Shows / American Political History
American Political History
The full story of this country, told through the people who lived it. From the soldier in the mud to the statesman at the table. Chronological, self-contained seasons, built on the primary sources. New episodes Tuesdays and Thursday.
Episodes
- American Political History
A Failed Nation - Negro Soldiers
We discuss the fate of negro soldiers in the revolutionary war
- American Political History
Revolutionary War - Peace
On September 3rd, 1783, the definitive peace treaty was signed, by the end of 1783 all English forces had withdrawn from Colonial America.
- American Political History
Revolutionary War - Yorktown
General Washington will lead his army to siege General Cornwallis at Yorktown, provoking another English's army to surrender just a day before Genral Clinton…
- American Political History
Independence - It Is All Over
Yorktown did not end the American Revolution. It ended the will to fight it — and that will broke not in Virginia but in London, and then in a rented room in…
- American Political History
Independence - Yorktown
In October 1781, two armies closed a ring around a British force dug in at a Virginia tobacco port — and the American Revolution reached the field where it…
- American Political History
Independence - Naval Superiority
The most important battle of the American Revolution was fought without a single American in it. In September 1781, everything came down to one fact George…
- American Political History
Independence - Two Volleys
After Charleston and Camden, the Continental Army in the South was a wreck — and George Washington sent it a limping Rhode Island foundryman named Nathanael…
- American Political History
Independence - The King’s Friends
History is written by the winners, and the winners of the American Revolution wrote the Loyalists down as a handful of rich cowards. The truth was larger: as…
- American Political History
Independence - Tarleton’s Quarter
On May 29th, 1780, on a road in the Carolina backcountry, Banastre Tarleton’s cavalry cut down hundreds of Virginia Continentals as they threw down their arms…
- American Political History
Independence - The Swamp Fox
In August 1780, the “Hero of Saratoga,” General Horatio Gates, marched the last American army in the South to Camden — and lost it in a single morning, his…
- American Political History
Independence - The Southern Strategy
In December 1778, a British army took Savannah in an afternoon — guided around the American line by an enslaved man betting on which side would make him free…
- American Political History
Independence - The Open Field
On a Sunday in June 1778, in heat that killed men where they stood, Washington’s reborn army finally caught the British in the open at Monmouth Court House…
- American Political History
Independence - A War to Win
In June 1778, a barefoot Connecticut private named Joseph Plumb Martin marched out of Valley Forge and, for the first time in the war, toward the enemy. This…
- American Political History
The Glorious Cause - The Alliance
On the evening of February 6th, 1778, four men signed two treaties by a fire in a Paris apartment, and a colonial rebellion became a world war. This is the…
- American Political History
The Glorious Cause - Doctor Franklin in Paris
In the winter of 1776, a 70-year-old man in a fur cap stepped off a ship in France with the fate of the American Revolution resting on his shoulders. This is…
- American Political History
The Glorious Cause - Valley Forge
On December 19th, 1777, the beaten Continental Army marched into Valley Forge, many of the men barefoot, leaving blood on the frozen ground. This is the story…
- American Political History
The Glorious Cause - Saratoga
In June of 1777, General John Burgoyne led a British army south from Canada to cut New England out of the war and end the rebellion in a single stroke. This is…
- American Political History
The Glorious Cause - Philadelphia Has Taken Howe
In the summer of 1777, General William Howe put 15,000 men on ships and sailed away from the Hudson River — and away from the second British army marching down…
- American Political History
The Glorious Cause - Victory or Death
Three days before Christmas 1776, a doctor visiting headquarters watched George Washington scratch the same two words on scraps of paper, over and over…
- American Political History
The Glorious Cause - The Times That Try Men’s Souls
By December of 1776, the American Revolution was all but over. George Washington’s army had been chased the length of New Jersey and now huddled, a few…
- American Political History
The Glorious Cause - All London Afloat
Two months after declaring independence, George Washington faced the largest expeditionary force Britain had ever sent across an ocean — 400 ships and 32,000…
- American Political History
The Glorious Cause - The Declaration
In July of 1776, the Continental Congress gathered in Philadelphia to do the thing there was no taking back: to declare, in writing, that the thirteen colonies…
- American Political History
The Glorious Cause - The Noble Train of Artillery
In the winter of 1776, the American army had Boston under siege and could not break it. The heavy guns that might have broken it sat 300 miles away, behind the…
- American Political History
The Glorious Cause - Out of His Protection
In the winter of 1775, the colonists still called themselves loyal subjects of a king they believed would protect them. Then the King’s men spent a single…
- American Political History
The Glorious Cause - Common Sense
In January 1776, the American war was 9 months old and nobody would say the word. The colonists were fighting, dying, and still hoping to be loyal British…
- American Political History
The Glorious Cause - The 14th Colony
In the autumn of 1775, the American rebellion reached for an entire country. Congress wanted Canada as the fourteenth colony, and sent two armies north to take…
- American Political History
The Glorious Cause - An Army from Nothing
In July 1775, George Washington rode into Cambridge to take command of the army that would win American independence, and found that the army did not exist…
- American Political History
The Glorious Cause - Bunker Hill
The British called it a victory. It nearly destroyed them. On June 17th, 1775, the King’s regulars marched up a hill outside Boston three times into the…
- American Political History
The Long Fuse - Lexington and Concord
On the night of April 18th, 1775, General Gage sent 700 of his best soldiers on a secret march to seize the militia’s weapons at Concord. The plan depended on…
- American Political History
The Long Fuse - The First Continental Congress
In September 1774, 56 men from twelve colonies rode to Philadelphia and sat down together for the first time, strangers and rivals trying to discover whether…
- American Political History
The Long Fuse - The Intolerable Acts
In the spring of 1774, Parliament set out to break one rebellious town. After the Boston Tea Party, the King’s ministers closed Boston’s harbor with the Royal…
- American Political History
The Long Fuse - The Cockpit
On January 29th, 1774, Benjamin Franklin, the most famous American in the world, stood in a Whitehall hearing room once used for cockfights and was torn apart…
- American Political History
The Long Fuse - The Insult of Cheaper Tea
In the spring of 1773, the most powerful corporation on earth was going bankrupt, and Parliament’s plan to save it was a shipload of cheap tea. The Tea Act…
- American Political History
The Long Fuse - Thirteen Clocks
After the Boston Massacre, the great quarrel with Britain seemed to burn out. The soldiers sailed home, the boycotts collapsed, and London congratulated itself…
- American Political History
The Long Fuse - The Boston Massacre
On the night of March 5th, 1770, 8 terrified British soldiers, pelted with ice and clubs by a Boston crowd screaming at them to fire, fired. 5 colonists died…
- American Political History
The Long Fuse - The Townshend Acts
When the colonists beat the Stamp Act, they drew a careful line: Parliament could tax their trade, but not reach inside the colonies for revenue. In 1767, a…
- American Political History
The Long Fuse - In All Cases Whatsoever
In January 1766, a gout-stricken William Pitt had himself carried into the House of Commons to tell his colleagues something no statesman of his rank had dared…
- American Political History
The Long Fuse - The Sons of Liberty
In the summer of 1765, the argument over the Stamp Act came down out of the pamphlets and into the streets. This is the story of the Sons of Liberty: the…
- American Political History
The Long Fuse - If This Be Treason
He was a 29-year-old backcountry lawyer in shabby clothes, nine days into his first term, in a chamber full of the most powerful men in Virginia. By the time…
- American Political History
The Long Fuse - Virtual Representation
The Stamp Act of 1765 was a small tax. To the men who wrote it in London, it was the most reasonable thing in the world: the colonies should help pay for their…
- American Political History
The Long Fuse - The Price of Victory
In 1763, the proudest British subjects in the world were Americans. They had just helped win the greatest war in their empire’s history, expelling France from…
- American Political History
An Empire of Reason - The Curious Americans
In June 1752, a forty-six-year-old retired printer stood in a shed on the edge of Philadelphia and flew a silk kite into a thunderstorm — and when the spark…
- American Political History
An Empire of Reason - Born Again
In October 1740, a Connecticut farmer named Nathan Cole dropped his tools, threw his wife on a horse, and raced twelve miles in terror of arriving too late —…
- American Political History
An Empire of Reason - The Agrarian World
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…
- American Political History
An Empire of Reason - The Cities
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…
- American Political History
An Empire of Reason - The Open Ground
A library is only paper. For a century the great ideas of the Enlightenment had been written and shelved in Europe — and Europe remained a continent of kings…
- American Political History
An Empire of Reason - The Pursuit of Happiness
Where do three of the most famous words in American life — the pursuit of happiness — actually come from? This episode follows the last great stream of the…
- American Political History
An Empire of Reason - Men Are Not Angels
The commonwealth tradition left the founders staring at a wall: if power always corrupts and virtue always decays, how can any free government last? Every…
- American Political History
An Empire of Reason - The Fear of Power
In 1765 the British laid a modest tax on the colonies, and the colonists answered as though chains were being fastened on their wrists — crying slavery…
- American Political History
An Empire of Reason - The Rights of Englishmen
Before the American colonists ever claimed the rights of man, they claimed the rights of Englishmen. For the first ten years of the quarrel with Britain they…
- American Political History
An Empire of Reason - The Social Contract
Every government claims the right to do what no private person may — to tax, to jail, to send men to die. By what right? For most of history the answer was…
- American Political History
An Empire of Reason - What Is a Right?
“Rights” is the most powerful word in American political life — and one of the slipperiest. Everyone claims them, on every side, for opposite things, and…
- American Political History
An Empire of Reason - Are We Free?
The free-will defense answered the problem of evil — but it rested on one claim: that we are free. So this episode puts freedom itself on trial, against a God…
- American Political History
An Empire of Reason - The Problem of Evil
In the year 524, a condemned man named Boethius sat in a cell awaiting a brutal execution and wrote down the question that has haunted the West ever since: if…
- American Political History
An Empire of Reason - The Higher Law
For a thousand years they would not stand together. Greek reason was the pride of the pagans the Church had buried; Roman law was the law of the empire that…
- American Political History
An Empire of Reason - Christian Morality
In the year 1 BC, an ordinary, loving husband wrote home to his pregnant wife with a casual instruction: if the child is a girl, expose it. It was normal. It…
- American Political History
An Empire of Reason – Roman Law
The Romans had a horror of one word — rex, king — and after they threw out their last one, they spent five centuries building a government designed so that no…
- American Political History
An Empire of Reason – Greek Logic
In 585 BC, the sun went dark over a battlefield — and one Greek had said it would, not by reading the will of the gods, but by working out that the heavens run…
- American Political History
An Empire of Reason – Inheritance of the West
We hold these truths to be self-evident — but they were not self-evident. For almost the whole of human history, on nearly every patch of the globe, the…
- American Political History
The French and Indian War - Pontiac’s War
In the spring of 1763, the British colonies were lighting bonfires for the greatest victory in their history — and within weeks the frontier they had just won…