YouSaid · the spoken record

Alexis Coe

lines on the record: 105
first: 2020-05-06
most recent: 2020-05-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“They can find me at alexisco on Twitter or AlexisCo.com. You never forget your first biography of George Washington is for sale almost everywhere.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I might alternate. I might go back and forth. The book seemed disparate, but they're not. It's all political history, and these are people who were at the center of really interesting stories that also tell us about their time period.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dead. I'll be dead. People say, you know, do you want to write a book on Trump? Absolutely not. I think that it is an overwhelming amount of material, and we're going to have to, but I would assume that people will be able to figure out certain ways to utilize programs to sort of sort through information. There will be certain keywords in Trump's. I'm not sure, but it's one of these things. Do we need every example of Trump being petty, every example of him lashing out, or do we just need the top three That's probably true.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I barely want to live right now. Is there though? No. No, I agree. No, absolutely not. I mean, maybe a few years ago when I didn't have to learn, you know, worry about certain rights and I saw the signs of progress. I saw a woman in the world. I mean, later we learned that the woman in Obama's.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the most common question I've asked is, as a historian, is there any other era I would like to live in? And I think I'm a woman.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I said that to them, it was about remember how easy marriages? I'm like, no, I don't because it was really about gay issues. It was really interesting. And I thought, wow, they don't. They actually don't. So why don't they? Like that's”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I think it's also understanding the person being empathetic towards people because someone the other day was saying something to me about, oh, remember how good it was. I'm like, it wasn't good for me.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And just remember that we have a good amount of nostalgia in this country. And just like anything else, something that we learned 20 years ago when we hear about it now might seem a little bit different.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is sort of what I tried to imply in the title of the book. It was a joke meant to both invite readers and to sort of put them at ease about this serious topic that either they are nervous about or they feel is overwhelming or they're not interested in.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, David McCauley. I think that we can think like, okay, am I looking for a woman of color? Or is this someone who's really well known for being even-handed, like Eric Foner on Reconstruction? He writes beautifully. And, you know, people don't really talk about Reconstruction. I think we can focus on these very important and fundamental, but they're very interested in the Civil War. We don't talk about the Mexican-American War. So basically find the knowledge, be open to it being different than what you thought about.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I think that we do need to read more history and watch more history, and we have to be careful about the sources that we get it from. Now McCullough is sort of generally understood to be like a little bit racist. And I think we can all make.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Them of things We shouldn't This he was, you know, or he was president. Finishing up, we have just two more minutes. What should people do to become more civically minded in terms and what does history have to do? Continue telling the truth or what is the role that that has to play?”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if we could talk about why they were erected, if they were erected, for example, during Jim Crow, and they were put in areas that were populated by black people in order to remind them of things, then that is probably a thing that shouldn't be there. It does not mean that we shouldn't know who Davis was, that we shouldn't say he was in fact a general. He was this, he was that, you know, or he was president. Like, we should do that. But it's too emotional because we are still arguing about the basic things. You know, we're still arguing about Sally Hemmings when DNA evidence has been established. And that's because we've let it go too long.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I first want to say that I think we need to do something about civic education and that if we don't have to have these basic arguments with people about whether if you gave your enslaved population a blanket and food isn't benevolent can you really say they were that bad if we don't have to have those really fundamental frustrating emotional conversations then I think we can get much farther in it and we can deal with these things. The problem is when we have a conversation about like monuments of General Davis, you know, the Confederate president. The problem is people get so emotional and they don't consider the details, which is, okay, we should talk about Confederate history clearly. No one ever goes without knowledge because in school, historians don't study monuments. They offer you like four lines.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, now, as you're talking about, you either see, you know, whether it's the debates about Confederate statues, you see the point of what we've done here is that we now know too much. And then what do you do? It sort of leaves you paralyzed that you have to either go all in one way or all in the other.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and he was, you know, sort of an arrogant Yeah, totally. Really, really annoying. But we have a realistic view of him and we can sort of delight in his complexity. It's harder to do when there are enslaved people. That's the favorite one.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I certainly grew up with it around him. But yeah, I mean, Hamilton, you can say there's the Reynolds affair there, you know, he had an affair. There are plenty of other things he said.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It in a weird way. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, just like a lot of historians have problems with 1619, but enjoy it. A lot of historians have problems with Hamilton, but enjoy it. So the problem with Hamilton is by casting people of color. You don't see that there aren't many people of color and you don't deal with slavery and you sort of get a pass from a lot of things, which is difficult.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“General day They're actual people. So which Vanguard did come is the most realistic? Probably Jefferson, if you had to. And now Hamilton in a weird way. You do get a complex portrait of him, even though it's been musicalized. You do get a much different...”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That are really frank in this way that talk about slavery and Martin Luther King. So children can handle it and they do care about these things. But we don't tell them this about Washington. And I think a part of it, to be honest, is that in building him up to be perfect, we have made him too perfect to care about. You know, Richard Brookheiser has sort of famously said he's in our pockets, but he's not in our hearts. And I think that's a big part of it. We just don't think about him unless we're told, you know. It's washing. Well, President's Day is now washing. It used to be Washington's birthday now. It's a general day. The Washington Monument is this like weird phallic stone thing. It doesn't move you the way Jefferson's monument does or Lincoln's their actual people.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Short because it's jarring, right? Whenever you hear new information that shakes your worldview about someone you know, about someone you thought you knew, living or dead, it's destabilizing. But these things are different. Critical thinking and cynical thinking are different. If we were taught to think critically about Washington, we would do things like we would say, oh yeah, we all know he doesn't have wooden teeth. We would ask what they were made of. And we would also be told what they were made of. I have a baby, and so I was in the children's section of the Brooklyn Public Library, and I was looking at a book on precedents because I had never had the occasion to go in this section before. And there was this book 2019 was printed about Washington and it said, you know, what do you think his teeth were made of? And it named the things it didn't name enslaved people that he had paid them under market value for their teeth. There are books.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, he was beautiful. Like, what are you talking? What are you doing to this beautiful woman? In slavery, but that you can't see it together because it does, you either have to hate him or love him, that kind of thing.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think it is written in this way that's very pretty, and then when the reality comes in, it's upsetting because you don't want to see the reality, even if it's real. And I don't think people are against the realness. I'll never forget a book I had when I was a kid about John Kennedy, and it was such a... Whitewash of what he was, you know, what a complicated person. He was good and bad and a lot of bad, by the way, a lot of fuck-ups, you know, especially as a youth. Yeah, exactly. Like, it goes on and on.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's true. It absolutely true is fundamental. And if we understood that and we taught civics, I think also I do think there's not only I don't think people are interested in that. And I think that this book has proven that. I think people are interested. We don't teach it. We don't teach civics. We don't have this sort of community outreach. We don't get people involved in founding history. And then when we tell them about it, it's a chapter in elementary school. Yeah.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like the British. And I think that if we actually listen to them instead of sort of generally being like, the founders believe this, the founders believe that, we'd be really upset about what was going on right now. As patriots, the right to sort of claim patriotism, the most patriotic, I mean, we're near the ACLU's headquarters. Their dissent is patriotic as one of their standby slogans and their”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And also dealing with the reality rather than either going to the extreme of being super defensive or thinking, you know, this whole system is totally screwed. However, the founders, as I said before, they were reluctant, right? These were businessmen. They weren't the people we think sort of starting revolutions, weren't Thomas Paine. They needed Thomas Paine to use those words to get everyone riled up. Their greatest fear for America, for this infant nation, as they called it, was that it would devolve into corruption and decay and that unprincipled men who only cared about maintaining power. And as a result, were completely loyal to their party rather than citizens and trying to get things done for the people, that it would be the downfall of America. And then essentially, we would become just like any other empire.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And everyone had these relationships. Washington sort of first crushed a similar story. She lost everything. Because if you were a loyalist after the war, everything got taken away if you tried to stay in America. Anyway, so I think that if we manage to hold two things at once the way we do about a relation, we have to deal with or, you know, a partner we love or something, the way that we are able to sort of hold these complexities, even when they're awful. We would have a much better understanding of why our country looks the way it does, why Ferguson happens, why a meeting about the coronavirus is a whole room full of white men. We would have a better time talking about these things. If we understood the real story.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've been served a beautiful plate of the founding history is all like. Gorgeous in appetizing, right? It was a civil war. Like half the country didn't want it. There were people called loyalists. We regularly don't teach.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What would be, you know, just think about these leaders today? Think about the idea of them in today's world. So much information about everybody. Very little is hidden. It's very transparent. In the case of someone like Donald Trump, it doesn't seem to matter. You can tell story after horrible story, and people seem to, I think he's correct. He could walk down Fifth Avenue and choose him. It doesn't matter. What would these, all the founding fathers, but especially Washington, how would he be, is there a fear of doing it because we know way too much about everybody and we don't want the actual truth? We'd like a sort of prettier version of it that's relatively truthful, but not quite on point.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“His stepgrandson, who he raised from the time he was very young until Washington's death, who claimed Washington as his father, I mean, he's so micromanaged washi, what's his name? He was named after Washington that like Washington is lecturing washy about losing his umbrella. That's how close of a parent he was. Washi raped... A lot of enslaved people. We know that he has heirs. You cannot find that on the Mount Fern website.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, it's really interesting. There is some pushback. I wouldn't say that these stories are accepted with Jefferson, and I think that's the great fear. Washington does not have the same people coming to his estate. Jefferson has lover of words. His idealist at least did. There are people who struggle with his story. He was a great innovator. Washington doesn't have those other sort of things going for him, let's say. And so the people who are coming from him are like military oriented do you sort of think in this perfect that he was the ideal. You know, we don't know if he raped his slaves because he was sterile. So, you know, that is possible. We do know that his.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, Sally Hemmings was probably related, very likely related, to Washington's wife's sister because she comes from generations of enslaved women who were raped. This is a story that is America's story. This was quite common. And as a result, she is not fully black. She has some white blood. And so a really a way that it was referred to was quadrune, which nobody uses anymore the same way you're not supposed to use concubine addressed on Monticello's page. And they call concubine. Concubine makes it seem like this was some sort of consensual relationship. Yeah, that's not what happened.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This book has been really well received, but the few times that there has been something negative, it's almost always on a website where they refer to me as pro-LGBTQ. And then they also reference Annette Gordon Reed and basically roll their eyes at that story because there's still a tremendous, there's still a lot of people who disagree with that. And they call her a quadrun. Which is explain that for people who don't know this.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and they have changed everything about the tour. I think, you know, the last time I was there, I was greeted by Sally Hemmings. It was incredible. But there is anxiety around telling the truth around the anxiety.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This story of him. And, you know, and they're worried, the thing is Monicello is the gold standard for this. They have completely, over the course of decades, shifted. You cannot go on Monicello's website without seeing Sally Heming somewhere. They are page devoted to it.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is Washington as vaunted as he's held up as not only emancipating his slaves, but he couldn't stand to see them separated from their families. And that's why that was part of the reason he didn't quite know how to go about it during his life. He knew that they were going to be separated from their families because his slaves had married Martha's slaves. So he was just putting it off. So the idea that he didn't know that was coming is, again, not true. I'm not saying that this is incredible, but like let's add some context to this that they didn't get. But they need to, they need him to be this hero. And there's so much anxiety around.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I may bullshit. And Martha's not going to do this. So basically, she fears for her life, so she does a year after Washington dies. She, of course, doesn't do that with her own enslaved people, some because she can't, they belong to her first husband's estate and others because she chooses not to. And what happens again,”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She was not inclined to do so. And I just have a few quotes in the book that speak to this because she was quite racist and the languages claire. You don't need a lot of examples. But what we know is what happened in the next year. Martha was afraid for her life. She was afraid that they were going to murder her in the middle of the night because Washington, while I think he did mean to do this, he did mean to emancipate them. We can't ignore the fact that it looked good for his legacy that the world was changing, that Lafayette had been writing to him for decades proposing different schemes. And he had said, oh, that's a good idea. I just can't write now. And like, let's going to handle it. They're going to do it gradually. Almost, they use, they love this word imperceptible, which is.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We cannot celebrate him, is that because the reason he delayed their freedom was, you know, Billy Lee was crippled. He was a bunch of use, but Martha could use them to keep, you know, the plantation going after he died. He also knew that she was not”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He did not emancipate hundreds of people outright. He emancipated one man outright, Billy Lee, who he had always thought of as exceptional. He served him during the war. He was an enslaved man who he left crippled in his service and then replaced him with a younger man. Rest of the people had to wait for Martha to die. So he paved the road. I'm not denying that that was important and that it wasn't very important to the people who received their freedom. However,”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, and that's significant, or change, you know, so a foil to the story I'm about to tell is, Franklin actually lived this redemption story doesn't get a lot of, we think of him as an abolitionist, but his personal story is really interesting. Washington, as the story goes, in his will, made the bold move to, I'm using the language of the men and also Mount Vernon. Where I spent the night and they've been very supportive of the book, but they and I disagree on this, their framing of it. The bold move to emancipate his slaves in his will. Outright. Outright means right away”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This redemption story, right? There's a lot of anxiety around the founders and around founding history. You have the defenders who think they were men of their times. Like you can't cancel them. Leave the monuments up. You know, they conflate all these things and want this heroic story because that's the story they want to tell themselves about America. And then we have the other class of people thinking these were people who owned people. They were hypocrites. I do not care to think about them or want to live my life the way half of them actually.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And some of those things were he was a spy master, so he could tell a lie. He understood the court of public opinion. He was very good at figuring out what propaganda was useful and how to spread it. So that's one thing I think that, or I guess two, that we think of him as being more of a military man and not really a gifted political thinker. I think that, again, takes a lot of credit away from him. And maybe we can even things out a little bit more. So, I don't want to just bring him down off this pedestal. I just want us to see him realistically. Yeah. So I think, you know, he could tell a lie. He was a great military tactician. And then sort of the biggest one is.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the three things that get right. Well, you could tell a lie, obviously. He was a spy master during the war. We were, as Hamilton has made famous, we were outmanned and outgunned. Washington doesn't get credit for these other great thinkers who went to school, like, you know, Adams to Harvard, Jefferson to the College of William and Mary, they get all this credit for the Constantinople great things. But Washington was a great tactician, even if he didn't, he lost more battles than he won, but he figured out how to make up for the fact that we didn't have a navy. We barely had boats. The British Navy was the best in the world.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jefferson said that part of Washington's gift was that he basically could get away with anything and everyone else around him would be blamed for it. It wasn't the first one who said that. Other people have said this over time. He did abandon people, much like he was sort of negligent to his mother. If you were of use to him and then you weren't, you embarrassed him in some way or you were a liability. He really wanted to be neutral as president. It was good for the country. This was true. Then he got rid of you. He just completely iced you out, which is why when he left office and when he died, he was basically estranged from everyone. You know, Madison, Jefferson, Monroe, except for Lafayette and Adams, who he wasn't that close to to begin with. And I think that was a huge part of it.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think in an era where everyone was really quick to talk a lot and share their opinion didn't. So he made people uncomfortable. And people really fought for their opinion. This was unprecedented where they could have a role in shaping their country when they had lived in a monarch that had was hundreds of years old. He listened. He didn't comment on things that were controversial. You know, our current president tweets a response to almost any twitching, you know? Washington never publicly commented on any of those negative stories that Jefferson said he was so sensitive about. He never criticized other leaders in public. You know, he sort of, he was stoic in a way. And I think that gave him a great amount of appeal. Unflattering thing.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I think the thing that we're struggling to talk about, it's just a really simple word, and we wouldn't be able to describe Washington or anyone we met at a party who's... He was charismatic. And he was far more charismatic Body, and it had certainly survived so many diseases. But by the time he's president, you know, he's, you know, got a little bit of a belly. He's not quite this fit athlete earlier, certainly. And I think he must have been really graceful. I think he must have been like someone you watch and you think he's a delight to watch on the football field, on the tennis court, whatever it is that is your sport, soccer field.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're here with Alexis Ko, a historian who has written the book, You'll Never Forget Your First A Biography of George Washington, just talking about Washington, the complexity of Washington, which I think is hard for people. It's easier to be reductive and to have thematic things about him, which I think in many cases are largely true. There's a reason why one person bonds over other people, it isn't luck or anything else. It's often exceptional being exceptional in some way.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Founding history, which is what they are, and those are very popular. That's the thing, those exist. This book that I wrote didn't exist”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and it's funny, I was on Mike Peska's podcast and he said to me that he had interviewed Ron Chernau and Ron Turnow said, you know, I really like Washington. And, you know, I couldn't be with someone for years if I didn't really like them. It doesn't occur to me to like or dislike my subject because it's a professional relationship. And if I was Reverend, I couldn't really deliver an honest narrative, then it's more of, then, I don't know, it's more of like a Fox News.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT