Who’s your daddy?

In most societies throughout most of recorded human history, your answer to that question would be the primary determinant of who you were allowed to be. A community in which your prestige and your birth-status determine who you are is what’s called a society of orders.
But as a person of the present, you are disorderly.
This episode begins with an irritating experience in the waiting room at your local DMV. But then we explore the controversy in the early United States around a group called the Society of the Cincinnati. Many political leaders feared it might represent the beginning of a new American aristocracy that would undermine the new republic. To discover why this seemingly innocent club for Revolutionary War veterans and their families concerned so many U.S., we accompany Thomas Jefferson to France and learn why living in an absolutist monarchy changed his mind about the Cincinnati.

Learn more about this rogue, underdog, Hail Mary pass of a project at findyourselfinhistory.com !

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Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.