Weekender: 1776, Hot Milk, American Apparel

Hello and welcome to this weekend’s edition of Brazen Weekender. For our American friends, Happy 4th of July. In honor of Independence Day, I'm sharing below my favorite book about the Revolutionary War, 1776 by David McCullough. Publishing a bit early this weekend.

ICYMI from Whale Hunting this week:

• Tom had an incredibly insightful interview with a very old friend of Brazen who has extraordinary access to what's going on in Iran as well as the power centers in Washington, D.C., London and Tel Aviv. The US-Israeli attacks not only had a tiny impact on Iran's nuclear ambitions but it also led to the wipe-out of a special group of three moderate Iranians that were delicately preventing a further blow-out conflict.

• Whale Hunting launched a new expedition about Havana Syndrome, one of the scariest and most suspenseful medical-espionage mysteries of our time. We created the definitive podcast on the topic in 2023, The Sound: Mystery of Havana Syndrome, which is an important starting point. The new expedition is a collaborative investigation that will take months, but hopefully lead to new never-before-seen insights. We started out with a deep dive into the science of microwave weapons.

And a reminder, Weekender is now for our paid subscribers. Join now and support our live investigations, "Expeditions," like the Unauthorized Rich List and much more coming soon.

-- Bradley Hope

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1776 – David McCullough

American history is one of those topics you think you know, but later realize you know nothing about. After watching Hamilton for the first time many years ago, I felt sufficiently intrigued to dig deeper into the Revolutionary War and I picked up what might seem at first like a turgid history book 1776 by David McCullough. It was my first time reading a book from him, but it instantly converted me into a loyal reader.

What I loved the most about the book—and the history it depicts—is just how fragile the whole American Revolution was. They were outnumbered, completely bumbling in almost every way, but full of spit and fury. McCullough captures this sense of contingency with remarkable clarity. These weren’t the marble statues that we now reflect upon—they were ornery farmers, printers, and merchants, many of them half-starving, freezing in tents, poorly trained, and constantly on the edge of total collapse. Washington himself comes across not as a flawless leader, but as a man constantly doubting, learning on the fly, and somehow pushing the whole thing forward through sheer force of will.

What makes 1776 so gripping is that it strips away the inevitability we often retroactively assign to history. It reminds you that victory was never assured. The revolution could have failed at a dozen moments—if fog hadn’t rolled in during the retreat from Brooklyn, if British generals had pressed a little harder (or had more of a sense of mission), if morale had broken at just the wrong time. These details, told with McCullough’s narrative grace, make you appreciate not just the courage of the revolutionaries, but the randomness of survival and the weight of leadership under impossible odds.

Reading it gave me a deeper respect not just for American history, but for the difference between myth and memory—how messy, chaotic, and uncertain real turning points are. It’s a book I still think about when I’m considering any historical narrative. Who’s the hero? Who was afraid? What nearly went wrong?

Some of my favorite parts of 1776 weren’t even about Washington or the big moments you read about in textbooks. It was the side characters—men like Nathanael Greene and Henry Knox—who stuck with me the most.