An Empire of Reason - The Agrarian World

American Political History · Oct 9, 2023 · 26m

Nineteen of twenty colonists never lived in a city. They lived on the land — and not as peasants or tenants, but as freeholders, owning the ground they worked and answering to no master for it. This episode is a portrait of that agrarian world, from the bottom up: the New England farmer raising his hand in town meeting to tax himself and school his children; the freeholder whose ownership of land made him the independent citizen the whole Enlightenment argument required; the unbroken ladder of self-government — town meeting, county court, colonial assembly — that the colonists had been…