Welcome everyone to another episode of the most

notorious podcast. I'm Eric Rivenes. Hope you are having a marvelous summer so far.

My guest today is none other than award-winning and New York Times best-selling author H.W.

Brands. He holds the Jack S. Blanton Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin.

And he is a prolific author having written 30 books including biographies of FDR,

Theodore Roosevelt, Benjamin Franklin, Aaron Burr, and Andrew Jackson. His most recent book is

called The Last Campaign, Sherman Jeronimo and the War for America. His works have twice been

selected as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. I asked him on the show however to talk about a

historical figure who may not have quite the gravitas of a Roosevelt but certainly deserves

a book of his own, The Colorful Jim Fisk. And the book by the way is called The Murder of Jim Fisk

for the Love of Josie Mansfield. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It's so great to have you.

My pleasure. So what is it about the story of Jim Fisk that intrigued you enough to decide to

put it onto paper? Well, I'll share with you something that's maybe not commonly known even

among readers of the book. I wrote the book to be about Josie Mansfield, not about Jim Fisk.

And the reason I wanted to write about Josie Mansfield was well actually there are a couple of

reasons. One is that it's not that easy to write about women in American history. If you're going

to use the typical standards for writing history, novels are something entirely different.

But because women until the 20th century didn't hold political office, because they didn't usually

take leading positions in business, they weren't in public life much. Because of that,

they didn't leave much of a trace of the standard kind of materials that a historian, a biographer

like me, would use. And I thought, well, that's a shame because women are half the population

and they do interesting stuff. So I want to tell something of their story. And I had written

...