James A. Garfield

On 2 July 1881, a man who had been refused a job walked up behind the President of the United States in a Washington railway station and fired twice. James A. Garfield did not die that morning. He lived for 79 more days, while doctors probed for a bullet they could not find and the whole country read the bulletins.

Garfield was the last president born in a log cabin. He lost his father before he was two, walked canal mules for six weeks, worked his way through school as a janitor, carpenter and teacher, won a battle in the Civil War, and spent seventeen years in Congress. In 1880 he went to the Republican convention to nominate someone else and came home as the candidate.

This Turbo History short tells his story straight, from the cabin to the sickroom by the sea:

• The 36th ballot: how a deadlocked party turned to the man making the speeches
• One of the closest popular votes in American history, won by fewer than 10,000
• The fight with Roscoe Conkling over a single New York job, and how it ended
• Alexander Graham Bell's metal detector, and why it heard nothing it could trust
• The bullet found on the opposite side, and the argument about the doctors that has never ended
• What the rest of the world was doing from 1831 to 1881, from the revolutions of 1848 to Meiji Japan
• How a murder by a disappointed office-seeker helped give America a civil service hired on merit

He worked for everything he had. His death made sure the next generation would have to as well.

Read it in under an hour. Free on Kindle Unlimited.