I am so glad I am not the only one! First let me say I really enjoy this podcast and the wealth of information it presents as a card carrying history geek:) The most recent offering interviewed Howell Raines, author of “Silent Cavalry: How Union Soldiers from Alabama Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta—and Then Got Written Out of History.” This was so fascinating, and I love how the information seems clearly well researched to paint a more accurate picture of actual people and events in history pertaining to the American civil war. Revisionist history and discovering hidden truths are always exciting! So I was very surprised and disappointed to be dragged back to current day partisan politics from the author who, out of the blue, stated some arbitrary fact about the antebellum south and how it relates back to Donald Trump… I was just starting to enjoy the enrichment of this new information when, out of left field, he states some vague ethos that the ex-president adheres to. And left it there. No facts provided to substantiate it, just left it there. I let that first comment slide as Trump is clearly a divisive subject. The author then doubled down by commenting on it again a short while later. It was both distracting and baffling how a research scholar would say such a thing amidst the subject matter. I truly enjoyed the facts in this episode but was really disappointed and a bit confused as to why the author added his opinion on Donald Trump regarding a war that was fought 160 years ago, and without going into any detail to substantiate why this relates with the subject in a meaningful way. Is Trump our only contemporary in 160 years to try to erase history? If so, that would be remarkable! So now, as happens when a source clearly has a bias and feels the need to incorporate it somehow into the conversation, the entire source is suspect of historically skewed or inaccurate reporting based on personal opinion. How can we take the facts presented here as truth when the author went so far as to plant his opinion (twice) in a subject that it doesn’t fit in? I feel that history is essential to understanding how to prepare for the future and this was just very disappointing since it did not help or advance the understanding of the civil war but left me with a sense of a glaring flaw in this author whose facts now need to be questioned for the sake of truthful story telling.

As a retired American history teacher for 40+ years I listened with rapt attention to Raines' narrative and found it interesting and compelling. But it turned decidedly political when he offered a rather skewed analysis of Trump and those that support him. So often, historians that offer a didactic reading of history cannot resist making it political. That's unfortunate.