Analyzing American Revolution - AARevolution.net

Independence alone wasn’t enough. For Thomas Paine, the Revolutionary War was worth the fight only if independence led to a new kind of government and polity—one in which, as he famously wrote, “the LAW IS KING.”

In January 1776—just six months before the Declaration of Independence—General George Washington and his officers were still toasting King George III. Paine’s Common Sense shattered any lingering attachment to the King, to Parliament, and to the idea of the British constitution itself. His arguments were so persuasive that Washington ordered Paine’s writing to distributed among his troops before major engagements, including the famous Delaware crossing that led to victory at the Battle of Trenton.

And yet, despite Paine’s service to the cause, he would later feel betrayed by Washington as he languished in a French prison, awaiting execution.

In Part II of my conversation with Prof. Harvey Kaye, we trace Paine’s influence from Washington, Adams, and Jefferson to Lincoln, FDR, Barry Goldwater, Reagan, and Obama. This is the story of how Paine’s passion and persuasive vision helped galvanize a people into founding a new nation—and the darker story of why generations of America’s elite came to loathe him and diminish his contributions to the American cause.

📄 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Interview Transcript ⁠⁠⁠

🚩About My 203rd Guest:

⁠Dr. Harvey Kaye⁠ is Professor Emeritus of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin—Green Bay. His area of interest and expertise is American Democracy: History, Memory, Politics, Radicals, and Ideas.

Prof. Kaye is a nationally recognized historian and an award-winning author of many books, including the following:

• "The Powers of the Past: Reflections on the Crisis and the Promise of History",
• "Why Do Ruling Classes Fear History?",
• "Are We Good Citizens? Affairs Political, Literary, and Academic",
• "The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great",
• "Thomas Paine: Firebrand of the Revolution", and
• "Thomas Paine and the Promise of America".

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Before "Common Sense" shook the Atlantic world, Thomas Paine lived a tumultuous life of struggle, failure, and radical discovery. He arrived in America unknown, ill, and nearly broken. Within a year, Paine would transform a rebellion for right to a revolution for independence.

►In this conversation, Professor Harvey J. Kaye traces Paine’s journey from working-class England to revolutionary America — and the ideas that transformed him into the most influential political writer of the age.

📄 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Interview Transcript ⁠⁠

🚩About My 203rd Guest:

Dr. Harvey Kaye is Professor Emeritus of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin—Green Bay. His area of interest and expertise is American Democracy: History, Memory, Politics, Radicals, and Ideas.

Prof. Kaye is a nationally recognized historian and an award-winning author of many books, including the following:

• "The Powers of the Past: Reflections on the Crisis and the Promise of History",
• "Why Do Ruling Classes Fear History?",
• "Are We Good Citizens? Affairs Political, Literary, and Academic",
• "The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great",
• "Thomas Paine: Firebrand of the Revolution", and
• "Thomas Paine and the Promise of America".

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In 1775, Concord was not a quiet rural town waiting for history to arrive. It was an important Massachusetts community already under strain—shaped by class divisions, religious tensions, and an eighteenth-century “affordability crisis” that had been building for years before "the shot heard 'round the world".

📄 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Interview Transcript ⁠

►In this interview, Dr. Robert Gross examines Concord, Massachusetts, in the lead-up to the Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. As you will see in these discussions, the town was an important colonial town teetering between radical and conservative values until the British Imperial government effectively propelled Concord toward Revolution.

🚩About My 202nd Guest:

Dr. Robert A. Gross is Professor Emeritus of American History at the University of Connecticut (UConn). His scholarship focuses on U.S. social and cultural history from 1750 to 1850, with particular attention to the American Revolution, Transcendentalism, and New England history.

Dr. Gross is the recipient of various national awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim, Howard, and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Antiquarian Society. Dr. Gross is the author of several influential works, including:

• The Minutemen and Their World
• Transcendentalists and Their World

He joins us from Concord, Massachusetts—the central setting of this interview—which examines the town’s social and political tensions before the Revolution, as well as events in Lexington and western Massachusetts on the eve of April 19, 1775.

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📑 Video Chapters:

00:00 Select Highlights

01:57 Guest Introduction

03:25 Who were the Minutemen?

08:01 A Remarkable Tension

11:45 Concord not volunteering

15:13 Minutemen, Militia or Both?

17:10 Concord Before the Revolution

23:37 Road to April 19, 1775

27:25 Questioning Concord's Centrality

37:13 “No concord in Concord”

40:02 18th Century Affordability Crisis

45:13 Rebellion In Concord

52:58 Concord— an important town

58:39 Popular Radicalism

1:02:43 Radical vs. Conservative

1:04:44 A Rude Awakening!

1:08:40 Concord Uniting Against the British

1:13:58 Rebellion or Revolution

1:15:29 Intellectual Capital of the New Nation

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The East India Company’s trade monopoly angered American colonists by undercutting their smuggling of Chinese goods and keeping prices high. This helped push Americans toward revolution — and it wasn’t just the Boston Tea Party. Patriots held Tea Parties up and down the colonies to challenge British tariffs and control. And it wasn’t only about tea: the consumer revolution had colonists hungry for porcelain, silk, nankeens, fine furniture, and countless other goods from China.

📄 ⁠⁠⁠⁠Interview Transcript

►In this interview, Dr. Dael Norwood explains how America’s demand for Chinese products shaped commerce, politics, and the young nation’s identity — and how global trade fueled the path to revolution.

🚩About My 200th Guest:

⁠Dr. Dael Norwood is a professor in the History Department of the University of Delaware, a historian of nineteenth-century America specializing on the global dimensions of U.S. politics and economics. He is particularly interested in the political economy of commerce: how the ideas and practices of international exchange have affected Americans’ relations with other powers, as well as their dealings with each other.

He has published extensively on these subjects, including the following book, which we discuss in this interview: "Trading in Freedom: How Trade with China Defined Early America"

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📑 Video Chapters:

3:51 Thinking About China in Colonial America

06:52 Consumer Revolution in American Colonies

09:12 High-Level Consumer Goods

11:44 "Colonists are inveterate smugglers."

13:50 Top American Imports

14:25 “The really nice stuff never really gets to North America.”

15:23 How Colonists Purchased Chinese Goods

21:28 Franklin’s Plans To Develop Chinese Products in America

23:20 Europeans & Americans Imitating China

25:08 China Trade and the American Revolution

28:05 The East India Company and Colonial Grievances

32:08 Corruption & Tyranny

33:21 A New Kind of Slavery

34:16 Beyond Boston: Other Colonial Tea Parties

37:04 The Intolerable Acts

40:22 Treaty of Paris

40:59 Out Competing Britain in China Trade

43:40 What American Shipped to China in the 1780s

44:19 Silver Dollars to China

48:15 Could the U.S. Afford Trade With China?

51:52 How Americans Financed Trade With China

53:29 Cabotage and Mechanics of American Trade China

57:21 Politicians vs. Merchants - American Vision of China Trade

58:26 Drugs & China Trade

59:18 Dr. Norwood's Story of Researching China Trade

1:02:17 "China is always there!"

1:03:21 A BIG DEAL

1:04:22 From China Trade to Constitution

1:05:28 Just One Point

1:07:46 "Yankee Doodle"

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"Yankee Doodle" in our videos:

►⁠⁠ Choral, U.S. Army Band (Public Domain) ⁠⁠

We incorporate parts of this fabulous performance in the beginning and end of our videos.

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Was the Boston Massacre inevitable? For its time, was it truly a “massacre”?

And how much do we really know about that night—and how much comes from the stories people chose to share?

📄 ⁠⁠Interview Transcript ⁠⁠

► In this interview, historian Dr. Serena Zabin reconsiders March 5, 1770—looking beyond propaganda to the people, choices, and social networks that shaped revolutionary action in the dark hours after the shooting and transformed how colonists understood their place within the British imperial family—setting the stage for revolution.

🚩About My 199th Guest:

Dr. Serena Zabin is a professor of history and the Liberal Arts at Carleton College. She is the Vice President of the Teaching Division of American Historical Association, a distinguished fellow in Early American History at the Huntington Library for 2024-25, and a former president of Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.

Her research focuses on Early America and Public History, subjects about which he has published extensively, including the following books:

1. "Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York",

2. "The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741: Daniel Horsmanden's "Journal of the Proceedings" with Related Documents", and

3. "The Boston Massacre: A Family History", which received the 2024 George Washington Book Prize and is the focus of this interview.

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📑 Video Chapters:

03:48 March 5, 1770: What Happened?

08:49 Was It Really a “Massacre”?

10:10 Did Soldiers and Bostonians Know Each Other?

11:27 Did Anyone Expect Violence?

16:44 Paul Revere’s Image of the Massacre

21:43 Boston Massacre Conspiracy Theories

22:53 What Revere Exaggerated—or Invented

24:33 What Can We Really Know?

27:38 Revere's Motivation

30:19 The Trial: Politics or Performance?

31:18 The Boston Massacre on Trial

32:23 John Adams: Ethics or Politics?

34:18 Soldiers’ Self-Defense Explained

35:15 Adams and the Soldiers’ Defense

38:31 The Massacre as Family History

40:34 British Living Among Bostonians

44:14 Daily Life Before the “Massacre”

46:53 A Broken Imperial Family?

48:56 A Bad Divorce

53:10 Dr. Zabin and Ken Burns’ "The American Revolution"

55:22 "Just One Point"

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This interview with Dr. Serena Zabin examines the Boston Massacre—the social developments and everyday challenges faced by Bostonians and British residents that led to March 5, 1770, what happened that night, and, equally important, what followed, including Paul Revere’s propaganda and John Adams’s defense of the British soldiers.

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►all images are in the Public Domain

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"Yankee Doodle" in our videos:

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We incorporate parts of this fabulous performance in the beginning and end of our videos.

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What role did Enlightenment ideas and Thomas Paine’s concept of common sense play in shaping the American Revolution? In this conversation, Dr. Sophia Rosenfeld explores how revolutionary leaders digested and adapted European intellectual currents, and how ordinary people were imagined as capable of participating in a new kind of politics. Discover the ideas that sparked change and still influence us today.

📄 Interview Transcript

🚩About My 198th Guest:

Dr. Sophia Rosenfeld is a professor of history and former chair of the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches European and American intellectual and cultural history with a special emphasis on the Enlightenment, the trans-Atlantic Age of Revolutions, and the legacy of the eighteenth century for modern democracy. Her writings and works include the following books:

1) "The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in the Modern World"

2) "A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France"

3) "Common Sense: A Political History "

4) "Democracy and Truth: A Short History"

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🗂️Thems of the American Revolution

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📑 Video Chapters:

00:00 Interview Highlights

02:09 Interview Introduction

03:30 Defining Enlightenment

04:33 Revolution of minds for whom?

08:41 For the Elite-or By the Elite?

12:45 One or many Enlightenments?

14:15 Reason or Enlightenment?

16:12 When was Enlightenment?

18:56 Secular or religious?

20:27 Revolution or Enlightenment?

22:28 American Revolution & Enlightenment

24:40 Was it called Enlightenment in 1700s?

27:43 “Common Sense: A Political History”

32:44 Thomas Paine & 'common sense'

35:05 'common sense' against common people

38:23 'common sense' for Revolution

39:25 'common sense' afterlife

42:20 The “Naïve” Truth-Teller

43:54 The "Age of Choice"

45:31 Revolution & Making Choices

48:21 Americans now vs. during American Revolution

51:17 Why risk a revolution?

52:22 Just One Point

53:38 Thinking about thinking

56:49 Closing & "Yankee Doodle"

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This interview with Dr. Rosenfeld is about the Age of Enlightenment (aka Age of Revolutions) and its impact on the American Revolution.

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►all images are in the Public Domain

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► Choral, U.S. Army Band (Public Domain)

We incorporate parts of this fabulous performance in the beginning and end of our videos.

✅ Subscribe to our YouTube channel

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🖼️ Explore AAR’s Visual Index of the American Revolution☑️How much do you really know about the American Revolution? Quiz your knowledge▶️In Analyzing American Revolution (AAR), more than 30 scholars tell the story of the American Revolution from 30 different perspectives. AAR is a special series production of the History Behind News program - now in its 5th season, where Adel Aali - host and producer, has interviewed 196 scholars (and counting) about world history and, importantly, the history of our own country. So Adel has substantial experience in interviewing scholars and analyzing history. And he now brings that experience to analyze the history of the American Revolution with scholars who have spent decades researching subjects relating to the Revolutionary War and the American Revolution.

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📑 Video Chapters:

(00:00) opening music: U.S. Army Band

(00:19) What is a revolution?

(01:00) Thomas Paine - disliked by Founders?

(01:13) French Alliance - An Irony?

(02:29) British perspective - Russians or Hessians are coming?

(03:20) Hyder Ali and the American Revolution

(03:29) China - Europeans have nothing to offer!

(03:53) Spain - What happened in Pensacola?

(04:14) A civil war?

(04:27) Adel Aali - Experienced Analysis of History with scholars

(05:58) What is history? Storytelling vs. Analysis.

(06:33) Lexington & Concord

(07:17) Subject covered in this podcast series

(07:35) Where to get Analyzing American Revolution

(08:04) Quiz: https://bit.ly/AAR-YT-Quiz

🚩Where to find AAR:

Home: https://AnalyzingAmericanRevolution.com

YouTube: 🎞️ https://www.youtube.com/@UCG7dqG9iXCn7G6Zk9CYm68A

Spotify: 🎞️🎧 https://open.spotify.com/show/7hOxTKzLL18ffv5BajVdTD

📰AAR's Newsletter: https://analyzingamericanrevolution.com/aar-newsletter/

►Adel Aali,

Host & Producer

Analyzing American Revolution

History Behind News podcast

🚩AAR is a special series production of HbN

HbN Home: https://HistoryBehindNews.com

HbN Spotify: 🎧 https://bit.ly/HbN-Podcast-Spotify

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☑️Image Attributions:

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yankee_Doodle_(choral).ogg

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