Ben Franklin's World27 Mar 2018

179 After the Revolution: Governance During the Critical Period

The Confederation period is one of the most neglected aspects of United States History. And yet, it’s a very important period. Between 1781 and 1789, the Confederation Congress established by the Articles of Confederation had to deal with war, economic depression, infighting between the states, trouble in the west, foreign meddling, and domestic insurrection. It’s a critical period where no one knew whether the United States would survive as an independent nation.

George William Van Cleve, a researcher in law and history at the University of Seattle Law School and author of We Have Not A Government: The Articles of Confederation and the Road to the Constitution, takes us into the Confederation period so we can discover more about the Articles of Confederation, the government it established, and the problems that government confronted.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/179

*Correction: After production we noticed that in her second question to George, Liz noted the Articles of Confederation has a history that begins in 1787. Liz misspoke. The Second Continental Congress drafted the Articles of Confederation in 1777, ratified them in 1781, and they remained the active constitution of the United States until 1789, when the Constitution of 1787 went into effect on March 4, 1789.

Sponsor Links

Complementary Episodes

Helpful Show Links

*Books purchased through this link will help support the production of Ben Franklin's World.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(514)

BFW 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 pre...

25 Aug 1h 23min

449 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 Caribbe...

18 Aug 1h 32min

BFW 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 th...

11 Aug 1h 18min

448 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...

4 Aug 45min

BFW 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 Haud...

28 Jul 53min

447 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 exp...

21 Jul 1h 1min

BFW 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...

14 Jul 1h 20min

446 The Declaration of Independence at 250

250 years after its signing, the Declaration of Independence remains an unfinished document. Its famous assertion "that all men are created equal" and endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty,...

7 Jul 43min