7/8: THE MAN ON THE WHITE HORSE: Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy, by Nathaniel Philbrick.
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 19 June 2023
⏱️ 12 minutes
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7/8: 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
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Are the papers driving you up the wall? Same here. |
| 0:03.4 | I'm Miranda Sawyer and I'm here to let you know about our new podcast PaperCuts. |
| 0:07.9 | It's the modern newspaper review where we look at the biggest stories from party gates to psychosegles, |
| 0:13.7 | from Boris to Trump to Megan and Harry and find out what's really going on behind the headlines. |
| 0:19.7 | That's PaperCuts, out lunchtime every Monday, Wednesday and Friday with me Miranda Sawyer. |
| 0:25.1 | Subscribe on your favourite podcast app. |
| 0:27.8 | PaperCuts, we read the papers so you don't have to. |
| 0:39.2 | This is CBS I In The World. |
| 0:40.7 | I'm John Batschah with Nathaniel Fulbrick. |
| 0:43.6 | His new book travels with George in search of Washington and his legacy. |
| 0:48.0 | George Washington is in South Carolina. |
| 0:51.2 | This is the state that is understood as the centerpiece of what we've come to be called the slave |
| 0:59.4 | ocracy. That's what it was called in the 19th century prior to the Civil War and after the Civil War. |
| 1:05.6 | And George Washington traveled from Charleston to Savannah, a beautiful city as well as Charleston. |
| 1:11.5 | But the ironies are everywhere. |
| 1:13.5 | And when we come to the 21st century with Nat and his wife Melissa and their |
| 1:19.3 | toller doora, they find strikingly without looking for them all these signs and memories of |
| 1:27.8 | Sherman's March. |
| 1:28.8 | It's amazing to me, Nat. |
| 1:30.7 | I felt sometimes that we were we were in a time machine to the 18th century. |
| 1:35.3 | But every once in a while there'd be a warping time and we said it is suddenly be 1865, 1865. |
| 1:41.4 | Absolutely. |
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