Episode Details

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 visitor once counted eighteen languages and money was the only god. And Charleston, the rich lowcountry aristocracy of the lower South, magnificent and hierarchical and English to the bone. Four cities, four strands of the American mind that the coming republic would have to braid together. But the cities were only the shop windows of an overwhelmingly rural world — and to find the typical American, you have to leave them for the farm and the meeting house.