Revolution 250 Podcast

Benjamin Franklin was one of America's most famous citizens.  He was a printer, scientist, philosopher, diplomat, inventor, postmaster and a self-proclaimed lover of women.  Nancy Rubin Stuart  tells us about some of the women Franklin loved, in three countries and two continents, including his wife Deborah, Madame Brillon and Madame Helvetius, Margaret Stevenson and her daughter Polly, and Kitty Ray of Block Island, whose liv...

Though he didn't arrive in America until 1780, Major General Francois-Jean de Chastellux had a profound impact on the war's outcome and on the French-American relationship.  He also enjoyed a close personal friendship with George Washington, and as a French philosophe  was elected a member of both the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  Iris De Rode has discovered the Chastellux ...

Smallpox--the most devastating disease in human history--struck the American colonies in 1773.   Andrew Wehrman (Central Michigan University) joins us to talk about the political responses to the disease, in Marblehead and Salem, Massachusetts, and Norfolk, Virginia, and what Americans learned about the contagion and how to combat it, as he discusses in his new book, Contagion of Liberty: The Politics of Smallpox in the American Re...

We talk with James Madison, President, Secretary of State, Congressman, architect of the Constitution, and political player in a wide-ranging conversation about politics, religion, slavery, Dolley Madison, and some of the people he knew.  Our discussion was facilitated by Kyle Jenks, and we are grateful to @madisonportrayer for this opportunity to talk with the "Great Little Madison." 

Find Mr. Madison on Instagr...

Every year on Election Day the new Massachusetts Assembly would take their seats, and would mark the occasion with a sermon delivered by one of the clergy.  Jeffrey Griffith has analyzed the Election Sermons from 1763 to 1793, and the themes and messages clergy delivered during this time of Revolution and change.  Among his other interests are the career of John Hancock--whose grandfather delivered the sermon in the 1720s--and whos...

The American privateer Marlborough set out in 1777-1778 to disrupt British trade and enrich its crew and owners by capturing British merchantmen.  The Marlborough  focused on Britain's slave trade, attacking the slave-trading port at the Isle de Los off today's Guinea. This successful raid, and other attacks by American privateers on British slavers, had repercussions for the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.  We talk with Chri...

What did the French hope to gain by siding with the Americans in the Revolution?  We talk with Norman Desmarais, Professor emeritus  from Providence College, about his book America's First Ally:  France in the Revolutionary War, and we hear other stories of this fraught alliance.  Norm Desmarais has also translated the Gazette Francois, a newspaper the French forces published in Newport, and has written a six-volume Guide to t...

Merchant, smuggler & patriot, William Molineux if forgotten now, but was a leading voice among the Boston Sons of Liberty. His hands were in many if not most of the protests that occurred in Boston between the 1765 Stamp Act and the protests of 1774, when he died suddenly, some think by his own hand. One historian who has not forgotten Molineux is J. L. Bell, creator of the Boston 1775 blog and author of The Road to Concord:  H...

Shays's Rebellion--or the Regulators of Massachusetts--tested many of the precepts for which the American Revolution was fought.  We talk with author Daniel Bullen, about his book, Daniel Shays' Honorable Rebellion, which tells the story of regular people banding together and keeping the peace during five months of protests, protecting their liberty and property from the speculators and financiers and speculators seeking ...

Following the evacuation of Boston in March of 1776, London authorities knew that Britain's small British alone could not possibly conquer the American continent.  King George III, also the Elector of Hanover, reached out to his German relations and other allied provinces to provide auxiliary forces to send to America.  Arriving first at New York in 1776, about 30,000 German soldiers would serve in the American War for Indepen...

American colonial leaders in the 1760's and 1770's insisted that they were just asserting their rights as free-born subjects of British empire.  They believed that English Constitution was the greatest source of freedom on Earth and their forefathers who came to America did not intend to separate themselves from that Constitution.  In time, of course, they sought a different path.  Guy Chet, Professor of History at the Un...

In "Ten Crucial Days" between December 25, 1776, and January 3, 1777, George Washington and his small force saved the Revolution.  Roger S. Williams joins us to talk about these ten crucial days, and the programs he sponsors at Washington's Crossing Park, the Trenton Battlefield, and in Princeton. Find out about the tours and events in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and the musical, "The Crossing,"  offered ...

On this day, 251 years ago, we would find ourselves in the middle of a trial of 8 British Soldiers on trial for murder over the events that occurred on the night of March 5, 1770, known as the Boston Massacre.  During that night, British soldiers fired into a crowd of Bostonians who had gathered on King Street and were threatening a British sentry.  The resulting skirmish left 4 Bostonians killed outright and several more wounded, ...

In museums and historical societies all across the nation there are artifacts related to the American Revolution and the cause of American Independence.  J.L. Bell, who maintains a terrific blog on Boston in the Revolution, tells us about vials of tea found in museums throughout New England.  Did they come off the ships in December 1773?  J.L. Bell is also the author of  The Road To Concord:, on four stolen cannon that ignited the ...

The Boston Town Meeting issued a report on the state of their liberties, and other towns responded, establishing Committees of Correspondence to communicate with one another.  This revolutionary step brought the towns of Massachusetts together in a common cause.  All this happened 250 years ago this fall, in October and November of 1772.  Professor Robert Allison (Chair, Suffolk University Department of History, Language & Glob...

The Boston Tea Party (December 16, 1773) was an event wreathed in secrecy.  John Adams said he never knew any person who was involved in the destruction of the East India Company tea.  Yet as time passed and the American Republic seemed secure, participants claimed, were identified or admitted to being part of the tea's destruction.  In preparation for the 250th Anniversary in December 2023,  The Boston Tea Party Ships and Mus...