Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchThe Long Fuse - Virtual Representation
Season 12 Episode 2
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…
3 years ago
The 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…
3 years 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…
3 years 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…
3 years 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…
3 years 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…
3 years 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 …
3 years 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 …
3 years 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, 3 months 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, 3 months ago