Revolution 250 Podcast Robert Allison

Alexander Cain joins us to talk about the impact of the Revolution's first battles on the civilians in Lexington, Concord, and Menotomy.  Cain,  a former practicing lawyer, now maintains the Historical Nerdery blog, and has written two books: We stood Our Ground looks at Lexington in the first year of the war;  and I See Nothing but the Horrors of a Civil War looks at the position of loyalists in the first years of Revolution.  In our conversation he discusses the women and children, civilians, babies, and cats caught up in the first days of war in April of 1775.   

George Wythe is one of the most interesting, important, and least known of the founders.  The second law professor in the English-speaking world (the first was William Blackstone), he taught the law to Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, Henry Clay, and others.  He also was one of the few Virginia leaders to free the people he owned, and he taught at least one Latin, Greek, and the Law before being poisoned, at the age of 80, by a jealous nephew.  George Wythe, signer of the Declaration of Independence, deserves to be better known, and Wythepedia is where to begin.  Join us in conversation with Steven Blaiklock and Linda Tesar from the Wolf Law Library at the College of William and Mary in a conversation about George Wythe, the law, and the Revolution in Virginia. 

Colin G. Calloway, the John Kimball, Jr. 1943 Professor of History and a professor of Native American Studies at Dartmouth College has led the study of Indigenous Americans.  He has written more than a dozen books, including The American Revolution in Indian Country (1995) and The Chiefs Now in This City (2021) on Native Americans and early American urbanization.  His 2018 The Indian World of George Washington was a finalist for the National Book Award, and received Mount Vernon's  George Washington Prize.  Join us for a conversation about Native Americans and the Revolution. 

The Oneida Nation supported the Americans in the War for Independence, an alliance that would have profound consequences for the Americans, the Oneida, and the Iroquois Confederation.  James Kirby Martin, one of the Revolutionary-era's leading scholars, joins us to give the background to the Oneida's decision, in the first of two parts of a conversation on the Forgotten Allies:  the Oneida in the Revolutionary War, the subject of one of Professor Martin's many books. 

December 20, 1777, the kingdom of Morocco became the first to recognize the United States of America as an independent and sovereign nation.  We talk with Anouar Majid, Director of the University of New England's Center for Global Humanities, and the Tangier Global Forum, about the long connections between Morocco and the United States.  Did you know that the only American historical site outside the United States is the Tangier American Legation Museum?  We discuss this and other issues with one of the leading scholars of the relationship between the United States and the Islamic World, and editor of the Tingis , and author of Freedom and Orthodoxy  and other works.  

The institution of slavery impacted American foreign relations in significant ways from the Revolution to the Civil War.  Historian Steve Brady from the Columbian College of Arts & Sciences discusses these connections in his new book,  Chained to History:  Slavery and United States Foreign Relations to 1865.  He sits down to discuss these many connections, from Article 7 of the Treaty of Paris, to the Haitian Revolution, prohibition of the international slave trade in 1807, the War of 1812 and acquisition of Florida,  the Amphictyonic Conference in Panama, and the role of the Adams generations in the tangled history.