A great list. I'd also add Common Sense by Thomas Paine, which was a huge influence in the zeitgeist of the time.

Both 'Hardcore History' and 'Common Sense' by Dan Carlin are near the top of my list. Hardcore History especially on long trips :)

Lumber was originally one of the chief exports of North America; if you read Common Sense there is quite a long discourse about lumber for ship-building.

"[The] more simple any thing is, the less liable it is to be disordered, and the easier repaired when disordered..."

- Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776

Common Sense by Thomas Paine: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Sense

Just to correct the downthread derail, I'm guessing you were confusing this with Common Sense, Thomas Paine's anonymously published 1776 pamphlet calling for rebellion against Britain.

The intelectual pilar of the American Revolution was a manuscript called Common Sense by Thomas Paine where the changes in values where outlined.

Calling it just a struggle for independence says nothing about why they were struggling to be independent.

Agree w/ andersthue's suggestions. Here are a few others I listen to frequently.

I like all of the Gimlet media podcasts. https://gimletmedia.com/ Specifically Startup, Mystery Show, and ReplyAll

Hardcore History and Common Sense are favorites of mine: http://dancarlin.com

99% Invisible by Roman Mars http://99percentinvisible.org/

Startup School Radio from ycombinator is pretty good https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/startup-school-radio/id9...

What's the Point is a podcast from fivethirtyeight about data
http://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/whats-the-point/

Traction by Jay Acunzo at Nextview Ventures is another great one http://nextviewventures.com/blog/category/traction-podcast/

This seems good enough I suppose:

https://www.britannica.com/topic/liberalism

Liberalism, political doctrine that takes protecting and enhancing the freedom of the individual to be the central problem of politics. Liberals typically believe that government is necessary to protect individuals from being harmed by others, but they also recognize that government itself can pose a threat to liberty. As the revolutionary American pamphleteer Thomas Paine expressed it in Common Sense (1776), government is at best “a necessary evil.” Laws, judges, and police are needed to secure the individual’s life and liberty, but their coercive power may also be turned against him. The problem, then, is to devise a system that gives government the power necessary to protect individual liberty but also prevents those who govern from abusing that power.

I'm speaking more so I think from the perspective of the implementation of liberalism, which is fairly closely tied to managing the affairs of human beings. So in doing so, we have conversations about the nature of society (events, rules, rights, procedures, fairness, speech, etc) and try to come up with an arrangement that maximizes outcomes for "all" people, generally speaking.

The point I was trying to make was with respect to "...liberalism has been having a really hard time lately dealing with...precisely because it ignores feelings about groups...", in that "feeling about groups" is not (precisely) the only thing it ignores. We ignore many variables, including many we consider unimportant (like feelings), and likely also some that we're not even aware of (unknown unknowns).

American journalism in the aftermath of WW2 had a brief moment where it became both a unifying idea (largely sharing and building shared cultural values) and was largely seen as high-integrity. This perception began collapsing around the start of the internet news age, and now has pretty much totally collapsed. But it's important to remember that the WW2 consensus around the press was just an artifact of its times and that Franklin is talking about the press from a very different lens. To him the "press" was more like the Federalist Papers or Thomas Paine's "Common Sense". If you want to see what journalism _used_ to be like in the US, read about Yellow Journalism [1], or just read some news from the 1800s industrial era in the US.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

Saying his ideas are well-supported by history is a bit generous considering his historical arguments always seem to boil down to a barrage of anecdotal evidence of dubious factual value. To be fair, I've only read the Underground History and not Dumbing us Down, but here's a quote from wikipedia:

"The publicity generated by the initial success and compounded by the publishing disagreements propelled the pamphlet to incredible sales and circulation. Following Paine's own estimate of the pamphlet's sales, some historians claim that Common Sense sold almost 100,000 copies in 1776,[13] and according to Paine, 120,000 copies were sold in the first three months. One biographer estimates that 500,000 copies sold in the first year (in both America and Europe, predominantly France and Britain), and another writes that Paine's pamphlet went through 25 published editions in the first year alone.[7][14] However, some historians dispute these figures as implausible because of the literate population at the time and estimated the far upper limit as 75,000 copies."

Now, this gets into a bit of a weird circular argument where the book didn't sell as many copies because the people weren't literate and therefore the people weren't literate because the book didn't sell so many copies. Still, claiming that the book sold 600,000 copies seems disingenuous unless Gatto expanded upon it. I don't remember him citing his sources either in his book, but it's not like I've looked at the sources either, so whatever.

Gatto's book Dumbing Us Down expands on the ideas of this essay and argues his side quite effectively. His ideas are based on his multiple decades as a successful schoolteacher and are well-supported by history. You don't have to agree with them, but you seem to be dismissing them too quickly and casually.

For example, here's a quote from Dumbing Us Down that I found persuasive:

"We had school, but not too much of it, and only as much as an individual wanted. People learned to read, write, and do arithmetic just fine anyway; there are some studies that suggest literacy at the time of the American Revolution, at least for non-slaves on the Eastern seaboard, was close to total. Thomas Paine's Common Sense sold 600,000 copies to a population of 3,000,000, twenty percent of whom were slaves, and fifty percent indentured servants."

Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" and "The American Crisis" would have been considered "misinformation", "propaganda" or "harmful content". These are considered "the two most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution, and helped inspire the patriots in 1776 to declare independence from Great Britain" (Wikipedia)

So many of the great discoveries in science were controversial in their time. "On the Origin of Species", expanding universe, microbiology. Do you really want the government deciding what is acceptable? No, we don't. We fought a revolution to have the ability to think for ourselves.

I'm not that worried though. Even if platforms are subjectively regulated by companies or the government, life seems to find a way. There are plenty of other mechanisms to publish scientific breakthroughs.

I think you are conflating 'has some sort of internal logic' with 'sane'. Of course you can dig around the thing and find some idea that appeals or convince yourself of its structural soundness. But many of the premises are still nuts and the quality and style of writing poor, to put it rather charitably. He starts by pinning the source of world 'craziness' on 'leftists', a broad category that appears to include 'animal activists' and people who find words like 'chick' and 'negro' derogatory and with a helpful forward reference to some 250 odd numbered paragraphs ahead. The whole thing is, again, 35k words. Consider, for comparison, the following famous pieces of political writing:

The Communist Manifesto

Thomas Paine's Common Sense

Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal

Each of these is shorter than 35k words. In fact, they're shorter than 35k words taken together.

Great comment. What you are describing is called a 'preference cascade'.

> In short, average people behave the way they think they ought to, even though that behavior might not reflect their own personal feelings. Given a sufficient "A-HA!" moment when they discover that their personal feelings are shared by a large portion of the population their behavior may change dramatically. An example of this is the British colonists before and after publication of Thomas Paine's Common Sense. A year before the Declaration of Independence, America was full of patriotic British convinced that things could be worked out with King George, but on July 4, 1776 the colonies were full of Americans determined that they needed independence. Another is the relatively recent "Arab Spring."

https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-preference-cascade

Does Thomas Paine himself not qualify as a 'founding father'? "Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.” --John Adams [1]

Whenever I see arguments rooted in the founder's intent, I always wonder exactly which founding fathers the arguer will choose.

In truth the people who might qualify as 'founding fathers' had a wide variety of political opinions. Perhaps the only unifying trait was that they were able to compromise to get things done.

I'm hoping your comment was purposeful hyperbole...

[1]: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/10/16/061016crbo_books (via Wikipedia)

I couldn't agree more about the frivolity of these debates, but judging from what he listed I figured govt/value debates might be somewhat frequent (especially since he is reading Common Sense for school).

On the other hand, not taking part in the debates can be bad for you also. The debating process allows you to expose your ideas to the light of free discussion and allows you to exchange error for truth (JSM). Even if you aren't debating people with a clue on the topic, the debate and your subsequent internal dialog will be beneficial.

It's not the discovery of america, it's the fact that India was actively deindustrialized by the British railways which had a negative feedback loop on Indian industry, whereas in America the railways had a positive feedback loop in manufacturing. It's not that America is ahead but that India was cut down. Also you can read up on internal tarrifs in India which were deliberate British policy to kill the market of goods produced in India, not the doing of one or two men like Clive or Hastings.

Let me close my argument by asking you to read a document that warned of British intentions to the Americans just before the American revolution - Common Sense by Thomas Paine. All the things he warned America about the British crown came true for India, whereas America which was also not united at the time - there were more loyalists than revolutionaries and many different colonies - got the warning in time and got its unity and independance early on. India was not so lucky and did not discern the threat or receive this kind of explicit warning and suffered for it.

There's no bias there, I am clearly stating facts from the Indian perspective not some utilitarian world good perspective. In case you believe in that perspective, the question to you is why America chose not to continue being a British colony.

As far as unity argument, like I said the history of the time has to be examined carefully and it turns out to be false as far as British intentions and actions went. Churchill said was no more a country than the equator for example. Also why UK been so opposed to EU and unification in its own backyard.

I can't give just one, but here are a few that had a strong influence on me:
"12 Rules for Life" by Jordan Peterson, "Why Switzerland?" Jonathan Steinberg, "Little Book of Common Sense Investing" by John C. Bogle, "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" by Butron Malkiel, "Liberalismus" by Ludwig von Mises, "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius, "A Treatise of Human Nature" by David Hume, "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman, "The Law" by Frédéric Bastiat, "Autobiography" by Benjamin Franklin, "Common Sense" by Thomas Paine, "Gespräche mit Goethe" by Johann Peter Eckermann, "Walden" by Henry David Thoreau, "The Old Regime and the Revolution" Alexis de Tocqueville, "On Liberty" by John Stuart Mill, "A Treatise on Political Economy" by Jean-Baptiste Say, "The Man Versus the State" by Herbert Spencer, "The Revolt of the Masses" by José Ortega y Gasset, "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy" by Joseph Alois Schumpeter, "The Logic of Scientific Discovery" by Karl Popper, "The Machinery of Freedom" by David Friedman, "On Power" Bertrand de Jouvenel, "1984" by George Orwell, "The State" by Anthony de Jasay, "Sketched With the Quill" by Andrzej Bobkowski, "My Correct Views on Everything" by Leszek Kolakowski, "The Captive Mind" Czesław Miłosz, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "The House of the Dead" by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, "Conversations with an Executioner" by Kazimierz Moczarski, "Diary 1954" by Leopold Tyrmand, "The Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov, "A World Apart: A Memoir of the Gulag" by Gustaw Herling-Grudziński