I'm Christopher Lighten, this is open source in a forlorn 4th of July week and the pit of an

unpresidential anti presidential campaign year 2024.

Welcome back, John Kagg.

You write history with a philosophical flare, John.

Never more colorful it in this new account of American Bloods in your title, the Untamed Dynasty that

shaped a nation. It's a family saga in three centuries of frontier settlers and folk characters with the same name,

Blood. They've got two other strong links among them.

Generation after generation these bloods embody in life, some of the wilderness, that wild streak in our history,

and they grasp it as articulately as the giants of American thinking,

notably Emerson, Thoreau, and William James.

If I had to sum up what they know, it's this.

There's a wolf watching us from the edge of a dark forest.

You've seen the wolf's eyes John and you've stared him down.

Perhaps we should start the conversation as you start your book with that wolf.

The story of American Bloods for Me started in a field in Carlisle, Massachusetts,

that Henry David Thoreau once called the City in the Woods.

Carlisle is located a little beyond Concord to the north.

I was and still am a long distance runner of sorts and I was out on a run and I was crossing Great Brook meadow about three miles from my house and I was just thinking to myself what a beautiful sort of area I lived in.

It's still very wooded, but it's kind of tame, or at least I thought it was.

And I came... came, or at least I thought it was.

And I came into a meadow right on the edge of the Tofet Swamp,

and I saw a very large dog,

...