Ben Franklin's World

What would it take for you to forgive a neighbor who sided against you in a civil war? And what would you say to win back a community that you had fought against?

In our last episode, we explored loyalism across the Atlantic World and met Loyalists who, as serious political actors, had their own ideas about how the British Empire should operate. But the story of Loyalism didn’t end with the founding of the United States, nor with the end of the war.

In this revisited episode, Rebecca Brannon explores how South Carolina’s War for Independence was a true civil war, one that pitted neighbor against neighbor and, in some instances, fathers against sons.

Rebecca’s Book | Website

RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODES

🎧 Episode 126: Reintegration of Loyalists in South Carolina

🎧 Episode 294: 1774: The Long Year of Revolution

🎧 Episode 330: Loyalism in the British Atlantic World

🎧 Episode 380: The Tory’s Wife

🎧 Episode 421: Loyalism and Revolution in Georgia

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In the late winter of 1775, colonists in a village outside of New York City hoisted the royal standard of King George III 75 feet into the air.

The standard raisers signed their names to a proclamation pledging to defend the king and his government. For them, defending the British crown did not mean surrender; it served as a clear statement of what it still meant to be British.

In Episode 451, we explored a court-martial trial that allowed us to see how early Americans thought about what it would mean to be an American after independence.

In this revisited episode, historian Brad Jones helps us take up the other half of that question: what did it mean to be British during the age of the American Revolution? And why did answers to this question take different forms around the Atlantic World?

Brad’s Book

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American history is in the news a lot these days. We see and hear about fights over monuments, textbooks, and the stories we should include or exclude from our museums and historic markers.

What these stories overshadow is the great demand for more history in the United States. A coalition of historians and history organizations noticed this demand and decided to feed it by organizing a new initiative: A We Want More History weekend, which takes place September 25-27.

In this bonus episode, we’re joined by Beth English, the Executive Director of the Organization of American Historians, and Kate Masur, the John D. MacArthur Professor of History at Northwestern University. The guest historians share more about the origins of the national, coordinated weekend of history programs, how we can get involved, and where to find more information.

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In December 1777, Continental Army Colonel David Henley climbed off his horse to discipline a drunk British prisoner of war who was screaming epithets about Americans and vowing to fight for his king. Henley struck the prisoner, one of 6,000 in his care, with his sword.

The wound was minor, but Major General John Burgoyne cited this incident when he accused Henley of plotting to murder British prisoners of war. Burgoyne demanded a formal court-martial.

Professor Timothy Breen joins us to examine Henley’s trial with details from his new book, The American Revolution on Trial. Timothy asks a question most grand narratives of the American Revolution skip past: What did it actually feel like, in real towns among real people, to stop being British? What did it mean to be American?

Timothy’s Book

Show notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/451

EPISODE OUTLINE

00:00:00 Introduction

00:04:43 The 250th Anniversary and the Limits of Grand Narratives

00:09:31 How Timothy Found the Henley Court-Martial Transcript

00:13:26 Major General John Burgoyne and Aristocratic Privilege

00:23:00 Competing Ideas of Honor During the Revolution

00:29:53 Inside the Cambridge Prisoner of War Camps

00:36:23 The Two Incidents that Led to the Court-Martial

00:45:25 The Verdict and What Happened Next for Henley and Burgoyne

00:48:37 How Early Americans Judged the Revolution and the New Nation

00:53:41 What Happened to the British and German POWs in Cambridge

RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODES

🎧 Episode 048: Dangerous Guests: Enemy Captives During the War for Independence

🎧 Episode 122: The Men Who Lost America

🎧 Episode 374: The American Revolutionary War in the West

🎧 Episode 414: Robert Newburgh’s Trials: Queerness & Reputation in Revolutionary America

🎧 Episode 434: The Frank Brothers: Freeborn Black Soldiers in the American Revolution

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What caused the American Revolution?

Taxation without representation? Colonies that had outgrown their dependence on the British Empire? Or something harder to see: a quarrel about power itself and about what a government may rightly do to the people it governs?

In 1967, Bernard Bailyn published The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, a book he built out of more than 400 pamphlets, and one historians have been arguing with ever since.

In this revisited conversation from Episode 152, Professor Bailyn explains why he never accepted a purely economic explanation for the Revolution, where the revolutionaries' ideas actually came from, and why colonists rationally concluded that the British government was concealing a conspiracy against their liberties.

Bernard Bailyn’s Wikipedia Page | Book |

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/152

RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODES

🎧 Episode 294: 1774: The Long Year of American Revolution

🎧 Episode 311: Religion and the American Revolution

🎧 Episode 307: History and the American Revolution

🎧 Episode 325: Everyday People of the American Revolution

🎧 Episode 407: Patrick Henry

🎧 Episode 434: The Frank Borthers: Freeborn Black Soldiers in the American Revolution

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In December 1776, a Delaware Chief named White Eyes stood before the Second Continental Congress. He had not come to declare himself a revolutionary, nor had he come to pledge his loyalty to King George III. White Eyes came to test a promise.

What does the American Revolution look like to people for whom independence was never a question? For the Delaware, also known as the Lenape, the War for Independence raised older and harder questions:

Whose word could be trusted? What choices can we make about whether to fight, stay neutral, or flee that might let our community remain itself on the land we know?

Jeremy Johnson, Cultural Education Director for the Delaware Tribe of Indians, traces Lenape and Delaware history from long before European contact through the American Revolution. He also introduces us to the September 1778 Treaty of Fort Pitt, the first treaty the United States made with a Native Nation and which promised a 14th Native state.

Delaware Tribe of Indians’ Website

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/450

EPISODE OUTLINE

00:00:00 Introduction

00:02:35 The Lenape Experience of the American Revolution

00:07:56 Lenape History and Indigenous Origin Stories

00:10:52 Diplomacy in Lenape Traditions

00:15:32 Evolution of Lenape Diplomacy Through European Contact

00:20:00 The Walking Purchase of 1737

00:24:55 Lenape Experiences of the Seven Years' War

00:32:13 Lenape Participation in Pontiac's Rebellion

00:37:17 The Delaware and the American Revolution

00:46:32 Negotiating the Treaty of Fort Pitt

00:50:16 The Hope for Delaware Sovereignty

00:52:53 The Delaware People & America's 250th

01:00:02 Time Warp

01:02:41 Resources

RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODES

🎧 Episode 163: The American Revolution in North America

🎧 Episode 264: The Treaty of Canandaigua

🎧 Episode 286: Elections in Early America: Native Sovereignty

🎧 Episode 323: American Expansion and the Political Economy of Plunder

🎧 Episode 397: Native Nations: A Millennium in North America

🎧 Episode 449: Stealing America: Indigenous Enslavement & the American Revolution

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In 1723, the College of William & Mary opened the Brafferton building, a permanent home for an Indian School the college had been chartered to run and struggled to fill for its first 30 years. The premise of the Brafferton: take Native boys and strategically teach them in ways that would make them more useful to the British Empire.

So what actually happened inside the Brafferton Indian School?

In this revisited episode, the first of a two-part series, our three guests investigate why the Brafferton School existed, how the English filled Brafferton with students even as Native families refused to send their children, and what the Indigenous students did with the knowledge the English taught them.

We’ll also explore how a school built on a colonial college campus during the reign of King George I connected to schools like the Carlisle School, which were still separating Indigenous children from their families in the 1950s.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/367

RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODES:

🎧 Episode 158: The Revolutionaries' Army

🎧 Episode 290: The World of the Wampanoag, Pt. 1

🎧 Episode 291: The World of the Wampanoag, Pt. 2

🎧 Episode 353: Women and the Making of Catawba Identity

🎧 Episode 368: The Brafferton Indian School, Part 2: Legacies

🎧 Episode 449: Stealing America

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More than half a million Indigenous people were enslaved within the present-day borders of the United States.

Historian Linford Fisher spent fifteen years in archives across North America, the Caribbean, and Britain to investigate this forgotten history. What he found was not a second story running alongside African slavery. It was something different in kind. Europeans and early Americans enslaved people who lived on land they intended to possess. This practice made slavery a tool of dispossession.

The American Revolution is where this process accelerated. Lin and Lorén Spears, a Narragansett tribal citizen and the executive director of the Tomaquag Museum, trace how the Revolution opened space for captive raiding on the western frontier, how Native nations weighed which side to take during the war, and how their Stolen Relations digital project is recovering the names of the Natives early Americans enslaved.

Lin’s Website | Book |

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/449

EPISODE OUTLINE

00:00:00 Introduction

00:01:23 The Declaration's Overlooked Grievance Against Indigenous People

00:02:29 The Other Revolutionary War

00:03:20 Investigating the Hidden History of Indigenous Enslavement

00:07:07 Uncovering the Scale of Indigenous Enslavement

00:13:43 Building Stolen Relations Through Archival and Tribal Collaboration

00:20:51 Decolonizing Archival Records

00:30:40 Connection Between Indigenous Enslavement & Land Dispossession

00:33:53 How Native Nations Navigated the American Revolution

00:37:16 From Colonial Experimentation to Revolutionary Expansion

00:41:15 How the American Revolution Expanded Indigenous Slavery

00:45:20 How Indigenous Nations Weighed Neutrality, Alliance, & Survival

00:52:51 The Declaration of Independence's Impact on Indigenous Communities

01:01:10 The Treaty of Paris, 1783 and the Continuation of Indigenous Dispossession

01:03:51 The Uncertain End of Indigenous Enslavement

01:11:59 Commemorating the American Revolution Through Indigenous History

01:24:36 Revolution to Freedom Through Indigenous Sovereignty

RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODES

🎧 Episode 163: The American Revolution in North America

🎧 Episode 264: The Treaty of Canadaigua

🎧 Episode 323: American Expansion & the Political Economy of Plunder

🎧 Episode 367: The Brafferton Indian School, Part 1

🎧 Episode 368: The Brafferton Indian School, Part 2

🎧 Episode 406: Threads of Power

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The Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all men are endowed with the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

But what did liberty and equality mean for the peoples the Declaration never named—the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi nations who had governed the vast Great Lakes homeland they called Anishinaabewake for generations before a single European sailed its waters?

In this revisited conversation, historian Michael Witgen, Professor of History at Columbia University and a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe, takes us inside the Anishinaabe world and reveals how the new United States set about transforming it.

The answer, Witgen shows us, wasn't simple conquest. It was something more elaborate, more profitable, and in some ways more insidious: what he calls the political economy of plunder—a system engineered to strip Indigenous peoples of their homelands while funneling the wealth of that dispossession directly into the settler colonial economy.

Michael's Website | Book

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/323

RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODES

🎧 Episode 051: A History of Early Detroit

🎧 Episode 064: Native American Slavery in New France

🎧 Episode 163: The American Revolution in North America

🎧 Episode 223: A Native American History of the Ohio River Valley & Great Lakes Region

🎧 Episode 286: Native Sovereignty

🎧 Episode 310: History of the Blackfeet

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The engrossed copy of the Declaration of Independence is on display at the National Archives building in Washington, DC. Millions of visitors flock to see it and the other Charters of Freedom. But how did it end up there and why do people approach it with religious reverence?

In this episode, we explore how the Declaration took on its symbolic role as the founding text of the United States.

Pauline's Book

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/403

EPISODE OUTLINE

00:00:00 Introduction

00:06:30 Introducing Mary Beth Norton

00:07:17 American Scripture: Pauline Maier

00:10:00 Graduate School with Pauline Maier

00:13:36 The State of Historians' Thinking in the 1990s

00:15:23 Other Declarations of Independence

00:21:08 Thomas Jefferson's Drafting of the Declaration

00:23:44 Why Create a Parchment Copy of the Declaration?

00:28:24 How the Declaration Became American Scripture

00:30:32 The Impact of American Scripture

00:32:10 Situating the Declaration in the American Revolution

00:35:39 The Role of the Parchment Copy Today

00:40:12 Closing Thoughts on Pauline Maier

RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODES

🎧 Episode 141: A Declaration in Draft

🎧 Episode 155: Pauline Maier's American Revolution

🎧 Episode 294: 1774: The Long Year of Revolution

🎧 Episode 325: Everyday People of the American Revolution

🎧 Episode 415: The Many Declarations of Independence

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