Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchThe Long Fuse - The Price of Victory
Season 12 Episode 1
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 Fr…
2 years, 10 months ago
An Empire of Reason - The Curious Americans
Season 11 Episode 18
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 th…
2 years, 10 months ago
An Empire of Reason - Born Again
Season 11 Episode 17
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 to…
2 years, 10 months ago
An Empire of Reason - The Agrarian World
Season 11 Episode 16
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 th…
2 years, 10 months ago
An Empire of Reason - The Cities
Season 11 Episode 15
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 fro…
2 years, 10 months ago
An Empire of Reason - The Open Ground
Season 11 Episode 14
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 …
2 years, 10 months ago
An Empire of Reason - The Pursuit of Happiness
Season 11 Episode 13
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 …
2 years, 10 months ago
An Empire of Reason - Men Are Not Angels
Season 11 Episode 12
The commonwealth tradition left the founders staring at a wall: if power always corrupts and virtue always decays, how can any free government last? …
3 years, 1 month ago
An Empire of Reason - The Fear of Power
Season 11 Episode 11
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 slave…
3 years, 1 month ago
An Empire of Reason - The Rights of Englishmen
Season 11 Episode 10
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 Brit…
3 years, 1 month ago