5. George Washington’s Threshing Barn

　　We don’t usually think about George Washington in any capacity except general or President, but the fact of the matter is that he ran a huge farm, and devoted a lot of his attention to the problems of running it, and developed and refined an extraordinary number of innovations in his farming. One of the problems that he tackled was that of threshing grain. In Washington’s time, there were two main ways of threshing grain – by human hand, a slow and backbreaking process, or by having horses trample the grain – which was more than a little unsanitary, but much faster.

　　NOTE 1: Founding Fathers with both Fs capitalized refer to leading figures in the founding of the United States; specifically: a member of the American Constitutional Convention of 1787.

　　NOTE 2: rundown is an item-by-item report or review: summary. Example of rundown: They gave us a rundown on the main points of the news.

　　NOTE 3: backbreaking means needing a lot of hard physical effort and making you feel extremely tired. It is similar to extremely arduous, exhausting, or demoralizing.