6/8: THE MAN ON THE WHITE HORSE: Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy, by Nathaniel Philbrick.
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John Batchelor
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🗓️ 19 June 2023
⏱️ 7 minutes
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6/8: THE MAN ON THE WHITE HORSE: Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy, by Nathaniel Philbrick.
https://www.amazon.com/Travels-George-Search-Washington-Legacy/dp/0525562176/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
When George Washington became president in 1789, the United States of America was still a loose and quarrelsome confederation and a tentative political experiment. Washington undertook a tour of the ex-colonies to talk to ordinary citizens about his new government, and to imbue in them the idea of being one thing—Americans.
In the fall of 2018, Nathaniel Philbrick embarked on his own journey into what Washington called “the infant woody country” to see for himself what America had become in the 229 years since. Writing in a thoughtful first person about his own adventures with his wife, Melissa, and their dog, Dora, Philbrick follows Washington’s presidential excursions: from Mount Vernon to the new capital in New York; a monthlong tour of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island; a venture onto Long Island and eventually across Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. The narrative moves smoothly between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries as we see the country through both Washington’s and Philbrick’s eyes
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batser. Travels with George is the new book from |
| 0:09.8 | Nathaniel Filblich in search of Washington and his legacy. The South is an |
| 0:14.4 | undiscovered country in the past and the future for George Washington. He is a |
| 0:20.6 | southerner and yet North Carolina was also a reluctant state to vouch save |
| 0:25.6 | the Constitution. The traveling however in his cream-colored carriage chariot with |
| 0:32.8 | his horse Prescott with his staff, two of Homer slaves, his his companions, his |
| 0:39.9 | secretaries. He's going to be over some really rough country and that I got the |
| 0:45.0 | sense what Washington traveled was impassable. He leaves in March of 1791. He |
| 0:51.8 | returns in July of 1791 but this was not obvious that he was going to survive |
| 0:57.1 | this. No this was this was the Odyssey if you will. The journey into top |
| 1:04.8 | all journeys for George Washington when it came to these groups of tours of |
| 1:10.8 | the country. I mean this was almost 2,000 miles of travel involved. It took him |
| 1:16.8 | three months over the worst roads in the country and the accommodations were |
| 1:23.8 | terrible. You know they were had not been great in New England but it was a |
| 1:29.0 | whole different order in the South and in fact there are some places where you |
| 1:31.7 | just couldn't find a public tavern forcing Washington to stay in private homes. |
| 1:36.1 | And so this was going to be the and also a great logistical challenge in |
| 1:42.9 | terms of he was going to be way three months. What if something happened that |
| 1:46.9 | required his attention back in in what now Philadelphia which has now become |
| 1:52.3 | the temporary capital. So he created a whole itinerary where messages could be |
| 1:58.8 | sent and he said yeah send it out and I'll be back in a month. And so you know |
| 2:04.4 | this was a huge undertaking would be exhausting. He had a new cream colored |
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