When we think about the American Revolution, textbooks, documentaries, and historic sites have trained most of us to think about American triumphs in battles or events when American revolutionaries overcame moments of despair, when all seemed lost, to triumph in the cause of American independence.
Benjamin L. Carp will help us look at the American Revolution differently. The Daniel M. Lyons Chair of History at Brooklyn College, Ben will use details from his book The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution to help us consider the strategic military importance of New York City and its capture by the British Army and how both armies used fire as an instrument of war.
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What did Thomas Jefferson and the members of the Second Continental Congress mean when they wrote “the pursuit of Happiness” into the United States Declaration of Independence? And why is pursuing happiness so important that Jefferson and his fellow Founding Fathers included it in the Declaration of Independence’s most powerful statement of the new United States’ ideals?
Jeffrey Rosen, the President and CEO of the National Constitution Center and a law professor at George Washington University Law School, joins us to investigate and answer these questions with details from his book, The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America.
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The Constitution is a document of “We the People.” The ways Americans have supported, debated, and interpreted the Constitution since 1787 have played a vital role in the rise of politics and political parties within the United States.
What kind of political culture did the United States Constitution and its interpretations help establish? What were the expectations, practices, and cultural norms early Americans had to follow when debating the Constitution or its interpretation in the early American republic?
In honor of Consitution Day on September 17, the day the United States commemorates the signing of the United States Constitution, we speak with two historians–Jonathan Gienapp, an Associate Professor of History and Associate Professor of Law at Stanford University and Rachel Shelden, Director of the Richard Civil War Era Center and an Associate Professor of History at Penn State University– about early American political culture and political civility in the early American republic.
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What does history have to tell us about how we, as Americans, came to define people by their race; the visual ways we have grouped people together based on their skin color, facial features, hair texture, and ancestry?
As you might imagine, history has a LOT to tell us about this question! So today, we’re going to explore one aspect of the answer to this question by focusing on some of the ways religion shaped European and early American ideas about race and racial groupings.
Kathryn Gin Lum is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University. She’s also the author of Heathen: Religion and Race in American History.
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Do you ever wonder how governments met and worked in colonial British America?
Williamsburg, Virginia, served as the capital of Virginia between 1699 and 1779. During its 80 years of service as capital, Williamsburg represented the center of British authority in Virginia. This meant the Royal Governor of the colony lived in Williamsburg. Indigenous, colonial, and other delegations came to Williamsburg to negotiate treaties and trade with Virginia. And, the colonial government met in Williamsburg’s capitol building to pass laws, listen to court cases, and debate ideas.
Katie Schinabeck, a historian of historical memory and the American Revolution and the Digital Projects Researcher at Colonial Williamsburg’s Innovation Studios, takes us on a behind-the-scenes tour of Williamsburg’s colonial capitol building to explore how the government of colonial Virginia worked and operated.
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When we think about the American Revolution, the French Revolution, or the Haitian Revolution, we think about the ideals of freedom and equality. These ideals were embedded and discussed in all of these revolutions.
What we don’t always think about when we think about these revolutions are the objects that inspired, came out of, and were circulated as they took place.
Ashli White, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Miami in Florida, joins us to investigate the “revolutionary things” that were created and circulated during the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions with details from her book Revolutionary Things: Material Culture and Politics in the Late Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World.
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Early North America was a place that contained hundreds of distinct Indigenous nations and peoples who spoke at least 2,000 distinct languages. In the early sixteenth century, Spain began to establish colonies on mainland North America, and they were followed by the French, Dutch, and English, and the forced migration of enslaved Africans who represented at least 45 different ethnic and cultural groups. With such diversity, Early North America was full of cross-cultural encounters.
What did it look like when people of different ethnicities, races, and cultures interacted with one another? How were the people involved in cross-cultural encounters able to understand and overcome their differences?
Nicole Eustace is an award-winning historian at New York University. Using details from her Pulitzer-prize-winning book, Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America, Nicole will take us through one cross-cultural encounter in 1722 between the Haudenosaunee and Susquehannock peoples and English colonists in Pennsylvania.
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Happy Fourth of July!
We’ve created special episodes to commemorate, celebrate, and remember the Fourth of July for years. Many of our episodes have focused on the Declaration of Independence, how and why it was created, the ideas behind it, and its sacred words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
This year, we examine a different aspect of the Declaration of Independence: the man behind the boldest signature on the document: John Hancock.
Brooke Barbier is a public historian and holds a Ph.D. in American History from Boston College. She’s also the author of the first biography in many years about John Hancock, it’s called King Hancock: The Radical Influence of a Moderate Founding Father.
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When we think of California, we might think about sunny weather, Hollywood, beaches, wine country, and perhaps the Gold Rush.
What we don’t usually think about when we think about California is the state’s long history of slavery.
Jean Pfaelzer, a Californian and a Professor Emerita of English, Asian Studies, and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Delaware, joins us to lead us through some of California’s long 250-year history of slavery with details from her book, California: A Slave State.
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In this special Juneteenth episode, as we honor the emancipation of enslaved African Americans, we delve into the work of those working to preserve slave dwellings across the United States, safeguarding the essential stories these structures embody.
In our conversation, Joseph McGill, the Executive Director and Founder of the Slave Dwelling Project, joins us to share why former slave dwellings are vital to our nation's history and what they reveal about the lives of those who once lived in them.
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The United States Constitution of 1787 gave many Americans pause about the powers the new federal government could exercise and how the government's leadership would rest with one person, the president.
The fact that George Washington would likely serve as the new nation’s first president calmed many Americans’ fears that the new nation was creating an opportunity for a hereditary monarch. Washington had proven his commitment to a democratic form of government when he gave up his army command peacefully and voluntarily. He had proven he was someone Americans could trust. Plus, George Washington had no biological heirs–no sons–to whom he might pass on the presidency.
But while George Washington had no biological heirs, he did have heirs.
Cassandra A. Good, an Associate Professor of History at Marymount University and author of First Family: George Washington’s Heirs and the Making of America, joins us to explore Washington’s heirs and the lives they lived.
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