American Political History
The full story of this country, told through the people who lived it. From the soldier in the mud to the statesman at the table. Chronological, self-contained seasons, built on the primary sources. New episodes Tuesdays and Thursday.
Episodes
139 episodes
Interlude
If you've listening to this, you been with this show a while, scroll back to the beginning of the feed. Everything down there is new.Every episode from the start of this show has been remade. Season one, season two, all of it — re-resear...
A Failed Nation - A Rope of Sand
On December 23rd, 1783, in the Senate chamber at Annapolis, George Washington did the thing conquerors never do: he laid his commission at the feet of the Congress and went home to be a farmer — an act so astonishing that a stunned King George ...
A Failed Nation - A Dangerous Instrument
In the spring of 1783, with the Revolution all but won, the most dangerous enemy of the United States was its own army. Unpaid for years, cheated of their promised pensions, the officers camped at Newburgh, New York, had every reason to be furi...
Independence - A War to Win
In June 1778, a barefoot Connecticut private named Joseph Plumb Martin marched out of Valley Forge and, for the first time in the war, toward the enemy. This is the story of the moment the American Revolution stopped being a war of survival and...
Independence - The Open Field
On a Sunday in June 1778, in heat that killed men where they stood, Washington’s reborn army finally caught the British in the open at Monmouth Court House. This is the story of the day the Continental Army proved it could stand. It nearly went...
Independence - The Southern Strategy
In December 1778, a British army took Savannah in an afternoon — guided around the American line by an enslaved man betting on which side would make him free. It was the opening move of Britain’s new plan: the South was said to be full of Loyal...
Independence - The Swamp Fox
In August 1780, the “Hero of Saratoga,” General Horatio Gates, marched the last American army in the South to Camden — and lost it in a single morning, his militia breaking at the first bayonet charge while he galloped 180 miles to safety and t...
Independence - Tarleton’s Quarter
On May 29th, 1780, on a road in the Carolina backcountry, Banastre Tarleton’s cavalry cut down hundreds of Virginia Continentals as they threw down their arms to surrender — and gave the southern war a phrase it would never lose: “Tarleton’s Qu...
Independence - The King’s Friends
History is written by the winners, and the winners of the American Revolution wrote the Loyalists down as a handful of rich cowards. The truth was larger: as many as a fifth of Americans stayed loyal to the King — and their case against the Rev...
Independence - Two Volleys
After Charleston and Camden, the Continental Army in the South was a wreck — and George Washington sent it a limping Rhode Island foundryman named Nathanael Greene, who promptly did the one thing every rule of war forbids: with a stronger enemy...
Independence - Naval Superiority
The most important battle of the American Revolution was fought without a single American in it. In September 1781, everything came down to one fact George Washington had preached for six years: whoever owned the sea would win the war. Lord Cor...
Independence - Yorktown
In October 1781, two armies closed a ring around a British force dug in at a Virginia tobacco port — and the American Revolution reached the field where it would be decided. This is the story of the siege of Yorktown: the parallels creeping clo...
Independence - It Is All Over
Yorktown did not end the American Revolution. It ended the will to fight it — and that will broke not in Virginia but in London, and then in a rented room in Paris. This is the story of how the war was really won and then made real: Prime Minis...
The Glorious Cause - Bunker Hill
The British called it a victory. It nearly destroyed them. On June 17th, 1775, the King’s regulars marched up a hill outside Boston three times into the muskets of New England farmers, and walked away having lost more than a thousand men, the b...
The Glorious Cause - An Army from Nothing
In July 1775, George Washington rode into Cambridge to take command of the army that would win American independence, and found that the army did not exist. What he had instead was a great armed crowd of New England militia, brave but undiscipl...
The Glorious Cause - The 14th Colony
In the autumn of 1775, the American rebellion reached for an entire country. Congress wanted Canada as the fourteenth colony, and sent two armies north to take it: one under the reluctant ex-British officer Richard Montgomery, the other under t...
The Glorious Cause - Common Sense
In January 1776, the American war was 9 months old and nobody would say the word. The colonists were fighting, dying, and still hoping to be loyal British subjects again — independence was very nearly treason, and the King was still beloved. Th...
The Glorious Cause - Out of His Protection
In the winter of 1775, the colonists still called themselves loyal subjects of a king they believed would protect them. Then the King’s men spent a single season proving otherwise. A Royal Navy squadron burned the town of Falmouth to the ground...
The Glorious Cause - The Noble Train of Artillery
In the winter of 1776, the American army had Boston under siege and could not break it. The heavy guns that might have broken it sat 300 miles away, behind the walls of a captured fort at Ticonderoga, on the far side of a frozen wilderness. The...
The Glorious Cause - The Declaration
In July of 1776, the Continental Congress gathered in Philadelphia to do the thing there was no taking back: to declare, in writing, that the thirteen colonies were free of their king. This is the story of how that document was actually made — ...
The Glorious Cause - All London Afloat
Two months after declaring independence, George Washington faced the largest expeditionary force Britain had ever sent across an ocean — 400 ships and 32,000 men — arriving off a city that could not be defended. This is the story of the New Yor...
The Glorious Cause - The Times That Try Men’s Souls
By December of 1776, the American Revolution was all but over. George Washington’s army had been chased the length of New Jersey and now huddled, a few thousand ragged and freezing men, on the far bank of the Delaware — and at month’s end their...
The Glorious Cause - Victory or Death
Three days before Christmas 1776, a doctor visiting headquarters watched George Washington scratch the same two words on scraps of paper, over and over. Victory or death. Days later that was the countersign for the most reckless thing he had ye...
The Glorious Cause - Philadelphia Has Taken Howe
In the summer of 1777, General William Howe put 15,000 men on ships and sailed away from the Hudson River — and away from the second British army marching down from Canada that he was supposed to meet. This is the story of the campaign that won...
The Glorious Cause - Saratoga
In June of 1777, General John Burgoyne led a British army south from Canada to cut New England out of the war and end the rebellion in a single stroke. This is the story of how that army was swallowed whole. Burgoyne took Fort Ticonderoga in a ...