FATHER FIGURE. IN MOTION: 7/8 Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy, by Nathaniel Philbrick.
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
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🗓️ 6 August 2023
⏱️ 11 minutes
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FATHER FIGURE. IN MOTION: 7/8 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 | This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batschow with Nathaniel Filbrick. His |
| 0:09.9 | new book travels with George in search of Washington and his legacy. George |
| 0:14.4 | Washington is in South Carolina. This is the state that is understood as the |
| 0:21.9 | centerpiece of what we've come to be called the slaveocracy. That's what it was |
| 0:26.8 | called in the 19th century prior to the Civil War and after the Civil War. |
| 0:31.4 | And George Washington traveled from Charleston to Savannah, a beautiful city as |
| 0:36.2 | well as Charleston. But the ironies are everywhere and when we come to the 21st |
| 0:41.4 | century with Nat and his wife Melissa and their toller Dora, they find |
| 0:48.8 | strikingly without looking for them all these signs and memories of Sherman's |
| 0:54.6 | march. It's amazing to me, Nat. I felt sometimes that we were in a time machine |
| 1:00.4 | to the 18th century. But every once in a while there'd be a warping time and we |
| 1:04.8 | suddenly be 1865, 1865. Absolutely. Well, you know, when Washington couldn't find |
| 1:11.9 | a public tavern, he would stay in in some Jewish houses that were there and |
| 1:17.9 | every one of them had been burned by Sherman. And so at one point I wanted to |
| 1:23.5 | visit the site of this place. I couldn't be, but someone working at a grocery |
| 1:30.6 | store nearby had a pictures of it on her on her iPad showed me, you know, the |
| 1:36.2 | rubble of this once splendid plantation with a row of live oaks leading to it. |
| 1:44.7 | And, you know, the rubble of what will be the future of Washington's journey. |
| 1:51.7 | And yet it's the past to us was everywhere on our way to Savannah. We passed a |
| 1:57.6 | billboard, this huge billboard beside a very small road saying, you know, Sherman's |
| 2:06.2 | army, looters, you know, I'm paraphrasing here, you know, it's as if it had |
| 2:11.5 | happened two days ago that the anger is still there. And so it made this and |
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