James Garfield: life of the week

Hello and welcome to Life of the Week, where leading historians delve into the lives of some of history's most intriguing and significant figures, from ancient Egyptian pharaohs and medieval warriors to daring 20th century spies. President James Garfield is having a moment as the subject of recent Netflix drama Death by Lightning. Starring Michael Shannon and Matthew McFadden. But it's fair to say that among the pantheon of US presidents, Garfield is very much forgotten, aside from his dramatic and tragic death following his shooting by an assassin in 1881. In this episode, Eleanor Evans is joined by C.

W. Goodyear, historian and biographer of the president, to explore Garfield's life. Charlie, when you came to write your 2023 biography of James Garfield, it had been forty years or so since the last birth to death biography written about the twentieth President. Why is it, do you think, that he's been so lightly considered? And what brought you to his life story?

That's a very good and very natural question, because in the pantheon of US Presidents, James Garfield is, through no fault of his own, a very short entry. He was the second president to be assassinated, and he was killed essentially within his first eight months in office. And there had been very good books, including Candace Millard's Destiny of the Republic, about the assassination of James Garfield. But that tended to be what most people knew about him, if anything at all, was how Garfield's life ended, how he died, how he was shot.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (53 minutes, 9,618 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.