Stan’s guest this week is historian John Garrison Marks, discussing his new book, Thy Will Be Done: George Washington’s Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory (University of North Carolina Press, 2026), which tells the story of Americans’ long struggle to come to terms with Washington’s legacy of slavery. He traces how politicians, abolitionists, educators, activists, Washington’s former slaves and their descendants, and others have remembered, forgotten, and manipulated slavery’s place in Washington’s story, and how they have wielded versions of that story in the political and cultural fights of their time. Marks shows how generational struggles over our collective memory of Washington and slavery have always been part of a bigger conversation about defining the United States and its people.





