American Political History

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 Okt 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 Okt 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 Okt 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 Okt 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 Okt 202329min

The commonwealth tradition left the founders staring at a wall: if power always corrupts and virtue always decays, how can any free government last? Every previous answer had depended on someone — a p...

4 Jul 202332min

In 1765 the British laid a modest tax on the colonies, and the colonists answered as though chains were being fastened on their wrists — crying slavery, conspiracy, a deliberate design against their f...

4 Jul 202332min

Before the American colonists ever claimed the rights of man, they claimed the rights of Englishmen. For the first ten years of the quarrel with Britain they argued not like philosophers but like lawy...

4 Jul 202331min