Remember how I mentioned that William Dunning's arguments against Reconstruction made their way into textbooks and classrooms? Eric Foner was in one of those classrooms, and even as a teenager, he found the textbook version of history suspect.

Well, I was in high school in Long Beach, Long Island, where I grew up, and my high school history teacher, Mrs. Bertha Berryman, she told the class Reconstruction was a disaster.

It was a failure.

She said the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which gave the right to vote to African American men in the South for the first time, really, was the worst law in all of American history.

And I raised my hand and I said, Mrs. Berryman, I don't agree with you.

I think the Alien and Sedition Acts were worse.

Mrs. Berryman said, look here, Eric, if you don't like the way I'm teaching, why don't you come in and teach the class next time about Reconstruction? So I did that with the help of my father.

That's astounding.

Uh, what else did you learn from Richard Hofstadter about the lessons of history?

Hofstadter was a great historian.

Uh, his work is still very relevant.

His book, uh, uh, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, uh, unfortunately you see that now with, uh, people who refuse to accept the findings of science and just don't trust, uh, highly educated people.

Uh, of course, highly educated people can make mistakes like any other person.

Um, but the strain of anti-intellectualism, uh, was something he wrote about, uh, Hofstadter wrote about a lot.

Um, and, uh, that...

Tell us about Warmoth and, and whether or not he might be a warning of a kind of crypto-