Larry Schweikert

for, I don't know, five or six years, just filing stuff away as it came to me.

You know, this would be a neat story to tell, or this is an important thing people need to understand.

And talk to me about the 21st century.

As a historian, it's always tougher to,

I guess, because journalism's called, I think it was Time Magazine that said they were the first draft of history.

It's always harder to write it when you're in the moment than able to go back.

Like, for instance, when you did Patriot's History, Ewan, is it Mike Allen?

You guys had taught history...

for decades.

In fact, one of the reasons you wrote the book is that you couldn't find, as you told me, you couldn't find a history text that you thought was unbiased enough to actually explain the American experience to your students, that they were so biased, had become so left-wing, that you and your co-author finally said, hey, I guess we're going to have to do this ourselves, right?

Exactly.

Let me give you one of the quickest and easiest observations you can make on how biased these existing textbooks were

If you come to the post-Civil War period, there is always a section in these textbooks on the building of the transcontinental railroads, Union Pacific, Central Pacific, later the Southern Pacific, Northern Pacific, and almost without exception, I documented this in another book, my 48 Liberal Lives, but almost without exception, the established historians would come to a sentence where they would say almost this exact line,

the transcontinental railroads never would have been built without government aid, which is simply a lie, because James J. Hill built the Great Northern Railroad without a dime of government assistance, and it was a stronger, more powerful, profitable railroad than any of those built with government assistance.

But that's just an example of where you can look to these existing textbooks, and they don't just

massage the truth.

Often they just kind of destroy the truth.

But you're absolutely right that teaching and writing modern history is incredibly difficult.

Our challenge in writing the early parts of American history, Mike Allen and I, our challenge was to find enough sources or the right sources.

The challenge for writing history in the last 10 years is you're deluged