And the Thank you. This is hell.

your eyewitness to Gee.

This is hell.

Your eyewitness to Grecia. is hell.

Your eyewitness to grief, this is hell.

When we think back to how we were taught about the United States, its beginning and its formative years.

We might remember stories of revolutionaries fighting for an experiment in democracy and the founding

documents that guarantee that so-called democracy.

We also likely remember being taught how the United States did not become the global power

that we recognize today, until long after at the dawn of the 20th century, over a hundred years later.

There may even be some foggy memories of history classes where you learned about President Theodore Roosevelt's so-called Great White Fleet,

an armada of 16 battleships painted sparkling white that would circumnavigate the

globe in 1907 as a symbol of the United States emerging as a global

power to be reckoned with. But what if it was another Navy of a sort and the

industry around it that revealed a great deal of American power

nearly a century earlier. What if long before the U.S. had what it could call a Navy

worthy of challenging Europe's great powers.

What if before that a privately owned force of merchant vessels were a great source of real

power for the fledgling United States?

And more to the point, what if instead of revolutionary

in documents assuring democracy, the founders were also businessmen, investors

who were focused on, to be blunt, profits as much as they were loyal patriots.

...