Larry Schweikert

In other words, as you guys went back and said, look, we got to go do it ourselves and got to do all the research and write it because these couple of things are fundamentally wrong and lead students, particularly in those formative years, down the wrong path.

What were they?

Okay, I'll give you three big ones.

First one, as we say in our introduction,

We don't believe in my country right or wrong, but we do believe that my country is not always wrong.

As almost all these other textbooks did, they dwelled on America's faults and minimized all of America's successes.

Number two, we introduced the four pillars of American exceptionalism.

So when you go to teach government or civics, for example, the first two are really relevant, and that is this nation was built on a Christian, mostly Protestant religious tradition that emphasized individual church congregations or congregationalism.

And the reason that's important is it gave America a bottom-up religious structure that emphasized and worked hand in glove with the second pillar, which is common law, which came over from England, which is a bottom-up political structure.

So we had a great deal of practice there.

in resisting government.

I mean, everything from guys burning down the governor's mansions and whatnot to calling out their own militias.

You would never have seen that in Australia or Canada.

And then the third real thing that we do in the book

is that we look at everything.

We look at America's faults and failures, but we also look at all of America's successes.

And there's a great deal of political, military, and economic history in Patriot's history, because my degree was in banking and financial history.

So I think you'll get a lot of economic analysis that is not in other books, particularly good economic analysis, I'd like to think.

No, I want to make sure I emphasize that.

When you read, it is a comprehensive history.