This is an I-Heart podcast.

And we continue with our American stories.

And up next, well, one of our favorite regular subjects, American history, Dr. Benjamin

Rush is America's forgotten founding father. His signature on the Declaration of Independence

comes immediately before that other famous Benjamin, and that of course would be Benjamin Franklin.

The fruits of Rush's underlying faith is the story, though, that we're about to hear

from a prolific founding father's biographer, Harlow Giles Unger.

Harlow is a New York Times bestselling author of 28 books, including Dr. Benjamin Rush,

the founding father, who healed a wounded nation.

He is also a former distinguished visiting fellow in American history at George Washington's Mount Vernon. Let's take a listen.

Dr. Benjamin Rush was one of the most important of our founding fathers, in many ways the most

important. George Washington was unquestionably the father of our founding fathers in many ways the most important. George Washington was unquestionably the

father of our political and military structure, and Alexander Hamilton fathered our economic structure.

But it was Dr. Benjamin Rush who fathered our social structure. He was the only doctor with a

medical school degree who signed the

Declaration of Independence, and with his signature, he began a lifelong struggle for abolition

of slavery, for women's rights, for a bad on child labor. He fought for establishment of universal free public education.

He was first to advocate temperate use of alcohol and opposed tobacco use.

He demanded that other doctors treat the poor as well as the rich,

African Americans as well as whites. Doctors wouldn't treat African

Americans then. He founded two great schools of higher education in Pennsylvania, Dickinson University

and Carlisle and Franklin College, now known as Franklin and Marshall College. And he saved his alma mater, Princeton College,

...