The

The United States,

The President,

and the Our guest for today is Elizabeth Mitchell.

She is an author of several books, including her newest book.

It's called Lincoln's Lie, a true Civil

War caper through fake news, Wall Street, and the White House. Elizabeth, we're very glad to

have you on the podcast today. I'm so happy to be here. Yes. So one of the things I enjoyed

about your book is that you take on a topic that is so often associated with our current political landscape. And that topic is fake news. And we learn from your book that fake news is nothing new. If anything, news might have been even more questionable or fake before. And your book is about the Civil War era. And

there's one paper that you cite that says, quote, the present, they're talking about the Civil

War era, is the present is emphatically an age of lies. We have lying news, lying journals, lying histories,

and lying prophecies. So what did you learn about fake news from that era? Well, first of all,

doesn't that quote make you feel better? Yes. I felt that, you know, one of the things that

I found reassuring about doing this research was to realize that, you know, one of the things that I found reassuring about doing this research

was to realize that this sort of idea that we're the worst that ever came along is not

actually true and that everyone's had to sort of fight these battles and they come up with

different solutions and we can learn from those. So that that helped me a lot.

But I was very surprised how much President Lincoln played games with the press and then how much,

you know, the press was often questioning the, you know, the material that was coming in and the

public had to be very canny consumers of news.

Right. Now, you mentioned President Lincoln. The book centers around events during Lincoln's

administration. There have been thousands upon thousands of books written about Lincoln.

...