Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with RetroPod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

In the spring of 2004, best-selling historian David McCullough was invited to give the commencement

address at Ohio University. They were celebrating their 200th anniversary, and I knew very little about the university,

so to prepare myself, I did some homework.

In reading up on the university, he discovered that the oldest building on campus was named

Cutler Hall, after a fellow named Manessa Cutler.

And I wanted to know who was Cutler.

Well, as soon as I found out, I realized that man was absolutely extraordinary, and I was

sort of baffled that I'd never heard of him.

McCullough told me that he found Cutler so captivating that he decided to depart from his

usual well-known subjects, John Adams, Harry Truman,

the Wright brothers, to write about one of early America's most profoundly influential

and forgotten characters. The result, a book titled The Pioneers, was published earlier this

month. It tells the story of Cutler,

a polymath botanist and minister with doctorates in medicine, law, and divinity, and how he led

a group of Revolutionary War veterans from New England to establish a community based on the

ideals Americans revere and fight for every day.

It all began with the Treaty of Paris, the document that ended the American Revolutionary War in 1783.

It was, obviously, a very big and complicated deal.

In addition to recognizing the United States of America,

the British-seated land that eventually became the Midwest.

The founding father sat on the land for a few years

...