Stay ConnectedThis is a multiple award-winning podcast about early American history. It’s a show for people who love history and who want to know more about the historical people and events that have impacted and shaped our present-day world.
Each episode features conversations with professional historians who help shed light on important people and events in early American history.
Copyright: © Liz Covart 2024
Declaring independence from Great Britain required the formation of new governments.
But why did Americans want and need new governments? And how did their interactions and experiences with their old, colonial governments inform their decisions to create new governments?
Barbara Clark Smith, a curator in the division of political history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and the author of The Freedoms We Lost: Consent and Resistance in Revolutionary America, leads us on an exploration of how Americans interacted with their government before the American Revolution and how the Revolution changed their interaction and ideas about government.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/154
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How did the American revolutionaries organize and coordinate local, provincial, and intercolonial action?
How did the revolutionaries form governments?
In this episode of the Doing History: To the Revolution series we explore governance and governments of the American Revolution with three scholars: Mark Boonshoft, Benjamin Irvin, and Jane Calvert.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/153
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What caused the American Revolution?
Was it the issue of ‘No Taxation without Representation?’ Was it conflict and change in the social order of colonial and British society? Or, was the Revolution about differences in ideas about governance and the roles government should play in society?
In this episode of the Doing History: To the Revolution series, we explore one set of ideas about the origins of the American Revolution with Bernard Bailyn, a Professor Emeritus at Harvard University and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/048
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What do we mean by the American Revolution?
How do we define it? Was it a war? Was it a movement? Was it a series of movements?
The Doing History: To the Revolution! Series seeks to explore not just the history of the American Revolution, but the histories of the American Revolution. In this episode, we undertake the difficult task of trying to define the American Revolution by going behind-the-scenes of the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/151
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Abigail Adams lived through and participated in the American Revolution. As the wife of John Adams, she used her position to famously remind Adams and his colleagues to "remember the ladies" when they created laws for the new, independent United States.
In this episode, Woody Holton, a Professor of History at the University of South Carolina and author of Abigail Adams: A Life, helps us explore a different, largely unknown aspect of Adams' life: Her financial investments.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/150
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Over the course of his long life, Benjamin Franklin traveled to and lived in London on two different occasions. The first time he went as a teenager. The second, as a man and colonial agent. All told he spent nearly 18 years living in the heart of the British Empire.
How did Franklin’s experiences in London shape his opportunities and view of the world?
George Goodwin, author of Benjamin Franklin in London: The British Life of America’s Founding Father, leads us on an exploration of Franklin’s life in London.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/149
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How did everyday men and women experience life in the colonial America?
How did the American Revolution transform their work and personal lives?
Marla Miller, a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the author of Betsy Ross and the Making of America, guides us through the life of Betsy Ross with an aim to help us answer these questions.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/148
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What about the British Redcoats?
When we discuss the military history of the American War for Independence, we tend to focus on specific battles or details about the men who served in George Washington’s Continental Army. Rarely do we take the opportunity to ask questions about the approximately 50,000 men who served in the British Army that opposed them.
Don N. Hagist, independent scholar and author of British Soldiers, American War: Voices of the American Revolution, leads us on exploration of the “other” men who fought in the American War for Independence, the soldiers in the British Army.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/147
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What drove George Washington to become a Patriot during the American Revolution?
How did he overcome the ill-trained and inexperienced troops, inadequate pay, and supply problems that plagued the Continental Army to win the War for American Independence?
Robert Middlekauff, professor emeritus of colonial and early United States history at the University of California, Berkeley, reveals the answers to these questions as we explore details from his book Washington’s Revolution: The Making of America’s First Leader.
This episode originally posted as Episode 026.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/146
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Mercy Otis Warren wasn’t your typical early American woman. She was a woman with strong political viewpoints, which she wrote about and published for the world to see and consider.
Did anyone take her views seriously?
Did her writings sway public opinion in the direction of her political views?
In this episode, Rosemarie Zagarri, a professor of history at George Mason University and author of A Woman’s Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution, helps us kick off a new, six-episode series about the people of the American Revolution by taking us through the life of Mercy Otis Warren.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/145
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