This is an IHeart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, including yours.

T.J. Stiles was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer for history for his biography on Cornelius Vanderbilt,

a story featured here on Our American Stories. In his biography on George Armstrong Custer,

Stiles cast surprisingly new light on one of the best-known

figures of American history, a subject of seemingly endless fascination.

And we're telling this story because on this day in 1876, the Battle of Little Bighorn was

fought.

Here's T.J. Stiles with the story of George Custer.

Now Custer is one of the most controversial figures in American history.

People love him and they hate him.

These days they tend to hate him more than love him.

He was in fact notorious as well as a celebrity during his own lifetime.

But whether you love Custer or hate him or have no particular opinion, we all envision him in a

particular way, usually alone on a hilltop surrounded by his dead soldiers as Cheyenne and Lakota warriors circle around him

as he fires off his last bullet and is slaughtered along with more than 200 of his troops.

This custer is the one that lives in our imagination.

He's a man of the West. He's a man who's eternally fighting Native Americans.

He's someone who we can't really imagine anywhere else.

Custer is one of the most researched people in American history, and I respect that research.

I tried to put together a picture of Custer's life and his significance and his meaning for Americans

at the time before he got to the Little Bighorn. Before that enormous sun rises over his life

...