American Political History

In 585 BC, the sun went dark over a battlefield — and one Greek had said it would, not by reading the will of the gods, but by working out that the heavens run on a pattern the human mind can grasp. T...

4 Jul 202332min

We hold these truths to be self-evident — but they were not self-evident. For almost the whole of human history, on nearly every patch of the globe, the opposite was assumed: that men are born unequal...

4 Jul 202326min

In the spring of 1763, the British colonies were lighting bonfires for the greatest victory in their history — and within weeks the frontier they had just won was burning. This is the story of Pontiac...

4 Jul 202318min

In the spring of 1760, two armies sat outside Quebec and stared at the river, because whoever’s ships came first would win a continent. This is the story of how the French and Indian War ended — and h...

4 Jul 202322min

While the British took Quebec in the north, the southern colonies fought a war almost nobody up north was watching — a brutal frontier war against the Cherokee, the most powerful nation of the souther...

4 Jul 202318min

In 1759, the year the British Empire could not stop winning, the largest prize of all sat on a cliff in the middle of North America: Quebec, the heart of New France, the fortress every earlier English...

4 Jul 202327min

The French and Indian War began at the forks of the Ohio in 1754, and in 1758 it came home to where it started. This is the story of how the British finally took the forks — not in one great battle, b...

5 Jun 202321min

By 1758 the British had been losing the war in America for three years. Then William Pitt took hold of it in London — and instead of bullying the colonies as his predecessor had, he paid them, respect...

1 Mar 202330min