Dr. Larry Schweikart

That's exactly right.

Mike Allen and I met at a Western history conference, and we were lamenting how bad the traditional textbooks that were out there were.

You know, it's interesting that they started off, many of these, like the National Experience or American Pageant, weren't terrible.

But over time, especially as they took on more co-authors and younger writers, they got to be extremely liberal.

So by the early 1990s, Mike and I couldn't find anything to teach from.

And as an instructor, it's a pain to have to argue against the textbook all the time.

So we said, why don't we write our own?

So around 1999, we started writing this book.

And by the way, it was not a direct response to Howard Zinn's People's History.

This wasn't even really the original title of the manuscript we gave him.

And we didn't think we'd get a publisher.

We thought we'd end up with a book that we had to bind and sell out of the back of a van along with plastic straws in California and various other sort of contraband items.

Plastic straws, Patriots history of the United States.

But we did get a publisher, and it worked out very well.

And as you mentioned, we had a number of years where we had just good sales, everything was fine.

And then I went on Glenn Beck's show in 2010,

And he had a massive audience at that time, about the equivalent of what Tucker had at Fox when he left Fox.

And overnight, the book just exploded to the point we were shipping over 19,000 copies a single day.

It is now in its 45th printing.

And for your audience, I will have a free update from the last edition, which ended in 2018.