An Empire of Reason - The Cities

American Political History · Oct 9, 2023 · 27m

The open ground did not produce one America. It produced several — and you can read them most sharply in the four great colonial cities, each the front door of a different agricultural region, each a different answer to the question of how a free people should live. Boston, the Puritan covenant: town meeting, Harvard, the press, the prickly conscience that would light the Revolution. Philadelphia, William Penn’s holy experiment: polyglot, tolerant, Franklin’s city, the largest in the colonies and the one built on purpose to let everyone in. New York, the Dutch-born marketplace, where a…