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From Wondery, I'm Lindsay Graham and this is American History Tellers. Our history, your story.

Next week, we begin a new series on America's National Parks. These 85 million acres across 417 parks and reserves began 146 years ago on March 1st, 1872.

That's when President Ulysses S. Grant signed an act establishing Yellowstone as the nation's first National Park.

But the story of these lands and the fights over them is a troubled one. America was still a young nation and had only just come out of the dark days of the Civil War.

It was a time of westward expansion, industrial growth, and an appetite for commerce that endangered some of the world's most beautiful landscapes and the animals and native populations that relied on them.

But today, we talk to Russell Shortow, author of the book Revolution Song, a story of American Freedom.

Russell adapted his book for this American History Tellers series. And for the past six weeks, we've been exploring the period of the American Revolution from the point of view of six individuals, General George Washington, Lord George Germain, who ran the war for the British,

Santa Cawar Chief and Diplomat Corm planter, independent woman and memoirist Margaret Monkrieve Cofflin, Fried Slav Venture Smith, and Populous Politician Abraham Yates.

Each lived through the period of the Revolution, but saw it from very different perspectives. Each of their stories is centered on the fight for freedom. But freedom from what also different.

We'll talk to Russell about how he chose these six individuals to personify the period. What freedom meant for each of them, and why the fight we began then might be something we are still fighting today.

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Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of one race podcast American scandal. Our newest series looks at the story of oxy content, a popular painkiller that helps spur an epidemic of addiction and drug abuse in which prompted a broad campaign to hold the pharmaceutical industry accountable.

Listen to American scandal on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts.

Russell, short to thank you for talking to me today about this series and your book. Thank you very much Lindsey. It was a lot of fun to work on the series and nice to talk to you now.

Well, when I heard that we were going to be partnering with you to do the our series on the American Revolution, which is perhaps the most well covered portion of American history ever.

I was excited because it seemed to me that your book Revolution Song was themed very much in the same way that we pursue topics here on American history tellers.

So I was wondering if you could talk to me a little bit about what narrative history means to you and how you chose the Revolution and then these six lives individually to tell the story through.

Sure, I do indeed write narrative history, which I define as narrative to me is storytelling and I believe very much that history going all the way back to the ancient Greeks is truly an ought to be telling stories about the past.

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