Revolution 250 Podcast

Boston, 1765. Eleven years before the Declaration. Tax collectors, mobs, fire in the streets, and the first sons of a revolution nobody saw coming. The decade your teachers skipped. If you like your history hard, your men flawed, and your stakes real, this one's for you. Join us for a conversation with Joe Wearmouth, who tells the story of this tumultuous time through the eyes of unforgettabl...

Winning independence was only the beginning. How did George Washington turn a divided country into a nation? On this episode of Revolution 250, Professor Robert Allison welcomes Nathaniel Philbrick to discuss Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy . Retracing Washington’s presidential journeys with his wife, Melissa, and their dog, Dora, Philbrick uncovers stories of local pri...

 What is the American experiment?  Johann Neem explores this question in books and essays, beginning with his Creating a Nation of Joiners:  Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts , which showed how Americans created a civil society which fostered their independence.  He explored how newly-independent Americans created a system of public education to sustain the republic, in D...

Digging in his Jersey City backyard in 2007, Chris Bray uncovered a 12-pound iron sphere.  This was a mystery.  What was it?  How did it get there?  Doing more digging in archives, he found that his neighborhood was the site of the Paulus Hook fort the rebels held in the summer of 1776, and the iron ball had been fired from a British cannon as the Royal Navy stormed up the Hudson River.  The canno...

 John Lowe of the University of Louisville joins us to talk about his new book, “Benevolence & Bondage”: Jonathan Edwards, Slavery, Race, and the Paradox of Spiritual Equality. Jonathan Edwards is remembered as one of colonial America’s most influential theologians—a preacher who taught that all souls stood equally before God. Yet Edwards was also an enslaver who lived and preached within a so...

The Declaration of Independence is the United States' most radical idea, and its most enduring paradox.  Byron Williams, renowned public intellectual, theologian, columnist, explores this paradox in his new book, Liberty and Equality in America:  Examining the Radical and Paradoxical Legacy of the Declaration of Independence.   Williams asks: What does it mean for a nation officially committe...

For a century after Independence, Americans believed that their Revolution was still in progress. Nowhere was this clearer than on the Fourth of July, when Americans gathered for speeches that, as one orator put it in 1834, aimed to “examine the present, and to look forward to the future.”  Nathan Perl-Rosenthal joins us to talk about this exploration, which he covers in his new book The Long Revo...

When in 1774 General Thomas Gage arrived in the rebellious colony of Massachusetts, he brought with him the Massachusetts Government Act which moved the colonial government from Boston to Salem.  General Gage set up residence in the neighboring town of Danvers at the home of Robert Hooper, a noted merchant and royalist.  Join Professor Robert Allison in conversation with Bill Kossowan as they disc...

The American Revolution was fought on famous battlefields, but it was sustained in communities like Hingham, Massachusetts, where ordinary people faced extraordinary choices. In this episode of the Revolution 250 Podcast , Professor Robert Allison welcomes historian and author James Conroy to discuss his book Hingham in the Revolution; Not the Gift of Kings . Together, they explore how one New Eng...

The American Revolution was argued in meetinghouses, fought on battlefields, and plotted over more than a few bowls of punch. This week Professor Robert Allison raises a glass with historian Brooke Barbier, author of Cocked and Boozy: An Intoxicating History of the American Revolution , to explore the surprisingly boozy world of Revolutionary America. Rum, cider, beer, punch, flip, and other poten...

The Battle of Bunker Hill was one of the defining moments of the American Revolution. Although the British claimed the battlefield, the staggering cost of victory demonstrated that defeating the colonial rebellion would be far more difficult than anyone had expected. In this episode of the Revolution 250 Podcast, Professor Robert Allison is joined by historians Daniel T. Davis and Phillip S. Green...

James Wilson was a brilliant Philadelphia lawyer, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and a driving force behind the Constitution.  And yet in 1779 a Philadelphia mob attacked his home, and his forceful defense of ratifying the Constitution led to him being burned in effigy.  An Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Wilson died in a North Carolina boarding house on the run from his many c...

 Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais was a man about Paris—watch-maker, inventor, and playwright best known for light comedies like "The Marriage of Figaro." But as the Americans struggled to secure independence, he took on a greater role, managing to ship arms and supplies to the rebels despite French neutrality and the British fleet. Harlow Giles Unger brought Beaumarchais's sto...

As Mercy Otis Warren in her "Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution" reminds us, not all of the battlefields of the American Revolution were in America. Although the conflict began in Massachusetts, it soon spread across the globe, with armies and navies fighting in North America, the Caribbean, Europe, India, Africa, and Central America. The struggle for American ind...

“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” These fundamental truths shape American identity. Ted Widmer explores their origins and impact in T he Living Declaration: A Biography of America’s Founding Text ¸ and joins us to talk ab...

Before the ink was dry, the Declaration was already on its way to the people. In this special Independence Day episode of the Revolution 250 Podcast, recorded for America's 250th Birthday on July 4, 2026, Professor Robert Allison welcomes master printer Gary Gregory of the historic Edes & Gill Print Shop to explore how the words that founded a nation were transformed into printed broadsid...

  Why did the British place so much importance on Charleston? How did a string of talented British commanders nearly crush the Revolution in the South, and why did they ultimately fail? In this episode of the Revolution 250 Podcast, Professor Robert J. Allison is joined by historian Ken Scarlett, author of Victory Day: Winning American Independence , for a sweeping discussion of the Southern Campa...

 The American Revolution was not fought on distant battlefields, but in private homes. British occupation produced an aggrieved American population, bound by shared domestic disorder and emotional distress. British officers usurped male authority to quarter themselves with families, patriot wives governed households in their husbands' absence, daughters flirted with officers, domestic servant...

 In his new book T his Fierce People:  The Untold Story of America’s Revolutionary War in the South , Alan Pell Crawford brings to life the three years between Monmouth and Yorktown.  A brutal war in the South—a true civil war—set the stage for the victory at Yorktown, and here, Crawford argues, the War for Independence was won.  What happened between 1778 and 1781 as the war shifted to the southe...

Renowned music historian and composer Roger Lee Hall takes us on a lively exploration of the music of the American Revolution. Far from being mere background entertainment, music in the Revolutionary era carried political messages, inspired soldiers, unified communities, and gave voice to both patriot fervor and loyalist resistance. From tavern ballads and marching tunes to hymns, broadsides, and...

 Yorktown was not the end!  Though Cornwallis surrendered, the British still held New York, Charleston, and Savannah, and the Americans did not control the western frontier.  Would 1782 bring a renewed British campaign to secure the American colonies?  Could the United States win its independence?   Military historian Craig Bruce Smith , professor of history at National Defense University, joins u...

The United States is not a nation like other nations, and it never has been. In July  1776, thirteen separate states, home to three million people with no common  ancestry or identity, stretching along a narrow coastal strip between the Atlantic and the Appalachians, declared their independence as the United States. Could they form a common identity and survive? Today, with more than 350 million p...

Animals were critical to the War for Independence, both as livestock to feed the armies and navies, and as draft animals to pull cannon and provisions.  Dogs and other animals served as mascots and companions, and insects spread diseases that upset the most careful military plans. While historians have looked at problems of supply and transportation for the armies at war, none has looked at the im...

Mary Dalley's boarding house in Philadelphia is where history happened! In the early days of the Revoluiton it was called "Liberty Hall,"  and after 1787 it was "Constitution House." Gouverneur Morris lived here, had his law office here, and probably wrote the Constitution at Miss Dalley's Boarding House.  Gathered around Miss Dalley's table at different times we...

 Linda Thorsen and Tom Coots take us to Malden, whose Town Meeting on May 27, 1776 unanimously supported independence.  The Malden Instructions boldly  announced the town's support for  independence from Great Britain—weeks before the Continental Congress would adopt the Declaration of Independence. Thorsen and Coots examine the political climate, local leadership, and community resolve that...