You’ll Never Forget This Book

You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington by Alexis Coe is nothing short of a phenomenon. Its February 4, 2020 publication date marked the first-ever biography of George Washington by a woman historian. The other two biographies of Washington by women were by a journalist and a novelist.[1] Coe’s perspectives as a woman, as a historian, and specifically as a public historian shape an early American history that you’ll never forget.

Historians often enjoy characterizing themselves – i.e. early Americanist, intellectual historian, public historian – but Alexis Coe defies traditional characterization. She holds a Master’s in history and more books, museum experience, opinion editorials, public-facing scholarship, and especially readers than most people with doctorates. Public history bridges academia and the museum world, but Coe dabbles in both while transcending each. Her work fuses profound historical significance with unparalleled accessibility to diverse publics.

You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington opens with a series of lists. George Washington’s jobs, titles, “greatest hits,” “pettiest acts,” religion, “father of,” likes, dislikes, closest friends, “frenemies,” and more. Followed by a page entitled “lies we believe about the man who could not tell them,” “diseases survived,” all capped off by a useful timeline. True to history, slavery is everywhere, from his title “master” to his teeth extracted from the mouths of enslaved persons.[2]

Coe’s first major intervention into both scholarship and popular memory of the first President is on behalf of his mother Mary Washington. She playfully prints a chart of derogatory terms that biographer Ron Chernow has used to describe Mary.[3] Coe decries previous biographers’ hyper-fixation on whether the first President was capable of procreation. She coins the phrase “thigh men of dad history” to describe many male biographers’ overemphasis on Washington’s thighs.[4]

If controversy and resistance are evidence of really saying something, then You’ll Never Forget Your First is truly ground-breaking. Ironically, the UK Daily Mail – a British publication, Washington’s historic enemy – penned an article accusing Coe of calling Washington an “illiterate liar.” Needless to say, she didn’t. Adversaries tweeted antisemitic attacks at Coe, to which she responded: “If a rando posts a book review & puts ‘Jewish’ in front of an author’s name/links to that sites that do, ask yourself: ‘Is the book about Judaism? Has the author made Judaism a part of her bio/work?’ If the answer is no, then it’s not a review – And you’re on a white supremacist site.” Reframing the Father of His Country clearly touched a nerve.

George Washington is unforgettable. Writing about a topic that massive audiences already care about is a powerful way to reach diverse publics. With this great power comes great responsibility. The memory of George Washington throughout the American story is at least as historically significant as the man himself. Key figures in early American history were formative for American national identity, and their reception is forever evolving like the story itself.

Since George Washington is both interesting to massive audiences and central to national identity, You Never Forget Your First by Alexis Coe has the potential to reshape national identity for massive audiences. So far, the book has been doing exactly that.

Further reading: “A New Book About George Washington Breaks All the Rules on How to Write About George Washington: Alexis Coe’s cheeky biography of the first president pulls no punches” by Karin Wulf in Smithsonian Magazine; “What We Still Don’t Get About George Washington” by Alexis Coe in The New York Times; “Five myths about George Washington” by Alexis Coe in The Washington Post; “The Best Gifts for People Who Love George Washington (According to George Washington’s Biographer)” by Alexis Coe in New York Magazine; “George Washington gets romanticized by male biographers. Now a woman has taken him on” by Gillian Brockell in The Washington Post; Alice + Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis by Alexis Coe (2014).

Further listening: Alexis Coe on “Politics & Polls” podcast; Alexis Coe on Washington Library at Mount Vernon podcast; Alexis Coe on “Call Your Girlfriend” podcast; “No Man’s Land” podcast series by Alexis Coe; “Presidents Are People Too” podcast series by Alexis Coe.

For more cutting-edge presidential history see: Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge by Erica Armstrong Dunbar (2017); “Michelle Obama’s ‘Becoming’ is Black Women’s History” by Erica Armstrong Dunbar (2018); Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy by Annette Gordon-Reed (1997); The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed (2008); Household Gods: The Religious Lives of the Adams Family by Sara Georgini (2019); A Peaceful Conquest: Woodrow Wilson, Religion, and the New World Order by Cara Lea Burnidge (2016); Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government by Catherine Allgor (2002); The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution by Lindsay M. Chervinsky (Forthcoming 2020).

[1] Alexis Coe, You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington (New York: Viking Press, 2020) xxv-xxvi.

[2] Coe xiii-xx.

[3] That’s as far as I’ve read so far, as this is no formal book review, though I’ve listened to countless Alexis Coe podcast interviews, read each piece about You Never Forget Your First, and enjoyed her first book Alice + Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis on Audible.

[4] Coe, xxxi.