Craig Fehrman
speaker
1,260 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 1 Jun
Craig Fehrman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So what France owned was not the land.
France owned the right to buy the land from native people.
And so that's what they sold to the Americans.
But like Jefferson would never say, we now own all this.
He would say, we will one day own this.
And so a historian has gone back and calculated all the treaties that turned like that before and after map we see in school into actually American land.
And most of those treaties were negotiated by William Clark, by the way, later in his life.
But America spent another $400 million.
So the Louisiana Purchase cost $15 million, but that's just this theoretical right.
There was another decades of negotiation, also wars, also very poor treatment of Native people.
It's a messy and complicated story.
But nobody in 1804 would be like, we doubled the size of the country because they didn't.
And so that's why you really got to try to understand what Jefferson thought or what Lewis thought instead of what Andrew Jackson thought or something like that.
And one of Lewis and Clark's jobs was finding the guy.
Like again and again, this isn't in the journals, these are in like some boring reports that they put together later on, but I went back and read those reports.
And you can see that again and again, Clark is asking the Lakota, like, okay, how much land do you claim?
Where do your boundaries stop?
And so that shows you that Lewis and Clark and Jefferson were imagining that continuity that you're talking about.
It was on their minds.
Well, I always started with the journals because I'm a historian.
Showing 1021–1040 of 1,260 · page 52 of 63
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