Jack Hitt
speaker
849 appearances
5 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 3 Jul
Jack Hitt’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 — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I'm a constitution nerd, you know, and my girlfriend and I've decided to write a book about marginalized figures in American history.
Butler Library is one of these libraries when you walk in the front door, it looks like it has about like four or five stories, but it's actually like 12 stories underground too.
Right.
So I'm down like in the ninth floor and you know that setting, right?
It's just books, wall-to-wall books, and there's nobody down there.
It's this wonderful feeling of come off the elevator or walk down the stairs, you're in this like just dark envelope of books.
And each aisle is only illuminated by this little 15-minute timer that you turn when you walk down it.
And so I'm heading down towards the American Revolution section.
We'd come across this guy named James Otis, who had written this sort of inflammatory pamphlet really early on, in the early 1760s, you know, a good 10 or 15 years before the Declaration of Independence.
Some people say, you know, this is the document that sort of got the ball rolling.
And it was also the place where you might have a hot take, right?
So think of the famous pamphlets that we all learn later in American history, Thomas Paine's Common Sense or Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania by John Dickinson.
They're the ones that, you know, that lasted and were famous.
And that's why my girlfriend at the time and I wanted to write this book is Otis's pamphlet deserves to be that famous.
But what made the story kind of great for us was,
is that things go sideways for otis actually horribly tragic that's like shakespeare a man you know soaring into greatness crashing into unbelievable humiliation and and then madness and you know of course i romanced the idea that you know these dangerous ideas that he was entertaining so early on you know had taken him over the edge
And I'm poking through the books, looking for which ones I should check out.
And I look behind one of the books and I see that there's something back there.
A thin volume, hand-sewn binding.
I'm like, what?
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