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This is Kickass News, I'm Ben Mathis.

Hi, I'm Ben Mathis.

Welcome to Kickass News.

As part of the Treaty of Paris in which Great Britain recognized the new United States of America,

Britain ceded the land that comprised the immense Northwest Territory,

a wilderness empire northwest of the Ohio River containing the future states of Ohio,

Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

A Massachusetts minister named Vanessa Cutler was instrumental in opening this vast territory

to veterans of the Revolutionary War and their families for settlement.

Those settlers created a town in a primeval wilderness

and they let no obstacle to terror or defeat them.

Now, in a brand new book titled The Pioneers,

the heroic story of the settlers who brought the American ideal West.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough rediscoveres this important

and dramatic chapter in the American story, the settling of the Northwest Territory

by Dauntless Pioneers who overcame incredible hardships

to build a community based on ideals that would come to define our country.

And today, I'm delighted to finally have David McCullough on the show to talk about the book,

how it fulfilled a lifelong dream of his to write a non-fiction version

of Thornton Wilder's Hour Town and why it should serve as a reminder

of fundamental American values at a time when many of those values seem to be under attack.

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