American Political History

The Stamp Act of 1765 was a small tax. To the men who wrote it in London, it was the most reasonable thing in the world: the colonies should help pay for their own defense. So why did a few pennies on...

9 Loka 202326min

In 1763, the proudest British subjects in the world were Americans. They had just helped win the greatest war in their empire’s history, expelling France from the continent and lighting bonfires from ...

9 Loka 202326min

In June 1752, a forty-six-year-old retired printer stood in a shed on the edge of Philadelphia and flew a silk kite into a thunderstorm — and when the spark jumped from the key to his knuckle, Benjami...

9 Loka 202327min

In October 1740, a Connecticut farmer named Nathan Cole dropped his tools, threw his wife on a horse, and raced twelve miles in terror of arriving too late — to hear a traveling preacher named George ...

9 Loka 202330min

Nineteen of twenty colonists never lived in a city. They lived on the land — and not as peasants or tenants, but as freeholders, owning the ground they worked and answering to no master for it. This e...

9 Loka 202326min

The open ground did not produce one America. It produced several — and you can read them most sharply in the four great colonial cities, each the front door of a different agricultural region, each a ...

9 Loka 202327min

A library is only paper. For a century the great ideas of the Enlightenment had been written and shelved in Europe — and Europe remained a continent of kings. This episode leaves the philosophers’ she...

9 Loka 202326min

Where do three of the most famous words in American life — the pursuit of happiness — actually come from? This episode follows the last great stream of the founding mind back to its source in Scotland...

9 Loka 202329min