H.W. Brands

speaker

313 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 12 May

H.W. Brands’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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Except I'd been thinking about Washington for a long time.

I've written around Washington.

I've never been writing directly on Washington as the subject of a biography.

And part of it was I just couldn't quite figure him out.

So I thought finally I would take a shot at it.

Did you figure him out, sir?

I think so.

So Benjamin Franklin, a contemporary of Washington's, was often called...

the archetype of the self-made American.

In some ways, Washington was the same sort of approach.

Ended up with a different product, but Washington became the person he thought he should be.

As a young man, he developed this sense of

the kind of reputation he wanted to have.

He was ambitious, but he didn't know exactly what his ambition was for.

He was also, and this is very significant, he was well off.

He was a member of the Virginia Gentry.

And I spent some time in the book talking about what this meant, who these people were.

And it was a class of people that lived, well, in large part by the labor of other people, including their slaves.

But it was also a class that lived by a code of honor.

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