Welcome to the Millard Fillmore episode.

With me for this week's podcast is my colleague T. Ray Shapiro, who's a fantastic education

reporter here at the Washington Post.

Hello folks.

So this is going to be fun.

Just his background for everyone listening, I asked you to help me out with this episode

because I've been really interested since starting this podcast in the question of how

all of these American presidents are actually taught in US history classes.

In particular, what the long term effect is on not only which presidents we think are

great, but the ones that we sort of immediately write off as unmemorable because we just

never even had to learn a single thing about them.

Yeah.

So I remember when I asked if I could help you out with this, which was really exciting,

I was hoping maybe to talk about one of the seminal figures of history and then we

would say, how about Millard Fillmore?

And I had to stop for a second and say, who?

Which I think is sort of our collective feeling about President Miller Fillmore.

He's our most forgettable president maybe.

I can't tell you how many people, when they hear I'm doing a podcast about presidents,

have said, what in the world are you going to do for episodes on the totally obscure

presidents like Millard Fillmore?

Every single time it's like Millard Fillmore is the example people give of the president

...