As part of GHS’s ongoing commemoration of the US250, Stan’s guest this week is acclaimed historian H.W. Brands, talking about his new book, American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington (Doubleday, 2026). The biographer of American luminaries Ben Franklin, Andrew Jackson, U.S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, and Reagan, turns his attention to Washington, from his early military career in the French and Indian War and his rise among the Virginia gentry, to his leadership during the American Revolution and the Constitutional Convention, to his reluctant return to public service as the first president of the United States.