Ben Franklin's World12 Mars 2019

229 The Townshend Moment

Within days of the Boston Massacre, Bostonians politicized the event. They circulated a pamphlet about “the Horrid Massacre” and published images portraying soldiers firing into a well-assembled and peaceful crowd.  

But why did the Boston Massacre happen? Why did the British government feel it had little choice but to station as many 2,000 soldiers in Boston during peacetime? And what was going on within the larger British Empire that drove colonists to the point where they provoked armed soldiers to fire upon them?

Patrick Griffin, the Madden-Hennebry Family Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame and author of The Townshend Moment: The Making of Empire and Revolution in the Eighteenth Century, joins us to answer these questions as we continue our 3-episode investigation of the Boston Massacre.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/229

Sponsor Links

Omohundro Institute
Omohundro Institute Books (Use Promo Code 01DAH40 to save 40 percent)

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

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(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 Juli 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 Juli 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 Juli 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 Juli 43min