Why This Conversation Matters

Some places have a second life. Or a shadow life, a life apart from their reality that becomes as important as their actual life. Sometimes it’s even more important.

They cease to be merely geographical locations and become symbols. Jerusalem, Rome, Paris—and Babylon. Over not just centuries but millennia, Babylon became shorthand for decadence, tyranny, wealth, corruption, exile, and divine judgment. By the modern era, the historical city had almost disappeared beneath the weight of everything people imagined it to represent.

But historical thought demands that we recover the city from the became a metaphor. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones’s Babylon: Biography of a Metropolis does precisely that. He reminds us that before Babylon became a warning or a myth, it was home. Before it became an image in prophetic literature, it was one of humanity’s greatest urban experiments, inhabited by millions of ordinary people who believed they lived in the center of a blessed and orderly world.

Throughlines

The conversation begins with the observation that almost everyone recognizes the name Babylon, yet relatively few people know much about the historical city itself. For many listeners, Babylon exists primarily through the Hebrew Bible, later Christian tradition, and popular culture. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones argues that these later interpretations have almost entirely eclipsed the civilization that actually flourished on the Euphrates for more than two thousand years.

Recovering that civilization begins by seeing Babylon as its inhabitants saw it. Far from imagining themselves as decadent or corrupt, the Babylonians believed they lived in the most fortunate city in the world. Their literature presents Babylon as a place favored by the gods, protected through divine order and sustained by remarkable human achievement. That confidence shaped everything from religion and kingship to architecture and civic identity.

A recurring theme of the discussion is the extraordinary documentary record the Babylonians left behind. Unlike many ancient civilizations, Babylon speaks to us through hundreds of thousands of clay tablets. They preserve royal inscriptions and religious texts, but also business contracts, court records, marriage agreements, school exercises, inventories, personal correspondence, and everyday accounts. Through them historians can reconstruct not merely the actions of kings but the lives of merchants, families, priests, and craftsmen. Few ancient societies are documented with such richness.

Those documents also reveal a city whose achievements extended far beyond monumental architecture. Babylonian scholars developed sophisticated mathematical techniques, carefully observed the heavens over centuries, refined systems of law and administration, and produced literary works whose influence spread across the ancient Near East. The Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, survived because generations of Babylonian scribes continued to copy, teach, and preserve it. Their commitment to learning became one of the city’s defining characteristics.

The conversation also explores Babylon’s remarkable continuity. Dynasties rose and fell. Conquerors arrived and departed. Assyrians, Persians, Macedonians, and others ruled the city in succession. Yet Babylon remained an important religious and intellectual center throughout these political transformations. The city’s identity proved more durable than the regimes that governed it, reminding us that civilizations often outlast empires.

Religion occupies a central place in Babylonian life. Rather than existing alongside politics, religion permeated it. Kings derived legitimacy through their relationship with the city’s chief deity, Marduk, while festivals and rituals reaffirmed the bond between divine order and civic stability. The annual Akitu festival symbolically renewed both kingship and the cosmos itself, illustrating how deeply political authority and religious belief were intertwined.

One particularly striking aspect of the discussion concerns memory. Later civilizations repeatedly reinvented Babylon for their own purposes. Biblical writers transformed it into the archetype of imperial oppression. Classical authors alternated between admiration and fantasy. Modern culture continued adding new layers of symbolism. Each generation inherited a Babylon that reflected its own concerns more than those of the ancient city itself. The historical Babylon gradually disappeared beneath the accumulated weight of metaphor.

The conversation ultimately becomes an exercise in historical thinking itself. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones asks us to distinguish between inherited symbols and historical realities. Doing so does not diminish Babylon’s cultural power. Instead, it restores to view a civilization remarkable enough that it requires no embellishment. The real Babylon—its scholarship, engineering, religion, literature, and urban life—is every bit as fascinating as the mythical one.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

1. Why do some cities become symbols while others remain places?

2. How has the biblical image of Babylon shaped modern understanding of the city?

3. What advantages do Babylon’s clay tablets give historians over many other ancient civilizations?

4. What surprised you most about everyday life in Babylon?

5. Why did Babylon remain important even as empires came and went?

6. How did religion shape Babylonian politics and civic life?

7. What can Babylon teach us about the durability of cities compared to states?

8. How does the Epic of Gilgamesh deepen our understanding of Babylonian civilization?

9. When does symbolism illuminate history, and when does it obscure it?

10. What other historical places have acquired symbolic lives that overshadow their historical realities?

For Further Investigation

Books

• Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Babylon: Biography of a Metropolis (Pegasus, 2026)

• Amanda H. Podany, Weavers, Scribes, and Kings (Oxford University Press, 2022)

• Marc Van De Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East (Blackwell, 2003)

• Trevor Ryce, Babylonia: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2016)

• Eric H. Cline, Love, War, and Diplomacy: The Discovery of the Amarna Letters and the Bronze Age World They Revealed (Princeton University Press, 2025)

• —, After 1177 BC: The Survival of Civilizations (Princeton University Press, 2024)

Primary Sources

• The Epic of Gilgamesh, translated by Andrew George (Penguin, 2003)

• Code of Hammurabi

• Enuma Elish: The Babylonian Epic of Creation

• Astronomical diaries of Babylon

Related Episodes

• The Persian Version: Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones on Persia, empire, and the age of the Great Kings

• Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: Amanda Podany on 3,000 years of the Ancient Near East

• Love, War, and Diplomacy: Eric H. Cline on the Discovery of the Amarna Letters and the Bronze Age World They Revealed

Introduction

Even if you know nothing about the city, it is almost a certainty that you know its name: Babylon. It is perhaps one of the most evocative city names ever in the history of the planet—perhaps one of the most evocative names, full stop, not too far down the list from “heaven” and “hell.” From the prophet Isaiah to Lady Gaga, it has stood for decadence, corruption, indulgence, wealth, and evil.

But that is not the Babylon of history, argues my guest Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, the city that was at the center of the thriving, rich, and advanced civilization of Mesopotamia. For two thousand years, as dynasties came and went, it remained a center of religious life, art, literature, astronomy, and medicine. “The Babylonians in their own literature reckoned themselves to be the most blessed people in the world…and they thought of themselves as loved and guarded by the gods.” We still enjoy the benefits of their achievements.

Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones holds the Chair of Ancient History at Cardiff University and has published widely on the ancient Near East. He was last on Historically Thinking to discuss The Persians, a conversation released on May 16, 2022. His latest book is Babylon: Biography of a Metropolis, and it is the subject of our conversation today.

About the Guest

Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones is Chair of Ancient History at Cardiff University and one of Britain’s leading historians of the ancient Near East. His books include The Persians, Persians: The Age of the Great Kings, and Babylon: Biography of a Metropolis. His work explores the civilizations of Mesopotamia, Persia, and the wider ancient world through archaeology, literature, religion, and political history.

For Further Investigation

• Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Babylon: Biography of a Metropolis (Pegasus, 2026)

• Amanda H. Podany, Weavers, Scribes, and Kings (Oxford University Press, 2022)

• The Epic of Gilgamesh, translated by Andrew George (Penguin, 2003)

Related Episodes

• The Persian Version: Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones on Persia, empire, and the age of the Great Kings

• Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: Amanda Podany on 3,000 years of the Ancient Near East

• Love, War, and Diplomacy: Eric H. Cline on the Discovery of the Amarna Letters and the Bronze Age World They Revealed

Tags

Ancient History, Babylon, Mesopotamia, Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Ancient Near East, Assyria, Hammurabi, Nebuchadnezzar, Archaeology, Cities, Civilization, History Podcast

Hello,

It’s been a while since I’ve sent a Notanda. My apologies. This one is not a compilation of six months of random information…I wouldn’t do that to me or to you…but just some things that I’ve run across as a trawl for conversation topics on the podcast. It ranges from catchphrases to wargaming to conspiracy theories; and there’s also a subtle Chaucerian undercurrent, that might result in a conversation or two in the next few months.

There’s also an agricultural theme. Part of this is the image of farms and agriculture, such as North Carolina’s desire to stop you and me from writing “sweet potato”, for whatever reason that emerged from a fevered Tarheel imagination. But it’s also how farmers became evermore muscular in advertising and popular imagination as their job was increasingly technological. There’s also an essay arguing that the production of fertilizer is a historically persistent geopolitical question, and another on meadows in medieval England’s imagination and actual agricultural practice.

And now the links…

Curiosities & Essays

I will miss “6-7!”—but I know something else will replace it, because something always has:

But as media scholars who study children’s culture, we didn’t view the meme with bewilderment or exasperation. Instead, we thought back to our own childhoods on three different continents – and all the secret languages we spoke.

There was Pig Latin. The cool “S” doodled on countless worksheets and bathroom stalls. Forming an L-shape with our thumb and index finger to insult someone. Remixing the words of hand-clapping games from previous generations.

6-7 is only the latest example of these long-standing practices – and though the gesture might not mean much to adults, it says a lot about children’s play, their social lives and their desire for power.

Do we have to be media scholars to view 6-7 without bewilderment or exasperation? I should hope not; that would be icky. You don’t even have to be a historian, amazingly enough. Just reading a few semi-old novels reveals similar transitory verbal practices, like “23 skidoo!”, which I think remains my favorite.

The only thing better are laborious attempts to explain such memes, all of which should be regarded with at best suspicion. For a collection of examples that give you a hernia just reading them, I give you Professor Wikipedia.

Ixnay upidstay planationsexay Offesssorpay Ikipediaway.

Grapefruits, like other citrus, have disturbing sex lives

They also don’t taste like grapes, have an uncertain history, created Florida, were part of a terrible diet, and have strange drug interactions.

North Carolina Wants You to Stop Saying “Sweet Potato”

They don’t want you to say “yam”, either.

Historian Jon Peterson traces the route from Prussian military headquarters to Gary Gygax’s basement

No further comment should be required.

The Geopolitics of Fertilizer

Few questions are as strategically consequential, and as historically persistent, as those that concern the production of fertilisers. Time and again, the supply of usable nitrogen has shaped wars, driven technological breakthroughs, and influenced the map of geopolitical power. The dependencies underpinning that supply chain have never disappeared; they have simply relocated from one source to the next. As the world once again confronts questions of supply chain resilience, that pattern deserves renewed attention.

Summertime

The Meadows of Medieval Summer

…For people involved in agricultural work the mead was a place for important labour. Haymaking was a significant stage in the agricultural calendar because a good stock of hay enabled animals to be fed through the winter months. As a result there was a complex economic and social structure attached to mowing rights and obligations and the regulation of hay production.

The Making of the Muscular Farmer

Farming is one of the great success stories of automation: over time, the need for manual labor has dropped dramatically. Yet, as historian J.L. Anderson writes, over the past 80 years, the dwindling need for muscle on farms has coincided with increasing depictions of masculine strength in advertisements targeting farm markets.

If Your Summer Travel Isn’t Already Scheduled…

“33 of the World’s Most Mysterious Tombstones”

Higher Ed: A Guide for the Perplexed (con’t)

Is There a Science of Writing?

For roughly a decade, the phrase “science of reading” has dominated literacy discourse in the United States, the United Kingdom, and most Anglophone education systems. The phrase refers to a large body of converging evidence about how the brain learns to decode print, the centrality of phonemic awareness, and the role of background knowledge and vocabulary in comprehension. It has reshaped statute, curriculum, and teacher preparation in roughly thirty US states, in England through the statutory phonics screening check and the systematic synthetic phonics requirement embedded in the national curriculum. Writing, by contrast, has been almost entirely absent from this conversation. The natural question is whether there is a comparable science of writing, and if so, why is it so unknown?

In an Age of Distraction: Historical Thinking, AI, and the Formation of College Students

AI promises efficiency, personalization, and speed. This combination is appealing to college students who are dealing with academic pressures and a fast-paced world. History teachers are now faced with the tension between student demand for quick results (which AI provides) and the slow, thoughtful process of learning to think historically. This tension is not merely about plagiarizing papers; it cuts to the heart of what it means to nurture intellectual and moral maturity at a time when universities are moving away from the humanities and neglecting the very practices that once defined liberal arts education.

And Yet It Persists

“Standardized tests are back from the dead. That’s probably a good thing.”

Essay–Episode Callbacks

• Bede: Father of English History

  • Listen to Venerable Bede: Rory Naismith on Britain’s First Great Historian

• Peter Mancall, “The US founders’ other revolutionary choice: Separating religion and government”

  • Listen to Contested Continent: Peter Mancall on the Struggle for North America, c. 1000–1680

• Chloe Chapin, “Unbuttoned: an interactive history of the suit”

  • Listen to Suitable: Chloe Chapin on the Sartorial Revolution and the Fashioning of Modern Man

• Christine Abigail L Tan, “No one is self-made: The idea that success is deserved has great traction in the world. But Zhuangzi argues that it is a deeply flawed notion”

  • Listen to The Great Historian: Andrew Meyer on Sima Qian and the Invention of History

• “The Ghost Roads of Ireland’s Great Famine”

  • Listen to Rot: Padraic X. Scanlan on the Irish Famine and Its Imperial Legacies

(Possible) Episode Previews

How Do Academics Handle Conspiracy Theorists?

I wish I knew, tbh

Chaucer’s England

Who were Chaucer’s thirty-three pilgrims, and why were they heading to Canterbury? What do they and their tales tell us about medieval England as a place, and about the daily lives of its people?

Nicholas Orme, one of our leading historians, brings literature and history together to answer this question, using the Canterbury Tales and the other great writings of Chaucer’s day. In ten chapters, he explains what people thought: about time and space, religion and the social system. He shows their wide degree of literacy and how they spent their leisure. He takes us through the politics of the day, the crusades, and the lifestyles of the nobility, clergy, townsfolk, and country dwellers, along with the landscapes they lived in.

The Hidden History of Conspiracy Theory

Truthers, birthers, flat-Earthers, the deep state, crisis actors, chemtrails, the Epstein files, Pizzagate, the Plandemic—it seems as though there’s a conspiracy theory for every situation. But what exactly is a conspiracy theory? And why is the term used to describe beliefs that are so very unlike theories (at least in the scientific sense of the word)?

Warmly,

Al Zambone

Why This Conversation Matters

The Declaration of Independence often appears in hindsight because we know the ending. We know the United States survives. We know the Revolution succeeds. We know the words become famous and take on a life of their own.

But it’s sometime hard to remember that nobody in July 1776 knew that. For contemporaries, the Declaration was not a monument. It was information. It was a provocation. It arrived amid rumors, military reports, newspaper stories, political arguments, and personal anxieties. It was something people had to react to in real time. It was something that made people pick a side.

Emily Sneff’s work invites us to recover that uncertainty.

Throughlines

The conversation opens with the deceptively simple question of how people learned about independence. Rather than beginning with Jefferson or Congress, Sneff begins with circulation. The Declaration moved through newspapers, broadsides, handwritten copies, and public readings. It entered a world already saturated with wartime information, rumor, and speculation. Americans did not encounter it in isolation; they encountered it amid a constant stream of competing news.

A central figure in the story is printer John Dunlap. His broadside became the vehicle through which the Declaration spread across the continent. Yet Sneff emphasizes that the process involved many more people than Dunlap alone. Printers, apprentices, laborers, and readers all contributed to the dissemination of the text. The Declaration’s reach depended on networks rather than on individuals.

The discussion then turns to public readings. These events were not simply practical solutions for reaching illiterate audiences but civic rituals, based upon precedents like the King’s birthday and Guy Fawkes’ Day. Communities gathered together to hear the Declaration, celebrate independence, and symbolically sever ties with Britain. Bells were rung, cannons fired, effigies were burned, and royal symbols were destroyed. Independence was communicated through performance as much as through text; but the text was the spark.

At the same time, not everyone welcomed the news. Some individuals hesitated, doubted, or resisted. Sheriffs declined to read the Declaration. Ministers struggled with the implications of abandoning prayers for the king. Anglican clergy wrestled with obligations that were not merely political but spiritual. For many people, the Declaration forced difficult choices rather than inspiring immediate enthusiasm.

Translation emerges as another major theme. German-speaking communities in Pennsylvania quickly received sophisticated translations produced by people deeply familiar with revolutionary language because they had been participants in the long argument leading to that moment. Elsewhere, translation often distorted meaning. The story highlights the importance of cultural context and demonstrates how difficult it can be to transmit political ideas across linguistic boundaries.

One particularly striking episode concerns diplomacy. The first foreign acknowledgement of American independence came not from France but from native leaders from Nova Scotia meeting Massachusetts officials. This moment complicates traditional narratives that focus exclusively on European reactions to the Revolution.

The conversation also reveals the surprising weakness of American diplomatic communication. Silas Deane waited in France for months without receiving the official document he needed to present at Versailles. Meanwhile, British officials acquired copies with ease. The episode illustrates the contrast between revolutionary aspirations and administrative realities.

The final section follows the transition from news to memory. Mary Katharine Goddard’s January 1777 printing, complete with the names of the signers, marks a turning point. The Declaration ceased to be merely current information and began to become an artifact. The document that had once circulated through newspapers and rumor slowly entered the realm of commemoration and preservation.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

1. What changes when we view the Declaration as news rather than scripture?

2. Why were public readings so important?

3. How did communities perform independence?

4. Why did some ministers struggle with the Declaration?

5. What challenges arise when revolutionary ideas are translated?

6. Why did Indigenous leaders respond differently than Europeans?

7. What does the Silas Deane episode reveal about the Continental Congress?

8. How did British newspapers shape reception of the Declaration?

9. Why did the Declaration eventually cease to be news?

10. What was gained—and lost—when it became a historical artifact?

For Further Investigation

Books

• Emily Sneff, When the Declaration of Independence Was News (Oxford University Press, 2026)

• Michael Auslin, National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America (Simon and Schuster, 2026)

• Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (Vintage, 1998)

• Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (Knopf Doubleday, 2018)

• Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas

• David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Harvard, 2008)

Primary Sources

• Dunlap Broadside (National Archives)

• Goddard Broadside (New York Public Library)

• Treaty of Watertown (Historical Society of Watertown)

• Abigail Adams to John Adams, 13 July 1776: “I cannot but feel sorry that some of the most Manly Sentiments in the Declaration are Expunged from the printed coppy. Perhaps wise reasons induced it.”

Related Episodes

• The Man at the Center of Two Revolutions: Martin Clagett on William Small, Thomas Jefferson’s teacher and James Watt’s collaborator

• Republic and Empire: Andrew O’Shaughnessy on the global causes and consequences of the American Revolution

• Quaker Founder: Jane E. Calvert on John Dickinson, Quaker Constitutionalism, and America’s “Penman of the Revolution”

• The Great Atlantic Freedom Conspiracy: Micah Alpaugh on correspondence, revolution, and social movement

• Thomas Jefferson and the Fight Against Slavery: Cara Rogers Stevens on

  rethinking Jefferson

Tags

America 250; Declaration of Independence; Emily Sneff; American Revolution; Newspapers; Print Culture; John Dunlap; Mary Katharine Goddard; Thomas Jefferson; Public Memory; Early America; Historical Thinking

Introduction

“There was a time when the Declaration of Independence was news.”

“Most books written about the Declaration have pursued questions about its precedence and authorship as well as its legacy. In 1776, when the Declaration was news, it was part of an ever-changing and circulating amalgam of accurate and inaccurate information, gossip, military intelligence, speculation, and opinion. At approximately one thousand three hundred and twenty words from ‘When in the Course of Human Events’ through ‘Our Sacred Honor,’ the Declaration took fewer than ten minutes to read and filled only one or two columns of a typical newspaper. This was a text that could be communicated swiftly, but it was also a text for which the context in which it was communicated mattered. The questions of who experienced the news of independence and when and how they did so reveal a critical, overlooked history of the American Revolution.”

Those are the words of my guest Emily Sneff in her new book When the Declaration of Independence Was News. It is a book that reframes the Declaration and enables us to see it in a new way: at a moment when the success of the Revolution was far from inevitable, and when the mere existence of the Declaration forced people to choose sides—or to reconsider everything they had previously believed about authority, loyalty, and politics.

In this conversation we discuss how news of independence spread through newspapers, broadsides, public readings, churches, diplomatic networks, and translation. We follow the Declaration from John Dunlap’s printing office in Philadelphia to German-language newspapers, and treaty councils with native American tribes; to the office of the Colonial Secretary in London, to London newspapers, and to the court of Versailles.

About the Guest

Emily Sneff is an independent historian specializing in the history and memory of the American Revolution. Her research has focused particularly on the Declaration of Independence and its transmission, reception, and preservation. When the Declaration of Independence Was News is her first book.

For Further Investigation

• Emily Sneff, When the Declaration of Independence Was News (Oxford University Press, 2026)

• The Website of Emily Sneff

• Michael Auslin, National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America (Simon and Schuster, 2026)

• Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (Vintage, 1998)

• Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (Knopf Doubleday, 2018)

• Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas

• David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Harvard, 2008)

Related Episodes

• The Man at the Center of Two Revolutions: Martin Clagett on William Small, Thomas Jefferson’s teacher and James Watt’s collaborator

• Republic and Empire: Andrew O’Shaughnessy on the global causes and consequences of the American Revolution

• Quaker Founder: Jane E. Calvert on John Dickinson, Quaker Constitutionalism, and America’s “Penman of the Revolution”

• The Great Atlantic Freedom Conspiracy: Micah Alpaugh on correspondence, revolution, and social movement

• Thomas Jefferson and the Fight Against Slavery: Cara Rogers Stevens on

  rethinking Jefferson

Tags

America 250; Declaration of Independence; Emily Sneff; American Revolution; Newspapers; Print Culture; John Dunlap; Mary Katharine Goddard; Thomas Jefferson; Public Memory; Early America; Historical Thinking

Why This Conversation Matters

Most Americans encounter the Declaration of Independence as text. We memorize lines from it. We quote it. We argue about it.

But ideas are strangely fragile. They often survive because they become attached to places, objects, rituals, and memories.

Michael Auslin’s book explores the unusual fact that the Declaration became not only a statement of principles but also a national relic. Americans preserved it, displayed it, celebrated it, and protected it. In doing so, they transformed a political document into a physical embodiment of the republic itself.

Throughlines

The conversation begins with a deceptively simple question: why does the Declaration still exist? Standing before the document in the National Archives, Michael Auslin realized that historians had paid immense attention to the Declaration’s ideas while largely neglecting the story of the document itself. Yet the two histories quickly prove inseparable. The Declaration survives because generations of Americans believed it mattered. And because it survived, later generations were able to invest it with new meanings.

The discussion then turns to the drafting process. Jefferson’s role was important, but the Declaration emerged from collaboration and revision. Congress edited it heavily, and those edits may have improved it. The resulting document was not simply Jefferson’s creation but an expression of what he called “the American mind.” The Declaration succeeded precisely because it gathered together ideas that many colonists already recognized.

From there the conversation follows the document’s transformation into print. The Dunlap broadsides spread the Declaration throughout the states, but surprisingly little attention was initially paid to the engrossed parchment itself. During the Revolution the document functioned primarily as an instrument announcing independence rather than as a sacred object. Its later status as a national treasure was not inevitable.

A major turning point came after the War of 1812. News that the Declaration had been saved from the burning of Washington generated public fascination. Americans who had long known the words suddenly became interested in the document itself. Reproductions, engravings, biographies of the signers, and public displays helped create a new relationship between citizens and the Declaration.

The conversation also highlights John Quincy Adams’s role in transforming the Declaration’s meaning. Adams linked it directly to the Constitution and to the broader American political experiment. In doing so, he helped lay the groundwork for later interpretations by reformers of all kinds. The Declaration became more than a justification for independence; it became a statement about the nature of American government and citizenship. Soon it became a template for other declarations, such as those for the rights of women and for alcoholic temperance.

The Civil War reveals how powerful that transformation had become. Lincoln viewed the Declaration as the moral center of the republic, while Confederate thinkers increasingly sought to challenge its claims but at the same time use it as a validation for their own declaration of independence from the union. The struggle over the meaning of liberty and equality became inseparable from the struggle over the nation’s future.

The final sections of the conversation examine the twentieth century. Immigration, the Cold War, and the Civil Rights Movement all gave the Declaration renewed significance. Political leaders, civil rights activists, and ordinary Americans repeatedly returned to it as a source of legitimacy and aspiration. The Declaration’s words mattered. But so did the continued existence of the parchment itself. Americans could visit it, view it, and imagine a direct connection to the founding generation.

The conversation closes with a striking observation. Had the document been destroyed, Americans would still have possessed its words. Yet something important would have been lost. The Declaration survives not merely as text but as a tangible link between generations—a national relic that helps make abstract principles feel real.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

1. Why do physical artifacts matter in the preservation of ideas?

2. Did Congress improve Jefferson’s draft?

3. Why did Americans largely ignore the Declaration after independence?

4. What changed after the War of 1812?

5. Why were the signatures so important to later Americans?

6. How did John Quincy Adams reinterpret the Declaration?

7. Why did Lincoln place such emphasis on it?

8. Is the Declaration primarily a liberty document or an equality document? Or is that the wrong question to ask?

9. What role did it play in the Civil Rights Movement? What else was happening to the document at the time?

10. What would have been lost if the parchment itself had disappeared?

For Further Investigation

Books

• Michael Auslin, National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America (Simon and Schuster, 2026)

• Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (Vintage, 1998)

• Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (Knopf Doubleday, 2018)

• Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas

• David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Harvard, 2008)

Primary Sources

• Declaration of Independence (TAH)

• John Quincy Adams, “An Address…Celebrating the Declaration of Independence,” July 4, 1821 (TAH)

• Abraham Lincoln, “Fragment on the Constitution and Union”

• —, “Address at Independence Hall,” February 22, 1861

• —, “Gettysburg Address”, November 19, 1864

• Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (University of Alabama Libraries)

Related Episodes

• Civic Bargain: Brook Manville and Josiah Ober on democracy, self-rule, and civic renewal

• Remaking American Citizenship: Christopher Bonner on Black Americans and democratic identity

• Civil War Politics: Paul Escott on political traditions in crisis

• The Great Atlantic Freedom Conspiracy: Micah Alpaugh on revolutionary tactics and adaptations in the Atlantic World

Introduction

The Declaration of Independence has had two simultaneous lives.

One is the life of its ideas, the life that scholars pay the most attention to: a life of fits and starts, surprisingly forgotten in the first years after the Revolution, then returning with a vengeance amid sectional conflict in the 1830s, during the Progressive Era, and again during the Civil Rights Movement.

Its second life is as a material document. It is an engrossed parchment rushed away from advancing British troops twice in its life, carried by carriage and train across the United States, tucked away in archives and cellars, displayed in patent offices and libraries, and eventually enshrined in a helium-filled case under carefully controlled conditions.

As Michael Auslin argues in National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America, these two lives cannot be separated. Americans did not merely preserve the Declaration because of what it said. They preserved it because the physical document itself became a national relic—an object that connected generations of Americans to the Revolution and to one another.

In this conversation we discuss how the Declaration was drafted and edited, how it nearly disappeared from public consciousness after independence, how it re-emerged in the nineteenth century, and how both Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. drew upon it as a source of national meaning. We also follow the physical journey of the parchment itself through war, neglect, preservation, and eventual canonization.

About the Guest

Michael Auslin is the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is the author of numerous books on American and international history and writes The Pawtomack Packet, a Substack devoted to the history of Washington, D.C. His latest book is National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America.

For Further Investigation

• Michael Auslin, National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America (Simon and Schuster, 2026)

• Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (Vintage, 1998)

• Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (Knopf Doubleday, 2018)

• Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas

• David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Harvard, 2008)

Related Episodes

• Civic Bargain: Brook Manville and Josiah Ober on democracy, self-rule, and civic renewal

• Remaking American Citizenship: Christopher Bonner on Black Americans and democratic identity

• Civil War Politics: Paul Escott on political traditions in crisis

• The Great Atlantic Freedom Conspiracy: Micah Alpaugh on revolutionary tactics and adaptations in the Atlantic World

Tags

America 250; Declaration of Independence; Michael Auslin; American Revolution; Abraham Lincoln; Civil Rights Movement; Thomas Jefferson; Archives; Public Memory; Founding Era; Historical Thinking

Why This Conversation Matters

The American founding often appears in public memory as a sequence of sacred texts. The Declaration. The Constitution. The Bill of Rights. We quote them, celebrate them, and often fight over them.

Yet documents do not emerge from nowhere. They are products of debate, persuasion, disagreement, and uncertainty. Before Americans had institutions, they had arguments.

David Stewart’s book invites us to revisit those arguments through some of the most important documents of the founding era. In doing so, he also reminds us that the American experiment was never intended to be a perpetual motion machine. It depended—and still depends—on citizens willing to think seriously about the principles that underlie it.

Throughlines

The conversation begins with Patrick Henry’s “Liberty or Death” speech, one of the most famous moments of political oratory in American history. Stewart emphasizes not only Henry’s rhetorical gifts but his ability to crystallize a moment of uncertainty. Virginia had not yet committed itself to resistance. Many still hoped for reconciliation. Henry’s achievement was to persuade listeners that neutrality was no longer possible and that delay itself constituted a choice.

From Henry, the discussion moves to Thomas Paine and Common Sense. Paine’s contribution was different. Rather than attacking Parliament, he attacked monarchy itself. In doing so, he shifted the terms of debate. Colonists who had long considered themselves loyal subjects were invited to imagine an entirely different political future. Paine’s genius lay in presenting radical ideas in language that ordinary readers could understand.

The Declaration of Independence occupies a different place in the conversation. Stewart argues that its enduring power comes not from rhetorical excess but from restraint. The Declaration does not shout. It reasons. Its claims are presented as self-evident truths rather than partisan assertions. That calm confidence helps explain why it continues to resonate centuries later.

Federalist 51 introduces another set of concerns. Madison was less interested in inspiring citizens than in managing human nature. His famous observation that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary” reflects a deeply realistic understanding of politics. Government exists because people are imperfect. The challenge is to create institutions that can govern while simultaneously preventing those institutions from becoming oppressive.

The discussion highlights how different this vision is from popular descriptions of “checks and balances.” Madison was not imagining a machine that would run automatically. He expected ambition, rivalry, jealousy, and self-interest. The constitutional structure seeks to harness those tendencies rather than eliminate them. Human weaknesses become tools for preserving liberty.

Washington’s Farewell Address brings many of these themes together. Washington’s central concern is union. He worries about sectionalism, faction, and foreign influence. He fears that political divisions might grow strong enough to destroy the republic itself. His warnings emerge not from pessimism but from a sober recognition that republics fail. The success of the American experiment was never guaranteed.

One particularly striking theme is Washington’s concern with civic friendship. Political disagreement is inevitable, but disagreement must not become alienation. Citizens may oppose one another’s ideas while still recognizing one another as members of the same political community. Once that bond breaks down, faction becomes something more dangerous.

The conversation concludes with Stewart’s reflection on patriotism. For him, patriotism is neither sentimentality nor slogan. It involves recognizing both the achievements and the fragility of the American experiment. The founders left behind institutions, but they also left behind questions. Those questions remain worth asking because the democracy they created remains something that must be maintained rather than assumed.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

1. Why was Patrick Henry’s speech persuasive at that particular moment?

2. What made Common Sense so revolutionary?

3. Do you agree that the Declaration’s power comes partly from its restraint?

4. What does Madison mean when he says that government must first control the governed and then control itself?

5. Is “checks and balances” an adequate description of Federalist 51?

6. Why was Washington so concerned about faction?

7. What is civic friendship, and why does it matter?

8. How should citizens balance disagreement with political loyalty?

9. Which document discussed in this conversation seems most relevant today?

10. What does Stewart mean by “the democracy we must keep”?

For Further Investigation

Books

• David O. Stewart, The Democracy We Must Keep: Seven Founders, Nine Documents, and the Ideas That Shaped America

• —, Madison’s Gift: Five Partnerships That Built America

• —, George Washington: The Political Rise of America’s Founding Father

• John Kukla, Patrick Henry: Champion of Liberty (Simon and Schuster, 2017)

• Dennis Rasmussen, Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America’s Founders (Princeton University Press, 2021)

• Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press, 1998)

• —, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (Vintage, 1993)

• —, The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States (Penguin, 2012)

Primary Sources

• Patrick Henry, “Give me Liberty or Give Me Death!”—performed by Nathaniel Lasley of Colonial Williamsburg.

• Thomas Paine, Common Sense and The American Crisis I, edited by Richard Beeman (Penguin, 2025)

• Publius, The Federalist Papers (Signet, 2003)

• Federalist No. 51

• George Washington, Farewell Address—from Mount Vernon, a digital copy of the printed address in the American Daily Advertiser, along with a transcript

Related Episodes

• Civic Bargain: Brook Manville and Josiah Ober on democracy, self-rule, and civic renewal

• Remaking American Citizenship: Christopher Bonner on Black Americans and democratic identity

• Civil War Politics: Paul Escott on political traditions in crisis

Tags

America 250; American Revolution; David O. Stewart; Patrick Henry; Thomas Paine; Declaration of Independence; Federalist 51; George Washington; Founding Era; Political Thought; Historical Thinking

Introduction

American independence was not simply the writing of the Declaration of Independence, nor even the vote that approved it. It was the culmination of decades of argument, persuasion, and political innovation. The American founding emerged through a succession of speeches, petitions, resolutions, constitutions, and other documents in which Americans struggled to define liberty, self-government, and the proper limits of power. And the conversation did not end there; it continued, and continues.

David Stewart explores that conversation in his new book, The Democracy We Must Keep: Seven Founders, Nine Documents, and the Ideas That Shaped Them. Through a close examination of nine pivotal texts—from Patrick Henry’s call for liberty to Washington’s Farewell Address—Stewart traces the development of the ideas that made the United States possible. In doing so, he reminds us that the American experiment has always depended not only on institutions, but on the ideas, principles, and debates that gave them life.

In our conversation, we discuss Patrick Henry’s “Liberty or Death” speech, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the Declaration of Independence, Madison’s vision in Federalist 51, and Washington’s Farewell Address. Along the way emerges a portrait of a founding generation deeply aware of human weakness, deeply concerned about the dangers of faction, and profoundly uncertain about whether their experiment in self-government would survive.

About the Guest

David O. Stewart is a recovering attorney and the author of numerous works of history and fiction. His books include Madison’s Gift: Five Partnerships That Built America and George Washington: The Political Rise of America’s Founding Father. He previously appeared on Historically Thinking in Episode 199 to discuss George Washington and the practice of politics in the early republic.

For Further Investigation

• David O. Stewart, The Democracy We Must Keep: Seven Founders, Nine Documents, and the Ideas That Shaped America

• —, Madison’s Gift: Five Partnerships That Built America

• —, George Washington: The Political Rise of America’s Founding Father

• Patrick Henry, “Give me Liberty or Give Me Death!”—performed by Nathaniel Lasley of Colonial Williamsburg.

• John Kukla, Patrick Henry: Champion of Liberty (Simon and Schuster, 2017)

• Thomas Paine, Common Sense and The American Crisis I, edited by Richard Beeman (Penguin, 2025)

• Publius, The Federalist Papers (Signet, 2003)

• Federalist No. 51

• George Washington, Farewell Address—from Mount Vernon, a digital copy of the printed address in the American Daily Advertiser, along with a transcript

Related Episodes

• Civic Bargain: Brook Manville and Josiah Ober on democracy, self-rule, and civic renewal

• Remaking American Citizenship: Christopher Bonner on Black Americans and democratic identity

• Civil War Politics: Paul Escott on political traditions in crisis

Tags

America 250; American Revolution; David O. Stewart; Patrick Henry; Thomas Paine; Declaration of Independence; Federalist 51; George Washington; Founding Era; Political Thought; Historical Thinking

Why This Conversation Matters

Every nation develops stories about its origins. Over time those stories become familiar, polished, and often simplified. The American Revolution is no exception. We tend to think of it as something that happened between Lexington and Yorktown, ending with independence and the creation of a new nation.

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal’s work suggests a different perspective. For generations after 1776, Americans did not regard the Revolution as a settled achievement. They argued about its meaning every year. They debated whether its promises had been fulfilled, whether the republic was succeeding or failing, and whether the work of the Revolution remained unfinished.

What emerges from these Fourth of July speeches is a portrait of a nation that understood itself not as the heir to a completed project, but as a participant in an ongoing one.

Throughlines

The conversation begins with a forgotten institution of American public life: the Fourth of July oration. Today Independence Day is associated with parades, fireworks, cookouts, and baseball games. For much of the nineteenth century, however, the centerpiece of the holiday was often a speech. Across the country, Americans gathered to hear reflections on the Revolution, the republic, and the future of the nation. These speeches became one of the most important annual rituals of civic life.

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal explains that more than one hundred thousand such speeches were delivered during the first century of American independence. Around 2,500 survive in pamphlet form. Taken together, they provide a remarkable record of how Americans thought about their history and their future. They reveal not a fixed national memory but a continuing conversation.

One of the most surprising themes in the discussion is the degree of anxiety found in these speeches. Modern commemorations often emphasize celebration and consensus. The orators of the early republic frequently did the opposite. Again and again they warned that the republic was fragile. Corruption threatened liberty. Political parties threatened unity. Foreign influence threatened independence. Slavery threatened the nation’s ideals. The Revolution itself remained unfinished.

This persistent anxiety reflected a deeper belief that the United States was an experiment. The phrase “the American experiment” is still familiar today, but nineteenth-century Americans often used it literally. An experiment, after all, has an uncertain outcome. The republic’s success was not assumed. It had to be achieved. Every generation inherited the responsibility of preserving what the Revolution had begun.

The conversation also highlights how international these speeches often were. Americans did not confine their attention to domestic affairs. Orators discussed events in France, Haiti, Latin America, Ireland, and elsewhere. They viewed the American Revolution as part of a larger global struggle over liberty, self-government, and political legitimacy. The fate of other revolutions mattered because Americans believed their own future remained connected to the wider world.

Frederick Douglass’s famous 1852 speech emerges in a different light when viewed against this backdrop. Rather than standing entirely outside the Fourth of July tradition, Douglass participated in it. Like countless speakers before him, he used the occasion to measure the nation against the promises of the Revolution. His conclusions were more devastating than most, but the act of public criticism itself belonged to a long-established tradition.

The Civil War occupies a central place in this story. Looking backward, it is tempting to view the war as a sharp break in American history. Perl-Rosenthal argues that many Americans understood it differently. For decades, Fourth of July speakers had warned that unresolved contradictions threatened the republic. By the time war arrived, it appeared not as an unimaginable catastrophe but as the culmination of arguments that had been developing for generations.

The conversation concludes by examining the decline of the July Fourth oration. After 1876, the tradition gradually lost its central place in American civic culture. Other forms of entertainment, communication, and public life replaced it. Yet something may have been lost in the process. For more than a century, Americans devoted their national holiday to reflecting publicly on the meaning of their history. The disappearance of that practice raises questions about how modern societies remember, debate, and renew their civic traditions.

In the end, Perl-Rosenthal’s argument is both simple and profound. The American Revolution did not end in 1783, or 1789, or even 1865. For generations of Americans, it remained an unfinished argument about liberty, equality, citizenship, and the future of the republic itself.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

1. Why did Fourth of July speeches become such an important feature of American civic life?

2. What surprised you most about the concerns expressed by nineteenth-century orators?

3. Why did so many Americans describe the republic as an “experiment”?

4. What does the persistent anxiety in these speeches suggest about the early republic?

5. How does viewing Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech within a larger tradition change your understanding of it?

6. Why were Americans so interested in revolutions and political developments outside the United States?

7. Do you agree that the Civil War represented the culmination of arguments that began during the Revolution?

8. What has replaced the civic role once played by public oratory?

9. Are there advantages to a society that regularly debates its founding principles?

10. What does it mean to describe a revolution as unfinished?

For Further Investigation

Books

• Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, The Long Revolution: Creating a United States after 1776

• —, The Age of Revolutions–And the Generations Who Made It (Basic Books, 2024)

• —, Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution (Harvard, 2015)

• Andrew Burstein, America’s Jubilee: How in 1826 a Generation Remembered 50 Years of Independence (Knopf, 2001)

• Len Travers, Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic (University of Massachusetts Press, 1999)

Primary Sources

• 4th of July Orations: A Century of American Oratory, 1777-1876

• Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”

Related Episodes

• Revolutionary Age: Nathan Perl-Rosenthal on the Atlantic World in Upheaval

• Men on Horseback: David Bell on charismatic leaders, literally riding white horses, in an age of democratic revolution

• The Great Atlantic Freedom Conspiracy: Micah Alpaugh on revolutionary tactics and adaptations in the Atlantic World

Introduction

On July 4, 1777, in Boston, the Reverend William Gordon gave one of the first July 4th orations in American history—certainly the first to become a pamphlet. For over a century these orations were a feature of the national festival, “an essential annual occasion for debating the present and future of American politics.” In the first century of American independence over one hundred thousand such speeches were delivered, about 2,500 of which survive in pamphlets. They were essential, until suddenly they were not.

How these orations surveyed the past and looked forward to the future is the focus of my guest Nathan Perl-Rosenthal’s new book The Long Revolution: Creating a United States after 1776. These speeches are a mine from which he extracts visions, anxieties, and imaginings, ranging from William Gordon’s speech all the way to the fizzled attempts of President Gerald Ford to continue the tradition in 1976.

One of the most striking discoveries in this conversation is that these Fourth of July speeches were rarely complacent celebrations. Again and again, speakers warned that the republic remained fragile, incomplete, and endangered. The American Revolution, they insisted, was not a finished event but an ongoing project. To read these speeches is to encounter generations of Americans who regarded themselves not as heirs to a settled achievement, but as participants in a continuing experiment.

About the Guest

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is Professor of History, French and Italian, and Law at the University of Southern California. He is also the author of The Age of Revolutions–And the Generations Who Made It. His research focuses on political culture, revolution, and the creation of modern states and identities.

For Further Investigation

• Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, The Long Revolution: Creating a United States after 1776 (Basic Books, 2026)

• —, The Age of Revolutions–And the Generations Who Made It (Basic Books, 2024)

• —, Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution (Harvard, 2015)

• Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”

• Andrew Burstein, America’s Jubilee: How in 1826 a Generation Remembered 50 Years of Independence (Knopf, 2001)

• Len Travers, Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic (University of Massachusetts Press, 1999)

• 4th of July Orations: A Century of American Oratory, 1777-1876

Related Episodes

• Revolutionary Age: Nathan Perl-Rosenthal on the Atlantic World in Upheaval

• Men on Horseback: David Bell on charismatic leaders, literally riding white horses, in an age of democratic revolution

• The Great Atlantic Freedom Conspiracy: Micah Alpaugh on revolutionary tactics and adaptations in the Atlantic World

Tags

America 250; American Revolution; Fourth of July; Nathan Perl-Rosenthal; Historical Memory; Early Republic; Civil War; Frederick Douglass; Political Culture; Historical Thinking

Why This Conversation Matters

The American Revolution occupies a peculiar place in historical memory. Americans often regard it as the nation’s founding event, while many outside the United States see it as only one revolution among many, overshadowed by the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, or the upheavals of the nineteenth century.

Richard Bell asks us to look again. What if the Revolution was never merely an American story? What if it was, from the beginning, a global event whose consequences reached every inhabited continent?

Doing so changes not only our understanding of the Revolution itself. It changes how we think about the eighteenth century, about empire, and about the ways ideas, people, diseases, and ambitions move around the world.

Throughlines

One of Richard Bell’s central arguments is that the American Revolution cannot be understood within the borders of the thirteen colonies. From its beginning, it drew people, resources, and ideas from around the globe. German soldiers crossed the Atlantic to fight in North America. Black refugees sought freedom by fleeing to British lines. Loyalists scattered throughout the British Empire. Indigenous peoples found themselves fighting for their own political futures in a conflict not of their making. The Revolution was a vast movement of peoples, voluntary and involuntary alike.

Bell also emphasizes the extraordinary human cost of the war. Americans often imagine the Revolution as a relatively restrained conflict, especially when compared to the Civil War. Yet participants experienced it as a catastrophe. Indigenous confederacies fractured under the pressure of choosing sides. Civil war erupted between Loyalists and Patriots. Disease spread through military camps and civilian communities alike. Entire populations were displaced. The Revolution was not simply a contest of ideas but a prolonged period of violence and suffering.

The outcome itself was far from inevitable. Looking backward, it is tempting to imagine a steady march toward independence. Bell reminds us that participants did not enjoy that luxury. George Washington spent much of the war trying not to lose rather than expecting to win. The Continental Army lacked money, supplies, gunpowder, uniforms, and often men. American success depended on diplomatic efforts that brought France, Spain, and eventually the Netherlands into the conflict. Independence emerged not from destiny but from a series of improbable developments and contingent decisions.

Another theme of the conversation is the importance of the sea. Histories of the Revolution often follow armies across battlefields, but Bell points out that the eighteenth century was the great age of sail. The British Empire’s greatest strength lay in its navy. Blockades, troop movements, privateering, and naval warfare shaped the conflict as profoundly as events on land. Patriot privateers captured or destroyed enormous quantities of British shipping, while British prison hulks became sites of staggering mortality. The war’s maritime dimensions were not peripheral but central to the conflict.

Trade appears throughout Bell’s account as another form of power and influence. Governments and merchants alike understood that commercial networks shaped political possibilities. The same concerns that animated colonial protests against imperial trade restrictions also influenced the decisions of Spain, France, and Britain during the war. Control of trade routes, access to markets, and the movement of commodities mattered as much as territory. Economic interests helped turn a colonial rebellion into a global conflict.

The Revolution’s success also transformed how empires governed. Far from encouraging colonial authorities to loosen their grip elsewhere, the American example often prompted tighter control. British authorities worked to prevent similar movements in Ireland and Canada. Spanish officials crushed uprisings in South America. Across the imperial world, rulers studied the American example and sought ways to ensure that it would not be repeated. The Revolution inspired hope among some and fear among many others.

Yet the language of liberty continued to travel. Ideas crossed oceans just as people did. Reformers, radicals, and revolutionaries looked to America for inspiration, even when their own circumstances differed dramatically. The Revolution became part of a broader conversation about freedom, representation, and political legitimacy. Bell’s point is not that every later movement copied the American example. Rather, the Revolution became one of the reference points through which people around the world imagined alternatives to existing forms of power.

In the end, Bell suggests that Americans have often told the story of the Revolution too narrowly. As a national origin story, it has usually been reduced to a struggle between Patriots and Redcoats. But widening the lens reveals a more complicated reality: multinational coalitions, global migrations, competing empires, and worldwide consequences. The American Revolution remains an American story. But it is also much more than that.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

1. Why has the American Revolution so often been presented as a national rather than a global event?

2. Which of Bell’s seven arguments most changes your understanding of the Revolution?

3. How does the story of Harry Washington challenge traditional narratives of the founding era?

4. What does the experience of native peoples reveal about the costs of the Revolution?

5. Was American independence more contingent than Americans generally acknowledge?

6. Why do naval power and maritime history receive relatively little attention in popular accounts of the Revolution?

7. How did trade function as a form of political and military power?

8. Why did other empires respond to the Revolution by tightening rather than loosening their control?

9. In what ways did the Revolution inspire later movements for liberty?

10. What is gained—and what is lost—when nations turn historical events into origin stories?

For Further Investigation

Books

• Richard Bell, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World (Penguin, 2025)

• Trevor Burnard & Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, Republic and Empire: Crisis, Revolution, and America’s Early Independence (Yale, 2025)

• Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 (Hill & Wang, 2002)

• Holger Hoock, Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth (Crown, 2017)

• Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (Vintage, 2011)

• Mark Lender and James Kirby Martin, War Without Mercy: Liberty or Death in the American Revolution (Osprey, 2026)

• Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom (Beacon, 2007)

• Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804 (W.W. Norton, 2016)

Articles

• Baigent, Elizabeth, and James E. Bradley. “The Social Sources of Late Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism: Bristol in the 1770s and 1780s.” The English Historical Review 124, no. 510 (2009): 1075–108

• Clark, William Bell. “John the Painter.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 63, no. 1 (1939): 1–23.

• Philip Ranlet, “How Many American Loyalists Left the United States?” The Historian 76, no. 2 (2014): 278–307

Primary Sources

• Treaty of Paris (1783)

• The Book of Negroes: “The ‘Book of Negroes’ is the single most important document relating to the immigration of African Americans to Nova Scotia following the War of Independence. It includes the names and descriptions of 3000 black refugees registered on board the vessels in which they sailed from New York to Nova Scotia between 23 April and 30 November 1783.” (Nova Scotia Archives)

• Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation (1775)

Related Episodes

• Republic and Empire: Andrew O’Shaughnessy on the global causes and consequences of the American Revolution

• The American Revolution in Hapsburg Lands: Jonathan Singerton onthe American Revolution’s influence on the Austrian Empire

• The Hessians are Coming!: Friederike Baer on the German soldiers who fought for the British Army in the American Revolution

• Tory’s Wife: Cynthia Kierner on Jane Welborn Spurgin’s American Revolution

• The Great Atlantic Freedom Conspiracy: Micah Alpaugh on correspondence, revolution, and social movements

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The American Revolution is often told as the story of thirteen colonies breaking away from Britain. Richard Bell’s argument is that it was something much larger: a world crisis whose consequences reached from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone, from Ireland to India, and from Peru to Australia. If this conversation changed how you think about the Revolution, share it with someone else who enjoys seeing familiar history from a wider perspective.

Introduction

In the introduction to his book Europe: A New History, Roderick Beaton argues that new histories are needed because of events. “To study history,” he writes, is to look for patterns to make sense of the things that happen and the action of our fellow humans that affect all our lives…When things change when new and unexpected events suddenly reshape the world that we thought we knew around us, the effect is like the turning of a kaleidoscope–the whole pattern changes. We look at both the present and the past, and what we see lines up differently from before.” So, then, we need a new history of Europe because of the way the present changes the perception of the past. “The story told in this book,” he writes, “has been shaped by the changed and changing perspective of the mid-2020s; it could not have been told this way before.”

That was part of an introduction I wrote for a different conversation. Yet it applies surprisingly well to this one.

The often extremely quotable Hannah Arendt once wrote that “the French Revolution, which ended in disaster, has made world history, while the American Revolution, so triumphantly successful, has remained an event of little more than local importance.”

My guest Richard Bell emphatically disagrees. In The American Revolution and the Fate of the World (Penguin, 2025), Bell argues that the Revolution was global from the very beginning. It drew participants from multiple continents, reshaped patterns of migration and trade, altered imperial policy from Canada to India, and inspired movements for liberty around the world. What Americans often remember as a national story was, in reality, a global convulsion.

(The picture above is of Vice-Admiral Pierre André de Suffren of the French Navy meeting Hyder Ali at Bahur near Puducherry in South India, 26 July 1782. It was a long way from Lexington Common.)

About the Guest

Richard Bell is Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home, was the focus of a conversation on this podcast that was published on December 30th, 2019.

For Further Investigation

• Richard Bell, TThe American Revolution and the Fate of the World (Penguin, 2025)

• James Kirby Martin and Mark Lender, War Without Mercy: Liberty or Death in the American Revolution (Osprey, 2026)

• Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804 (W.W. Norton, 2016)

• Holger Hoock, Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth (Crown, 2017)

• Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (Vintage, 2011)

• Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 (Hill & Wang, 2002)

• Trevor Burnard & Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, Republic and Empire: Crisis, Revolution, and America’s Early Independence (Yale, 2025)

Related Episodes

• Republic and Empire: Andrew O’Shaughnessy on the global causes and consequences of the American Revolution

• The American Revolution in Hapsburg Lands: Jonathan Singerton onthe American Revolution’s influence on the Austrian Empire

• The Hessians are Coming!: Friederike Baer on the German soldiers who fought for the British Army in the American Revolution

• Tory’s Wife: Cynthia Kierner on Jane Welborn Spurgin’s American Revolution

• The Great Atlantic Freedom Conspiracy: Micah Alpaugh on correspondence, revolution, and social movements

Tags

American Revolution; America 250; Global History; Richard Bell; Atlantic World; British Empire; Indigenous History; Loyalists; Slavery; Historical Thinking

Why This Conversation Matters

Americans tend to remember the Revolution through its most elevated moments, a series of isolated snapshots: Lexington and Concord, the Declaration of Independence, Washington crossing the Delaware, the victory at Yorktown. These events happened, and they matter. But they can also obscure another reality.

For many of the people who lived through the Revolution, the war was not experienced as a constitutional debate or a struggle over abstract principles. It was local, it was personal, and it was often terrifying. Neighbors chose sides. Families divided. Communities fractured. Property was destroyed. People fled their homes. Violence spread far beyond the battlefields that later generations would memorialize.

In their book War Without Mercy: Liberty or Death in the American Revolution, Mark Lender and the late James Kirby Martin ask a simple but unsettling question: why did the Revolutionary War become so brutal? Their answer is that many participants came to see it as an existential conflict. Once people believe that everything they value is at stake, restraints begin to weaken and compromises become harder to imagine.

Throughlines

The conversation begins with the central argument of Lender and Martin’s War Without Mercy: that the American Revolution became exceptionally violent because many participants came to regard it as an existential war. By existential, Lender explains that he means a conflict in which defeat threatens not merely political loss but the destruction of one’s family, community, property, culture, and future. When people reach that conclusion, violence acquires a different logic. Actions that might otherwise seem unacceptable become necessary if the alternative is believed to be annihilation.

This interpretation immediately raises a question. The eighteenth century was also the age of Enlightenment thought, of writers such as Grotius and Vattel who argued that warfare should be governed by rules and restraints. Why did those restraints fail? Lender suggests that they worked best among professional armies operating under centralized command. Much of the Revolutionary War was not fought under those conditions. It was fought locally, among people who knew one another, remembered old grievances, and often viewed the conflict through intensely personal terms.

New Jersey emerges as one of the conversation’s most revealing examples, perhaps because no one associates New Jersey with revolutionary violence. But during teh American Revolution the new state was crossed repeatedly by the opposing armies, occupied occasionally and always divided politically. It was a laboratory for testing loyalty and resistance. Here the war usually resembled a civil war more than a conventional military campaign. Neighbors informed on neighbors. Punishment and retaliation followed one another in cycles that proved difficult to stop.

The discussion then widens to include the frontier and the role of Native nations. The experience of warfare in the backcountry often differed dramatically from warfare in the east. Figures such as the Mohawk leader Joseph Brant operated in a world where communities feared displacement, destruction, and extinction. The result was a form of conflict that many contemporaries regarded as especially brutal, though participants themselves often saw their actions as necessary responses to existential threats.

One of the most interesting threads of Al and Mark Lender’s conversation concerns political radicalization. Lender points to William Livingston of New Jersey, who began the imperial crisis as a moderate and became increasingly uncompromising as events unfolded. His story illustrates how prolonged conflict changes people. The longer the struggle continued, the more difficult it became to imagine coexistence with political opponents. Moderation, once possible, came to seem naïve or even dangerous.

The southern campaigns offer another illustration. By the late stages of the war, the fighting in the Carolinas and Georgia frequently blurred the distinction between military operations and civil conflict. Allegiances shifted from side to side, and reasons for revenge accumulated. Military victories mattered, but so did local feuds, fears, and calculations of survival. The war’s brutality was not an accidental byproduct of the Revolution. It emerged from the ways participants understood what was at stake in either side being victorious.

Throughout the conversation, Lender repeatedly returns to a larger point. Most people do not wake up eager to abandon restraint. They do so when they become convinced that restraint itself is a luxury they can no longer afford. That insight helps explain not only the American Revolution but many other conflicts as well. The question that remains at the end is not simply why eighteenth-century Americans acted as they did. It is how any of us might behave if we became convinced that the only alternatives were liberty or death.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

1. What makes a war “existential” rather than merely political?

2. Do you find Lender’s explanation for the brutality of the Revolution persuasive? Why or why not?

3. Why are civil wars almost always more bitter than wars between nations? (Or are they? Give that some thought.)

4. How effective are theories of restrained or “civilized” warfare when conflict becomes local and personal? What would it take to adhere to those theories when conflict does become local and personal?

5. What role did fear play in shaping the actions of Patriots, Loyalists, and Native peoples?

6. Why do historical memories often emphasize great battles while minimizing local violence? (Beware giving just one explanation!)

7. How does William Livingston’s story help explain political radicalization of both Loyalists and Rebels?

8. Can people recognize when they are becoming more extreme, or is that only visible in hindsight? How might they be able to tell at the moment?

9. Are there modern examples of conflicts that participants view as existential?

10. What does the phrase “liberty or death” mean when taken literally rather than rhetorically?

For Further Investigation

Books

• Mark Lender, War Without Mercy: Liberty or Death in the American Revolution (Osprey, 2026)

• James Kirby Martin and Mark Lender, A Respectable Army: The Military Origins of the Republic, 1763-1789 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015)

• Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804 (W.W. Norton, 2016)

• Holger Hoock, Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth (Crown, 2017)

• Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (Vintage, 2011)

Articles

• Vattel: Life and Works

• Hugo Grotius (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

• Scholarship on Loyalist experiences during the Revolution

• William Livingston’s World (website at Kean University)

• Michael Adelberg, “250 for the 250th: Celebrating the 250th Anniversary of the American Revolution in Monmouth County”—no less than 250 articles on Monmouth County’s American Revolution “where Patriots and Loyalists clashed in brutal, localized civil warfare”.

Primary Sources

• The writings of William Livingston

• The Loyalist Collection: “a special collection of British and Colonial North American sources, including the British West Indies, predominantly from 1750-1850, published mainly in microformat and limited digital format.” (University of New Brunswick Libraries)

• Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations

Related Episodes

• The American Revolution in the South: John Buchanan on Nathanael Greene, the Southern Campaign of the American Revolution, and the Road to Charleston

• The First Martyr of the American Revolution: Christian DiSpigna on Dr. Joseph Warren, his life and times, his death at Bunker Hill, and his legacy

• If This Be Treason, Make the Most of It: Carlton W. Larson on Treason, Juries, and Citizenship in the American Revolution

Introduction

“This is a book about a cruel and ruthless war—a war without mercy—in which those caught up in it believed they had nothing to lose by fighting without regard for the rules of so-called ‘civilized warfare.’ It was the War for American Independence. At its grimmest level, this was a confrontation in which military restraint was more the exception than the rule, a struggle in which combatants believed their very existence was in question.”

Those are the words of my guest Mark Lender and his co-author, the late James Kirby Martin, from their book War Without Mercy: Liberty or Death in the American Revolution. While a growing number of historians have shown that the Revolutionary War was often far more brutal than Americans like to remember, few have attempted to explain why it became so brutal. Lender and Martin argue that the answer lies in understanding the Revolution as an existential war: a conflict in which participants believed defeat threatened not merely political loss, but the destruction of their families, communities, and way of life.

About the Guest

Mark Lender is Professor Emeritus of History at Kean University and most recently served as advisor to the 250th Anniversary Exhibit at the National Museum of the United States Army. He is the co-author, with James Kirby Martin, of War Without Mercy: Liberty or Death in the American Revolution.

For Further Investigation

• Mark Lender, War Without Mercy: Liberty or Death in the American Revolution (Osprey, 2026)

• James Kirby Martin and Mark Lender, A Respectable Army: The Military Origins of the Republic, 1763-1789 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015)

• Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations

• Vattel: Life and Works

• Hugo Grotius (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

• William Livingston’s World (website at Kean University)

• Michael Adelberg, “250 for the 250th: Celebrating the 250th Anniversary of the American Revolution in Monmouth County”—no less than 250 articles on Monmouth County’s American Revolution “where Patriots and Loyalists clashed in brutal, localized civil warfare”.

Related Episodes

• The American Revolution in the South: John Buchanan on Nathanael Greene, the Southern Campaign of the American Revolution, and the Road to Charleston

• The First Martyr of the American Revolution: Christian DiSpigna on Dr. Joseph Warren, his life and times, his death at Bunker Hill, and his legacy

• If This Be Treason, Make the Most of It: Carlton W. Larson on Treason, Juries, and Citizenship in the American Revolution

Tags

American Revolution; Revolutionary War; Civil War; Loyalists; Military History; Mark Lender; James Kirby Martin; Historical Thinking

Why This Conversation Matters

Most of us rarely think about why men dress the way they do. The dark suit, white shirt, and tie seem almost natural—so familiar that they disappear into the background of modern life. Yet every historical generation has had its own assumptions about what clothing should communicate, and those assumptions have often changed dramatically.

What makes Chloe Chapin’s work so interesting is that it takes something seemingly trivial and reveals it to be connected to much larger developments. Questions of fashion become questions of politics, economics, technology, labor, equality, and power. Why did men stop wearing bright colors? Why did plainness come to signify virtue? And why did a democratic age produce a style of dress that often seems so remarkably uniform?

Throughlines

The conversation begins with George Washington’s first inauguration, where clothing served as a carefully calibrated political language. Washington’s daytime suit was made from fine American wool, signaling support for domestic manufacturing and the economic independence of the new nation. Yet that evening he appeared in imported purple silk. The apparent contradiction highlights a larger point: eighteenth-century people read clothing differently than we do. Fabric, texture, color, and place of manufacture all conveyed information about status, politics, and identity.

From there, the discussion explores the remarkable visual world of eighteenth-century men’s fashion. Men routinely wore bright colors, patterned fabrics, embroidered waistcoats, silk stockings, and decorative accessories. Clothing was expected to attract attention. Rather than viewing ornament as feminine, many men regarded elaborate dress as an appropriate expression of status, refinement, and masculinity.

The transformation away from this world occurred gradually over the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Political revolutions played an important role. In both America and France, suspicion of aristocratic display encouraged styles that emphasized restraint and simplicity. Yet the change was not merely ideological. It was also tied to industrialization, new methods of manufacturing, changing patterns of consumption, and the growth of democratic societies in which visible distinctions of rank became more difficult to sustain.

A recurring theme in the conversation is the extraordinary material literacy of earlier generations. Eighteenth-century consumers often understood textiles, dyes, tailoring, and workmanship in ways that are difficult for modern people to imagine. Clothing communicated information because observers knew how to interpret it. As manufacturing expanded and standardized goods became more common, many of these distinctions became less visible and less meaningful.

The discussion also highlights the technological foundations of modern fashion. The rise of ready-made clothing required standardized measurements, improved manufacturing techniques, and new systems for producing garments at scale. Even something as ordinary as the tape measure played a role in making modern clothing possible. What appears to be a simple black suit rests upon an elaborate infrastructure of production, trade, measurement, and industrial organization.

By the nineteenth century, black emerged as the dominant color of respectable male dress. Yet black itself was not simple. Producing durable black fabrics depended on global trade networks, new dyes, and increasingly sophisticated manufacturing processes. The modern suit was therefore both an expression of democratic ideals and the product of an expanding commercial world.

As the conversation unfolds, a broader question emerges. Clothing is never merely clothing. Every society develops expectations about how people should present themselves, and those expectations often reveal assumptions about authority, equality, masculinity, conformity, and power. The black suit may seem timeless, but it is the product of a particular historical moment—one whose influence continues to shape how men present themselves today.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

1. Do you think modern people tend to regard fashion as less significant than earlier generations did? If so, why?

2. What advantages and disadvantages come from a society in which people dress more uniformly?

3. Why might democratic societies value plainness and restraint in public dress?

4. How does clothing communicate social information today?

5. What kinds of material knowledge have modern consumers lost? Why might that be the case?

6. Can fashion ever truly be separated from politics? What connects them?

7. What does the history of the black suit suggest about the relationship between equality and conformity?

8. Are there forms of modern dress that future historians may find as surprising as eighteenth-century clothing seems to us?

9. How much of what we consider “natural” or “practical” is actually historical and conditional?

10. What other everyday objects might reveal larger historical transformations if we looked at them more closely?

For Further Investigation

• Chloe Chapin, Suitable: The Sartorial Revolution and the Fashioning of Modern Men (Oxford University Press, 2026)

• Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities. Second Edition. (Vintage, 2011)

• Laura Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (Vintage, 2009)

• John Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence: the Yale version, an oil sketch which he reworked over the years, is pretty drab; the final version in the Capitol might be even drabber

• The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC: for explorations in imagining fabric

• Historic Deerfield

Related Episodes

• The Stories in Shoes: Kimberly Alexander on Fashion and Material Culture

• New England Fashion: Kimberly Alexander on Why That’s Not an Oxymoron

Introduction

At his first inauguration, George Washington made a very carefully calibrated political statement: he wore a brown suit. It was tailored from a weave of superfine wool made in Hartford, Connecticut, and was so far from being the crude homespun which was for some an emblem of a proud American—or, for British cartoonists, of crude Brother Jonathan—that some newspapers criticized Washington for wearing a suit of imported fabric. The cloth seemed too good to have been made in America.

But Washington wore two suits that day. In the evening, at the inaugural ball, he wore a suit of imported purple silk. The choice of these two suits, argues my guest Chloe Chapin in her new book Suitable: The Sartorial Revolution and the Fashioning of Modern Men, shows a dividing line between two eras: an eighteenth century of Washington’s youth and early middle age in which men wore a wide variety of textiles in a cornucopia of colors and textures; and a democratic age in which drab and severe signaled liberty and equality among men.

What follows is not merely a history of clothing. It is a history of politics, technology, labor, consumption, social hierarchy, democracy, empire, and masculinity itself. Why did men abandon color? How hard is it to make black suits and white shirts? Why in the new democratic society did men increasingly dress alike? And what did that do to concepts of race and gender?

About the Guest

Chloe Chapin holds a PhD in American Studies and has worked for more than two decades as a costume designer for Broadway productions, opera companies, and Shakespeare festivals. Suitable: The Sartorial Revolution and the Fashioning of Modern Men is her first book.

For Further Investigation

• Chloe Chapin, Suitable: The Sartorial Revolution and the Fashioning of Modern Men (Oxford University Press, 2026)

• Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities. Second Edition. (Vintage, 2011)

• Laura Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (Vintage, 2009)

• John Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence: the Yale version, an oil sketch which he reworked over the years, is pretty drab; the final version in the Capitol might be even drabber

• The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC: for explorations in imagining fabric

• Historic Deerfield

Related Episodes

• The Stories in Shoes: Kimberly Alexander on Fashion and Material Culture

• New England Fashion: Kimberly Alexander on Why That’s Not an Oxymoron

Tags

American Revolution; Early Republic; Material Culture; Fashion History; Men’s Fashion; George Washington; Social History; Cultural History; Historical Thinking; Chloe Chapin

Why This Conversation Matters

Many histories of America begin with Europeans arriving. Some begin with Columbus. More ambitious accounts begin in 1491. Peter Mancall asks us to begin much earlier.

His argument is that crucial developments were already transforming North America centuries before Columbus crossed the Atlantic. Corn moved northward. Cities emerged and disappeared. Trade networks linked distant peoples. Landscapes were shaped and reshaped by human labor. When Europeans eventually arrived, they encountered not a wilderness but a world that had been settled and reshaped in the five hundred years prior to Jamestown.

The conversation also challenges another familiar assumption: that colonization was inevitable. Again and again, Mancall points to failure, contingency, and uncertainty. Europeans abandoned North America before they settled it. Colonies collapsed. Indigenous peoples decided which newcomers stayed and which departed. The future United States emerged from a long process whose outcome nobody could foresee.

As you reflect on the conversation, consider:

• What changes when we begin American history in the year 1000 rather than 1492?

• How does the idea of “mutual discovery” alter the traditional story of exploration?

Throughlines

The conversation begins with a deceptively simple question: why start an American history in the year 1000? Mancall’s answer introduces the book’s central framework. Around the turn of the millennium, two developments occurred independently but would shape everything that followed: the spread of maize agriculture northward from Mexico and the arrival of Norse explorers in the North Atlantic. Neither group knew the other existed, yet both reveal long-distance networks already reshaping North America.

From there, the discussion settles on corn. Al playfully calls it almost an American ideology, and Mancall develops the point. Maize agriculture allowed the rise of large, complex societies centered on places such as Cahokia. Corn made possible surplus food, specialized labor, social stratification, artistic production, and long-distance trade. Just as importantly, it transformed landscapes. Europeans later mistook these cultivated environments for untouched nature, failing to recognize generations of Indigenous labor embedded within them.

The conversation then turns to Cahokia itself. Although the city disappeared, its influence did not. Trade networks radiated outward, artistic styles spread, and maize agriculture continued to diffuse across eastern North America. The collapse of Cahokia becomes less a disappearance than a dispersal.

From the Mississippi Valley the discussion shifts northward to the Vikings. Here Mancall introduces a second corrective to familiar narratives. Europeans did not arrive and automatically succeed. The Norse reached Newfoundland, established settlements in Greenland, traded, fought, and ultimately abandoned North America. Climate change, distance, risk, and conflict all contributed to their withdrawal. Their story demonstrates that European presence in America was neither permanent nor inevitable.

That insight leads naturally into a broader discussion of subsequent colonial failures. Roanoke is only the most famous example. Failed settlements, abandoned ventures, and unrealized dreams litter the continent. Yet these failures matter because they reveal how uncertain colonization remained for centuries. Given those failures, we should be more surprised that Jamestown and then Plymouth held on.

The conversation’s middle section introduces Mancall’s idea of “mutual discovery.” Europeans were learning about Indigenous peoples, but Indigenous peoples were also evaluating Europeans. Settlements succeeded or failed depending largely on Native decisions and Native interests. Both sides traded, borrowed technologies, adapted practices, and attempted to understand one another. Al pushes this idea further by suggesting that Europeans and Native peoples often understood one another better than modern observers assume, recognizing familiar patterns of alliance, kinship, and political power. Mancall agrees that mutual comprehension was often as important as mutual misunderstanding.

Roanoke and Thomas Harriot then become examples of another transformative force: print. Harriot’s observations, combined with John White’s images and later engravings, circulated across Europe. Print allowed people who would never cross the Atlantic to imagine America, desire American products, and support further colonization.

The final portion of the conversation moves from experimentation to commitment. Jamestown, Quebec, and Santa Fe represent a moment when European powers decided not merely to explore but to stay. Yet Mancall emphasizes that this commitment remained uncertain and often irrational. Colonies suffered catastrophic mortality and repeated setbacks, but by the 1620s something had changed. The English, in particular, became determined to remain.

The discussion closes with Barbados and the violent transformations of the 1670s. Barbados becomes a laboratory for racial slavery and slave law; Bacon’s Rebellion, King Philip’s War, and the Pueblo Revolt reveal the tensions embedded in colonial societies. Out of these conflicts emerged William Penn’s vision of peaceful coexistence in Pennsylvania. Yet, as Mancall notes, Penn’s dream depended upon imagining the land as empty, overlooking the centuries of struggle that had already shaped it. The continent remained contested, even when newcomers preferred not to see the contest.

Questions for Reflection & Discussion

1. Why does Mancall begin his history in the year 1000 rather than 1492?

2. How did maize agriculture transform societies throughout North America?

3. What does Cahokia reveal about the scale and sophistication of pre-contact North American civilizations?

4. Why is the Viking experience in North America important to understanding later colonization?

5. What can failed colonies teach us that successful colonies cannot?

6. How does Mancall’s concept of “mutual discovery” differ from traditional narratives of exploration?

7. In what ways did Indigenous peoples shape the success or failure of European ventures?

8. Why does Mancall place such emphasis on print and the circulation of images?

9. How did Barbados influence the development of slavery in English America?

10. What connects the violence of the 1670s to William Penn’s later vision for Pennsylvania?

For Further Investigation

Books

• Peter Mancall, Contested Continent: The Struggle for North America, c. 1000–1680 (Oxford University Press, 2026)

• Timothy Pauketat, Gods of Thunder: How Climate Change, Travel, and Spirituality Reshaped Precolonial America (Oxford University Press, 2023)

• —, Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi

• James Belich, The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe (Princeton University Press, 2022)

• Robyn Arianrhod, Thomas Harriot: A Life in Science (OUP, 2019)

• James Horn, A Brave and Cunning Prince: The Great Chief Opechancanough and the War for America (Basic Books, 2021)

• Edward Countryman, “The Pueblo Revolt,” History Now, 28 (Summer 2011)

• Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. 2nd Edition. (Penguin, 2006)

• James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (Oxford University Press, 1986)

• Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. Second Edition. (Cambridge University Press, 2004)

• Karen Ordahl Kupperman, The Jamestown Project (Harvard University Press, 2009)

Primary Sources & Archives

• Thomas Harriot, A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (Dover Publications, 1972)

• John White Watercolors (Fort Raleigh National Historic Site)

• The Vinland Sagas, translated by Keneva Kunz, edited by Gisli Sigurosson (Penguin, 2008)

• Samuel de Champlain, Voyages and Explorations (vol. I)

• William Penn, The Political Writings of William Penn (Liberty Fund, 2002)

Related Episodes

• Gods of Thunder: The Civilization of the Mississippians, with Timothy Pauketat

• Atlantic Ocean: John Haywood on the Pre-Columbian Atlantic and the Roots of Global Exploration

• The World the Plague Made: James Belich on the Black Death and the rise of Europe

• The Long Walk: Dean Snow on David Ingram’s extraordinary journey across North America

• The Curiosities of Thomas Harriot: Robyn Arianrhod on a forgotten explorer, anthropologist, linguist, scientist, and mathematician

• A Brave and Cunning Prince: James Horn on Opechancanough, Jamestown, and following the evidence wherever it leads

• Lady Francis Berkeley/Amy Stallings: Amy Stallings as Lady Frances Berkeley explains Bacon’s Rebellion, and then as Amy Stallings explains first-person interpretation

Introduction

My guest Peter C. Mancall’s new book is Contested Continent: The Struggle for North America, c. 1000–1680. It is, now, the first volume in the Oxford History of the United States, an ongoing multi-volume narrative series—a series whose story is worth an episode in and of itself.

In Contested Continent, Mancall describes the foundation of that place which would eventually become the United States. It is a long era of human history which foreshadowed that which was to come, one in which peoples from four continents came together in a collision of violence and mutuality in North America. “Much of what happened,” he writes, “came to define the American experience, including the rise of a booming transatlantic economy based on the extraction of abundant American natural resources, the central role European migrants and their descendants played in the enslavement of Africans, the displacement of Indigenous peoples, and the spread of self-governing polities where many people enjoyed religious liberty. None of those developments was inevitable. Nor did sweeping changes occur quickly.” Or we might say that like the glaciers of an advancing ice age, the events of this era often seem slow and ponderous, but ultimately they change everything that gets in their way.

About the Guest

Peter C. Mancall is Distinguished Professor, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, and Director of the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute at the University of Southern California. He is the author of numerous books, including Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson and Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America.

For Further Investigation

• Peter Mancall, Contested Continent: The Struggle for North America, c. 1000–1680 (Oxford University Press, 2026)

• Timothy Pauketat, Gods of Thunder: How Climate Change, Travel, and Spirituality Reshaped Precolonial America (Oxford University Press, 2023)

• James Belich, The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe (Princeton University Press, 2022)

• Robyn Arianrhod, Thomas Harriot: A Life in Science (OUP, 2019)

• Edward Countryman, “The Pueblo Revolt,” History Now, 28 (Summer 2011)

• Horseshoe Lake State Park (Illinois): Environmental context for Cahokia; an oxbow rich in plant and animal life.

• Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site (Illinois): Start at the Interpretive Center, cross the Grand Plaza, climb Monks Mound.

Related Episodes

• Gods of Thunder: The Civilization of the Mississippians, with Timothy Pauketat

• Atlantic Ocean: John Haywood on the Pre-Columbian Atlantic and the Roots of Global Exploration

• The World the Plague Made: James Belich on the Black Death and the rise of Europe

• The Long Walk: Dean Snow on David Ingram’s extraordinary journey across North America

• The Curiosities of Thomas Harriot: Robyn Arianrhod on a forgotten explorer, anthropologist, linguist, scientist, and mathematician

• A Brave and Cunning Prince: James Horn on Opechancanough, Jamestown, and following the evidence wherever it leads

• Lady Francis Berkeley/Amy Stallings: Amy Stallings as Lady Frances Berkeley explains Bacon’s Rebellion, and then as Amy Stallings explains first-person interpretation

Tags

Colonial America; Early America; Indigenous History; Cahokia; Atlantic World; Peter Mancall; Native Americans; Colonialism; Oxford History of the United States; Historical Thinking

Why This Conversation Matters

In one story for which there is no good attribution, when confronted by yet another Moscow-aligned socialist who defended Stalin by saying you couldn’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, George Orwell responded by asking where the omelette was. I thought of that believable if non-attributal story a lot while reading Antonia Senior’s book.

The Cambridge Five have long occupied a peculiar place in the English-speaking imagination. They appear in novels, films, television dramas, and histories as brilliant traitors, establishment rebels, or symptoms of Britain’s class system. Their story is often told as a British story.

Antonia Senior asks us to look at it differently. What if we stop asking what the Cambridge Five did to Britain and begin asking what they did for Stalin? What if the central question is not betrayal, but purpose? Looking from Moscow rather than Cambridge reveals a different story—one in which intelligence gathering was not an abstract game of espionage but part of the creation and expansion of Soviet power.

As you think about this conversation, consider:

• Why are some forms of political extremism remembered romantically while others are remembered with horror?

• How much responsibility do individuals bear for the consequences of causes they knowingly advance?

• Is ideological commitment strengthened or weakened when evidence begins to contradict it?

Throughlines

The conversation begins with Senior’s dissatisfaction with what she calls the standard received version of the Cambridge Five. In popular culture they often appear as glamorous rogues, privileged young men stealing secrets from one elite to give to another. In scholarly work, attention has increasingly shifted toward institutions and class structures. Both approaches, she argues, obscure a more important question: what did Stalin want from them, and why were they valuable to him?

To answer that question, the discussion first turns to Cambridge in the 1930s. Senior places the Five within a broader wave of radical politics that swept universities after the First World War and during the Great Depression. Yet she is careful to distinguish between ordinary left-wing politics and the revolutionary communism embraced by these men. The attraction was not merely social reform but revolution itself. Violence was not an unfortunate byproduct; as she puts it, violence was a feature, not a bug. The young revolutionaries admired movements that promised to sweep away the existing order, even at enormous human cost.

From there, the conversation shifts to Moscow. Stalin’s Soviet Union was not simply waiting for volunteers. Recruitment was deliberate. Senior walks through the conversion and recruitment of each member of the Five, beginning with Kim Philby, whose encounter with Soviet recruiter Arnold Deutsch becomes the foundation of everything that follows. What emerges is less a coherent spy ring than a chain of relationships. Philby recommends Maclean; Burgess forces his way into the secret; Burgess and Blunt recruit others. Their motivations vary, but all come to believe they are participating in history’s inevitable march toward communism.

The discussion then introduces the Soviet handlers themselves. Deutsch, Theodore Maly, Alexander Orlov, and others emerge as fascinating and (sometimes) tragic figures. Many of them were eventually consumed by the very regime they served. Yet the fate of these men does not shake the loyalty of the Cambridge spies. Even during the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the chaos of the Terror, they continue searching for ways to provide information. Senior emphasizes that this persistence matters. These were not reluctant servants trapped by circumstance.

A particularly revealing exchange concerns Soviet intelligence itself. Al wonders why Soviet agencies recruited so many people. Senior agrees that the system often gathered information on an industrial scale, far exceeding its capacity to analyze it. Yet this raises a deeper issue: understanding not simply what information reached Moscow, but what Stalin chose to believe. Intelligence could shape decisions, reinforce assumptions, or be ignored altogether, as happened before Operation Barbarossa.

The conversation’s moral center arrives when Al raises the common defense that the Five were merely anti-fascists who could not have known the truth about Stalinism. Senior rejects this completely. The famine, the Gulag, the Terror, and the repression of political opponents were all widely discussed and available to those willing to look. The problem was not ignorance. It was choice. Many contemporaries recognized what Stalin’s regime was becoming and turned away from it. The Five did not.

That leads naturally to the question of what they actually accomplished for Stalin. Here Senior focuses particularly on Poland. Through Maclean, Burgess, Blunt, and others, Soviet leaders gained extraordinary visibility into British and American diplomacy. Stalin knew what Churchill and Roosevelt were saying publicly, what they believed privately, and what options they realistically possessed. At the same time, intelligence gathered through Blunt and others helped Soviet authorities suppress Polish resistance movements as the Red Army advanced. The argument is not that the Cambridge Five alone created Soviet control of Eastern Europe, but that they helped transform military conquest into durable political domination.

The final section traces the gradual collapse of the network through the Venona decrypts, the identification of Donald Maclean, and the dramatic defections of Maclean and Burgess in 1951. Yet the conversation ends not with espionage but with democracy. Both you and Senior reflect on the attraction of ideological certainty, the temptation of tribal politics, and the importance of defending free speech, dissent, and the rule of law. The story of the Cambridge Five becomes not merely a Cold War story, but a warning about what can happen when people decide that utopia matters more than liberty.

Questions for Reflection & Discussion

1. Why does Antonia Senior believe the traditional interpretation of the Cambridge Five is incomplete?

2. What distinguishes the revolutionary communism embraced by the Five from ordinary democratic left-wing politics?

3. Why does the appeal to the “Popular Front” not work chronologically?

4. Why were universities such fertile ground for radical political movements in the 1930s?

5. How did Soviet recruiters identify and cultivate potential agents like Kim Philby?

6. What do the lives of Soviet handlers such as Arnold Deutsch and Alexander Orlov reveal about Stalin’s regime?

7. Why did the Cambridge Five remain loyal to the Soviet cause even after Stalin’s purges and the Nazi-Soviet Pact?

8. How persuasive is Senior’s argument that the Five knew far more about Stalinist crimes than they later admitted?

9. What role did intelligence from the Cambridge Five play in Stalin’s domination of postwar Eastern Europe?

10. What does the story suggest about the relationship between ideology and moral responsibility?

11. What parallels, if any, do you see between the political tribalism discussed at the end of the episode and contemporary democratic societies?

For Further Investigation

Books

• Antonia Senior, Stalin’s Apostles: The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire (Basic Books, 2026)

• George Orwell, Animal Farm (Plume, 2003)

• Roger Moorhouse, The Devil’s Alliance: Hitler’s Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941 (Basic Books, 2015)

• Ben Macintyre, A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (Crown, 2014)

• Andrew Lownie, Stalin’s Englishman: The Lives of Guy Burgess (St. Martin’s Press, 2016)

• Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: His Lives (Pan Books, 2002)

• Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (Basic Books, 1999)

• Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment [40th Year Edition] (Oxford University Press, 2007)

• George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (Mariner Books, 1980)

Primary Sources & Archives

• Operation Unthinkable: Documents from The National Archives, London

• Robert Louis Benson and Michael Warner, eds., Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response, 1939–1957—Selected Documents and Messages (Joint NSA–CIA publication, August 1996), foreword by William P. Crowell.

• Alexander Orlov, “The Theory and Practice of Soviet Intelligence”—Approved for Release, CIA Historical Review Program, Sept 22, 1993

• The Papers of Vasiliy Mitrokhin (1922–2004)

• Confessions from the Cambridge Five: a file release from MI5

Related Episodes

• Red Hotel: Alan Philps on journalists, propaganda, and survival in Stalin’s Moscow

• How to Win a Power Struggle: Joseph Torigian on elite conflict in the Soviet Union and China

• Agent Zo: Clare Mulley on Elżbieta Zawacka, a Heroine of Poland’s Resistance against Nazis and Soviets

• The Plot to Stop the Russian Revolution: Jonathan Schneer on the attempt to kill Lenin and Trotsky, and stop the Russian Revolution