Required Reading For Every American Who Thinks These Are Unprecedented Times. Yes, I mean exactly what I said in the title of this review. No matter your particular bent of what you think is so bad – election/ voting fraud, political violence, “fake news”, whatever – Jackson does a tremendous job here of taking mostly examples even *I*, as studious of American History as I’ve been all my life, had either never or barely heard of and uses them to show, as Alex Wright’s Empire Of Ink (releasing on the same day and covering the “wild and wooly” early history of newspapers in America, which has some bearing on some aspects of this tale as well) also does quite well, how “history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme” (a quote misattributed to Mark Twain).
As James Morone’s 2021 book Republic Of Wrath showed, political violence in the US is actually at a rather historical *low* point in this current era (thankfully), yes, even with the repeated attempted assassinations over the last couple of years of President Trump. Here, Jackson shows this quite well indeed, covering both Baltimore riots in 1812, Lincoln’s assassination, the caning of Senator Charles Sumner in the leadup to the Civil War (which Robert W. Merry makes the central focus of his book Decade of Disunion), and more.
If you think voting irregularities – either “voter suppression” or “voter fraud” (both dog whistles to their respective sides that have been objectively shown to be minimal and not deterministic of outcomes in these last several years in particular) – are historically bad, Jackson shows you with several instances of mostly 19th century US history just how wrong you actually are, and how much worse things could actually be. (Though them getting as bad as they were in the age of the Internet as we currently know it – which could be changing if the US and other governments begin implementing planned age and identity verification restrictions – seems quite a long shot indeed, as Jackson shows here.)
If you think “fake news” is historically bad, again, Jackson uses the early days of corporate newspapers – where Wright’s Empire Of Ink ends its own tale – to show you just how wrong you actually are, and again, how the open Internet actually helps make the truth more readily accessible to anyone who chooses to seek it out.
In the end, this is a book designed for exactly one purpose: to use largely forgotten and certainly rarely if ever taught even at the collegiate US History major levels American history to show that the times we are currently in are in fact not unprecedented. Yes, they are bad – Jackson takes pains to never actually minimize current struggles at all. But in showing how we have survived times that are *so much worse*, Jackson ultimately gives us all – even the most pessimistic among us – at least a modicum of hope that the naysayers and doomseekers are in fact completely wrong, both about our past and about our future. Combined with the wave of European tourism for the World Cup taking over social media and showing Americans just how good and awesome our nation actually is relative to the rest of the world today that is ongoing as this book finally reaches publication (in a great bit of fortuitous, to a degree, timing), this really is one of the better, more optimistic books to be reading particularly in its initial release days just ahead of the upcoming 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Very much recommended.
This review of Been There Done That by Greg Jackson was originally written on June 18, 2026.