American Political History

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 Okt 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 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 Juli 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 Juli 202332min