- 20 minutes 58 secondsBFW Bonus: We Want More History
American history is in the news a lot these days. We see and hear about fights over monuments, textbooks, and the stories we should include or exclude from our museums and historic markers.
What these stories overshadow is the great demand for more history in the United States. A coalition of historians and history organizations noticed this demand and decided to feed it by organizing a new initiative: A We Want More History weekend, which takes place September 25-27.
In this bonus episode, we’re joined by Beth English, the Executive Director of the Organization of American Historians, and Kate Masur, the John D. MacArthur Professor of History at Northwestern University. The guest historians share more about the origins of the national, coordinated weekend of history programs, how we can get involved, and where to find more information.
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18 September 2026, 5:00 am - 1 hour 5 minutes451 The Court-Martial That Put The American Revolution on Trial
In December 1777, Continental Army Colonel David Henley climbed off his horse to discipline a drunk British prisoner of war who was screaming epithets about Americans and vowing to fight for his king. Henley struck the prisoner, one of 6,000 in his care, with his sword.
The wound was minor, but Major General John Burgoyne cited this incident when he accused Henley of plotting to murder British prisoners of war. Burgoyne demanded a formal court-martial.
Professor Timothy Breen joins us to examine Henley’s trial with details from his new book, The American Revolution on Trial. Timothy asks a question most grand narratives of the American Revolution skip past: What did it actually feel like, in real towns among real people, to stop being British? What did it mean to be American?
Timothy’s Book
Show notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/451
EPISODE OUTLINE
00:00:00 Introduction
00:04:43 The 250th Anniversary and the Limits of Grand Narratives
00:09:31 How Timothy Found the Henley Court-Martial Transcript
00:13:26 Major General John Burgoyne and Aristocratic Privilege
00:23:00 Competing Ideas of Honor During the Revolution
00:29:53 Inside the Cambridge Prisoner of War Camps
00:36:23 The Two Incidents that Led to the Court-Martial
00:45:25 The Verdict and What Happened Next for Henley and Burgoyne
00:48:37 How Early Americans Judged the Revolution and the New Nation
00:53:41 What Happened to the British and German POWs in Cambridge
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🎧 Episode 434: The Frank Brothers: Freeborn Black Soldiers in the American Revolution
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15 September 2026, 5:00 am - 51 minutes 37 secondsBFW Revisited: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
What caused the American Revolution?
Taxation without representation? Colonies that had outgrown their dependence on the British Empire? Or something harder to see: a quarrel about power itself and about what a government may rightly do to the people it governs?
In 1967, Bernard Bailyn published The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, a book he built out of more than 400 pamphlets, and one historians have been arguing with ever since.
In this revisited conversation from Episode 152, Professor Bailyn explains why he never accepted a purely economic explanation for the Revolution, where the revolutionaries' ideas actually came from, and why colonists rationally concluded that the British government was concealing a conspiracy against their liberties.
Bernard Bailyn’s Wikipedia Page | Book |
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/152
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🎧 Episode 294: 1774: The Long Year of American Revolution
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🎧 Episode 407: Patrick Henry
🎧 Episode 434: The Frank Borthers: Freeborn Black Soldiers in the American Revolution
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8 September 2026, 5:00 am - 1 hour 8 minutes450 Whose Revolution? The Delaware and the War for Independence
In December 1776, a Delaware Chief named White Eyes stood before the Second Continental Congress. He had not come to declare himself a revolutionary, nor had he come to pledge his loyalty to King George III. White Eyes came to test a promise.
What does the American Revolution look like to people for whom independence was never a question? For the Delaware, also known as the Lenape, the War for Independence raised older and harder questions:
Whose word could be trusted? What choices can we make about whether to fight, stay neutral, or flee that might let our community remain itself on the land we know?
Jeremy Johnson, Cultural Education Director for the Delaware Tribe of Indians, traces Lenape and Delaware history from long before European contact through the American Revolution. He also introduces us to the September 1778 Treaty of Fort Pitt, the first treaty the United States made with a Native Nation and which promised a 14th Native state.
Delaware Tribe of Indians’ Website
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/450
EPISODE OUTLINE
00:00:00 Introduction
00:02:35 The Lenape Experience of the American Revolution
00:07:56 Lenape History and Indigenous Origin Stories
00:10:52 Diplomacy in Lenape Traditions
00:15:32 Evolution of Lenape Diplomacy Through European Contact
00:20:00 The Walking Purchase of 1737
00:24:55 Lenape Experiences of the Seven Years' War
00:32:13 Lenape Participation in Pontiac's Rebellion
00:37:17 The Delaware and the American Revolution
00:46:32 Negotiating the Treaty of Fort Pitt
00:50:16 The Hope for Delaware Sovereignty
00:52:53 The Delaware People & America's 250th
01:00:02 Time Warp
01:02:41 Resources
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🎧 Episode 163: The American Revolution in North America
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🎧 Episode 397: Native Nations: A Millennium in North America
🎧 Episode 449: Stealing America: Indigenous Enslavement & the American Revolution
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1 September 2026, 5:00 am - 1 hour 23 minutesBFW Revisited: The Brafferton Indian School, Part 1
In 1723, the College of William & Mary opened the Brafferton building, a permanent home for an Indian School the college had been chartered to run and struggled to fill for its first 30 years. The premise of the Brafferton: take Native boys and strategically teach them in ways that would make them more useful to the British Empire.
So what actually happened inside the Brafferton Indian School?
In this revisited episode, the first of a two-part series, our three guests investigate why the Brafferton School existed, how the English filled Brafferton with students even as Native families refused to send their children, and what the Indigenous students did with the knowledge the English taught them.
We’ll also explore how a school built on a colonial college campus during the reign of King George I connected to schools like the Carlisle School, which were still separating Indigenous children from their families in the 1950s.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/367
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🎧 Episode 158: The Revolutionaries' Army
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🎧 Episode 353: Women and the Making of Catawba Identity
🎧 Episode 368: The Brafferton Indian School, Part 2: Legacies
🎧 Episode 449: Stealing America
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25 August 2026, 5:00 am - 1 hour 32 minutes449 Stealing America: Indigenous Slavery and the American Revolution
More than half a million Indigenous people were enslaved within the present-day borders of the United States.
Historian Linford Fisher spent fifteen years in archives across North America, the Caribbean, and Britain to investigate this forgotten history. What he found was not a second story running alongside African slavery. It was something different in kind. Europeans and early Americans enslaved people who lived on land they intended to possess. This practice made slavery a tool of dispossession.
The American Revolution is where this process accelerated. Lin and Lorén Spears, a Narragansett tribal citizen and the executive director of the Tomaquag Museum, trace how the Revolution opened space for captive raiding on the western frontier, how Native nations weighed which side to take during the war, and how their Stolen Relations digital project is recovering the names of the Natives early Americans enslaved.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/449
EPISODE OUTLINE
00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:23 The Declaration's Overlooked Grievance Against Indigenous People
00:02:29 The Other Revolutionary War
00:03:20 Investigating the Hidden History of Indigenous Enslavement
00:07:07 Uncovering the Scale of Indigenous Enslavement
00:13:43 Building Stolen Relations Through Archival and Tribal Collaboration
00:20:51 Decolonizing Archival Records
00:30:40 Connection Between Indigenous Enslavement & Land Dispossession
00:33:53 How Native Nations Navigated the American Revolution
00:37:16 From Colonial Experimentation to Revolutionary Expansion
00:41:15 How the American Revolution Expanded Indigenous Slavery
00:45:20 How Indigenous Nations Weighed Neutrality, Alliance, & Survival
00:52:51 The Declaration of Independence's Impact on Indigenous Communities
01:01:10 The Treaty of Paris, 1783 and the Continuation of Indigenous Dispossession
01:03:51 The Uncertain End of Indigenous Enslavement
01:11:59 Commemorating the American Revolution Through Indigenous History
01:24:36 Revolution to Freedom Through Indigenous Sovereignty
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🎧 Episode 163: The American Revolution in North America
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🎧 Episode 367: The Brafferton Indian School, Part 1
🎧 Episode 368: The Brafferton Indian School, Part 2
🎧 Episode 406: Threads of Power
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18 August 2026, 5:00 am - 1 hour 18 minutesBFW Revisited: American Expansion & the Political Economy of Plunder
The Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all men are endowed with the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
But what did liberty and equality mean for the peoples the Declaration never named—the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi nations who had governed the vast Great Lakes homeland they called Anishinaabewake for generations before a single European sailed its waters?
In this revisited conversation, historian Michael Witgen, Professor of History at Columbia University and a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe, takes us inside the Anishinaabe world and reveals how the new United States set about transforming it.
The answer, Witgen shows us, wasn't simple conquest. It was something more elaborate, more profitable, and in some ways more insidious: what he calls the political economy of plunder—a system engineered to strip Indigenous peoples of their homelands while funneling the wealth of that dispossession directly into the settler colonial economy.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/323
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🎧 Episode 310: History of the Blackfeet
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11 August 2026, 5:00 am - 45 minutes 48 seconds448 The Declaration of Independence as American Scripture
The engrossed copy of the Declaration of Independence is on display at the National Archives building in Washington, DC. Millions of visitors flock to see it and the other Charters of Freedom. But how did it end up there and why do people approach it with religious reverence?
In this episode, we explore how the Declaration took on its symbolic role as the founding text of the United States.
Pauline's Book
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/403
EPISODE OUTLINE
00:00:00 Introduction
00:06:30 Introducing Mary Beth Norton
00:07:17 American Scripture: Pauline Maier
00:10:00 Graduate School with Pauline Maier
00:13:36 The State of Historians' Thinking in the 1990s
00:15:23 Other Declarations of Independence
00:21:08 Thomas Jefferson's Drafting of the Declaration
00:23:44 Why Create a Parchment Copy of the Declaration?
00:28:24 How the Declaration Became American Scripture
00:30:32 The Impact of American Scripture
00:32:10 Situating the Declaration in the American Revolution
00:35:39 The Role of the Parchment Copy Today
00:40:12 Closing Thoughts on Pauline Maier
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🎧 Episode 141: A Declaration in Draft
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4 August 2026, 5:00 am - 53 minutes 43 secondsBFW Revisited Threads of Power
For the Haudenosaunee, the Six Nations People, the American Revolution brought not liberty, but land loss, displacement, and the dismantling of their world. The new United States seized land from Haudenosaunee nations regardless of which side they supported during the Revolution. And yet the Haudenosaunee survived, and Haudenosaunee women are central to this story.
In this revisited episode, Maeve Kane, Associate Professor of History at the University at Albany and author of Shirts Powdered Red, reveals how Haudenosaunee women used cloth, trade, and cultural creativity as tools of sovereignty and survival across three centuries of colonial pressure.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/406
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🎧 Episode 021: Smuggling in Colonial America & Living History
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🎧 Episode 223: A native American History of the Ohio River Valley & Great Lakes Region
🎧 Episode 264: The Treaty of Canandaigua
🎧 Episode 353: Women and the Making of Catawba Identity
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28 July 2026, 5:00 am - 1 hour 1 minute447 The Other Committee Members: Robert R. Livingston, Roger Sherman, and the Declaration of Independence
Five men served on the Continental Congress’s Declaration Committee. We know three of them well: Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin. But who were the other two?
In this episode, we explore the lives and contributions of Robert R. Livingston of New York and Roger Sherman of Connecticut.
Historians Geoff Benton and Michael Morand join us as we uncover the stories of the other Committee members.
Clermont State Historic Site: Website
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/447
EPISODE OUTLINE
00:00:00 Introduction
00:04:46 The Lee Resolution and the Committee of Five
00:05:26 Robert R. Livingston's Early Life
00:06:56 Colonial New York Politics
00:11:02 Livingston's Appointment to the Second Continental Congress
00:15:20 Why Livingston Chosen for Declaration Committee
00:18:44 Livingston's feud with John Adams
00:19:18 Livingston Misses the Vote for Independence
00:20:50 Livingston Becomes Chancellor of New York State
00:24:06 Livingston's Role in Steam Navigation
00:26:15 Clermont State Historic Site
00:32:35 Roger Sherman's Early Life
00:36:47 Sherman's Family and Life in New Haven
00:37:43 Sherman's Involvement in the Imperial Crisis
00:40:38 Sherman's Role in the Second Continental Congress
00:42:28 Why Sherman Chosen For Declaration Committee
00:43:42 Sherman's Role in Drafting the Declaration
00:46:16 The Connecticut Compromise, 1787
00:50:28 What Made Sherman Effective in Legislatures
00:53:47 1776 in Context
00:58:10 Conclusion
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🎧 Episode 415: The Many Declarations of Independence
🎧 Episode 439: When the Declaration of Independence Was News
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21 July 2026, 5:00 am - 1 hour 20 minutesBFW Revisited: A Declaration in Draft, 2026
Every American knows Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, but was he really its sole architect?
In this revisited episode, we sit down with three scholars to pull back the curtain on how the Declaration came to be written. Danielle Allen of Harvard University, Patrick Spero of the American Philosophical Society, and Peter Onuf of the University of Virginia reveal that the Declaration was never one man's work.
Together, they show how John Adams — not Jefferson — was the intellectual architect behind "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." How Benjamin Franklin changed the Declaration with just four or five surgical edits. And what the Second Continental Congress cut from Jefferson's original draft, including his striking grievance blaming King George III for the international slave trade.
Originally recorded in 2017 as part of Ben Franklin's World's Doing History to the Revolution series, this episode pairs with Episode 446 and Episode 447 to mark the Declaration's 250th anniversary.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/141
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🎧 Episode 018: Our Declaration
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🎧 Episode 443: How Independence Happend, Pt 1: The Lee Resolution, 1776
🎧 Episode 444: How Independence Happened, Pt 2: The Model Treaty
🎧 Episode 445: How Independence Happened, Pt 3: Articles of Confederation
🎧 Episode 446: The Declaration of Independence at 250
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14 July 2026, 9:00 am - More Episodes? Get the App