Additional information
by Daniel O'Brien (Author), Winston Rowntree (Illustrator)
Make no mistake: Our founding fathers were more bandanas-and-muscles than powdered-wigs-and-tea.
As a prisoner of war, Andrew Jackson walked several miles barefoot across state lines while suffering from smallpox and a serious head wound received when he refused to polish the boots of the soldiers who had taken him captive. He was thirteen years old. A few decades later, he became the first popularly elected president and served the nation, pausing briefly only to beat a would-be assassin with a cane to within an inch of his life. Theodore Roosevelt had asthma, was blind in one eye, survived multiple gunshot wounds, had only one regret (that there were no wars to fight under his presidency), and was the first U.S. president to win the Medal of Honor, which he did after he died. Faced with the choice, George Washington actually preferred the sound of bullets whizzing by his head in battle over the sound of silence.
Author Biography
DANIEL O'BRIEN is the head writer and creative director of video for Cracked.com, the coauthor of the New York Times bestseller You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News, and senior writer on The De-Textbook.
