Arts & Culture
‘Been There, Done That’ author brings signed copies to Lehi Library before heading to New York
Rob Shelton | Lehi Free Press
Before “Been There, Done That” hits shelves nationwide, North Utah County residents get the first crack at it and a front-row seat to the man who wrote it.
Professor Greg Jackson brings his new book to the Lehi City Library before its big New York debut. On Saturday, June 13, Jackson will perform a live presentation and early signing event starting at 6:30 p.m. at the Lehi City Library. Signed copies go on sale at the event that night, three days before the official June 16 release date. Registration is required and free, but only 168 seats are still available as of this week.
It’s the kind of event libraries were built for. Not a dry lecture, not a panel of academics trading footnotes. The promotional description cuts right to it: “This isn’t a lecture. It’s history — LIVE.”
After the Lehi event, Jackson will be traveling to New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco as the book hits the national stage.
The book’s argument
The premise of “Been There, Done That: How Our History Shows What We Can Overcome” is deceptively simple. Everything that feels new and terrifying about American politics right now, the partisan rage, the contested elections, the political violence, the disinformation, has happened before. More than once. And the country survived it.
That’s not a comforting platitude. Jackson backs it up chapter by chapter with the kind of historical specificity that makes the argument stick. He’s not asking readers to feel better. He’s asking them to pay closer attention to what actually happened.
Jackson built his platform through “History That Doesn’t Suck,” a podcast and educational brand that turned dense American history into something people actually wanted to consume. He brings that same instinct to the page here, the sense that history, told honestly and with some narrative drive, doesn’t need to be sanitized to be compelling. If anything, the dirt is the point.
The book arrives in a year loaded with symbolic weight. As Jackson notes in the opening pages, it’s been exactly 250 years since the Second Continental Congress voted to stake “their lives, their Fortunes and their sacred Honor” on American independence. The anniversary invites reflection. Jackson’s reflection, characteristically, goes straight to the uncomfortable parts.
Where it starts: Ben Franklin, fake news pioneer
The introduction opens not with a speech or a battle, but with a blunder and what one of the country’s founding fathers did to cover it up.
In April 1782, Benjamin Franklin sat across from British peace negotiator Richard Oswald in Paris. The two were working toward what would eventually become the Treaty of Paris, and Franklin, six years into his role as U.S. foreign minister to France, made a rookie mistake. He handed Oswald a page of personal notes that acknowledged, however obliquely, that American patriots had themselves seized property from Loyalists during the war. Not good.
Franklin’s solution was audacious. Back at his private printing press at the Hôtel de Valentinois outside Paris, he fabricated an entire fake newspaper, a “Supplement to the Boston Independent Chronicle”, complete with a horrifying fictional account of British-backed Native American scalping raids, fake advertisements for Massachusetts land parcels and a fabricated letter attributed to naval hero John Paul Jones.
The typefaces were French. The issue number and backdated publication date were chosen to make the crossing from Boston to Paris seem plausible. Franklin even enclosed copies to colleagues with letters expressing “some doubt” about the supplement’s claims, a wink that made the whole thing feel more credible, not less.
It worked well enough to get republished in some British newspapers.
The point Jackson makes isn’t that Franklin was a villain. It’s that the man on the $100 bill, statesman, diplomat, inventor, “First American”, ran a deliberate disinformation campaign to tilt peace negotiations in America’s favor. And he did it while a debt-ridden Congress struggled to pay its bills and the American experiment teetered on the edge of collapse.
Sound familiar? Jackson is betting it does.
Eight chapters of evidence
The book doesn’t lean on the Franklin story and coast. Jackson structures the rest of the narrative around eight historical case studies, each chosen to rhyme with something readers will recognize from the present day.
The Baltimore Riots of 1812 get their own chapter. So does the savage caning of Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1856, a moment of political violence so extreme that Sumner couldn’t return to his seat for three years, yet South Carolina celebrated his attacker as a hero and sent him back to Congress with an engraved cane reading “Hit Him Again.”
Then there’s the election of 1824 and its rematch in 1828, a campaign so vicious that opponents publicly called John Quincy Adams a pimp and labeled Andrew Jackson the son of a prostitute. The chapter title doesn’t soften it. Neither does Jackson.
The section on overlapping crises in the 1860s covers the first presidential assassination and the first presidential impeachment in the same chapter, because they occurred within a compressed window of American history, stacked on top of each other like disasters competing for attention.
The election of 1876 gets labeled what historians have long called it: “The Fraud of the Century.” And yellow journalism, the 19th-century media practice of printing sensationalized, often fabricated stories to drive circulation and stoke public outrage, closes out the case studies with a chapter that needs little translation for modern readers.
Each story is specific. Each one is documented. And each one, Jackson argues, eventually gave way to something better, not easily, not quickly, but genuinely.
Why this book, why now
Jackson doesn’t pretend the current moment is easy. He’s not writing a feel-good history. In the introduction, he acknowledges that the Digital Age has given us tools for disinformation that Ben Franklin couldn’t have dreamed of, that social media algorithms are optimized to harvest outrage, that trust in institutions is genuinely low, and that the reasons for that distrust are real.
But he draws a distinction between acknowledging difficulty and catastrophizing it. His two central arguments are that today’s claims of “unprecedented times” are, at best, grossly overstated and that the United States has consistently proven more durable than the moment of crisis would suggest.
“Americans are made of sterner stuff than we realize,” he writes. The historical record, he insists, doesn’t just illustrate that point. It offers a roadmap.
The Lehi event
The June 13 presentation runs from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. at the Lehi City Library, 120 N. Center St. The event is free, open to adults and requires registration. Groups of up to six people can register together.
Early access to signed copies of “Been There, Done That” will be available the night of the event, ahead of the book’s official nationwide release on June 16 through Simon & Schuster.
For a community that’s watched its civic footprint grow rapidly over the past decade, there’s something fitting about a book like this landing in Lehi first. Jackson’s argument is ultimately about civic endurance, about what happens when institutions are stressed and people still show up. The library event is, in its own small way, a demonstration of exactly that.
Registration is open at lehicity.libcal.com/event/16740332.
