Ulysses S. Grant was born into a shifting, dynamic world. Throughout his early life, the economic, social, and political dimensions of southwestern Ohio experienced radical upheaval. This episode sketches and skates through some of those trends. It also features a short clip of an interview I conducted with Grant expert and historian Professor Joan Waugh.

Sources:

U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth (Joan Waugh, UNC Press)

Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity 1822-1865 (Brooks Simpson, Zenith Press)

Grant (Ron Chernow, Penguin)

The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant (Ulysses S. Grant)

The Forgotten History of Ohio's Indigenous Peoples (Jessie Walton, Midstory)

The American Yawp (an open source history textbook project from Stanford University Press)

The Very Different But Connected Economies of the Northeast and South Before the Civil War (Carol E. Scott, B>Quest)

Interactive Access to Industry Economic Accounts Data (Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. Department of Commerce)

Percentage added to GDP of the United States of America in 2020, by industry (Statista)

Slavery at White Haven (National Park Service)

History and Culture of Wayne National Forest (U.S. Forest Service)

Industry and Economy During the Civil War (Benjamin T. Arrington, National Park Service)

Empire of Cotton: A Global History (Sven Beckert, Vintage)

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Edward Baptist, Basic Books)

Our democracy's founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true. (Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project, New York Times)

The Economics and Politics of the 1619 Project (Peter Wood, Phillip Magness, and Robert Cherry, National Association of Scholars)