Join host Professor Robert Allison for a fascinating conversation with historian Richard Bell, author of The American Revolution and the Fate of the World. Together they will explore how the struggle for American independence reverberated far beyond the thirteen colonies—reshaping politics, empires, and ideas of liberty around the globe. Bell reveals how revolutionaries from Boston to Bengal, Paris to Port-au-Prince, drew inspiration and warning from the events of 1776, and how the American Revolution’s legacy became a test case for freedom in an age of empire. This episode connects the local to the global, asking what the Revolution truly meant for the fate of the world.

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Host Professor Robert Allison welcomes Dr. Kathryn P. Viens, public historian and scholar, to explore how local histories have shaped Americans’ understanding of patriotism and the Revolution from the nineteenth century to today. Drawing from her essay “Mobs or the Martial Ideal? The Mutable Definition of Patriotism in Local Historical Narratives,” published in the online journal Remembering the American Revolution at 250, Viens discusses how community-based histories—often written by nineteenth-century antiquarians—both preserved and reframed the Revolution’s memory.

Together, Allison and Viens delve into the evolution of civic identity, how shifting cultural values influenced interpretations of the Revolution, and why local stories remain essential to the broader national narrative. This episode invites listeners to reconsider how patriotism has been defined, remembered, and reinterpreted in the generations since America’s founding.

https://journals.h-net.org/.../2025_Viens_mobs_martial_ideal

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In listening to James Otis, Jr.'s arguments against the Writs of Assistance in 1761, John Adams remarked that it was there that American Independence was born. There is no question of Otis' erudition or passion for liberty, but while he fought for the rights of his country, he was also fighting a personal battle for his mental health. We talk with Gerald Holland, aurhor of a new biography of Otis, Lucy Pollock, Kate LaPine, and Paul Piwko as they discuss the new online exhibit. Patriot, Hero, and Distracted Person. a collaboration between Revolutionary Spaces and the National Museum of Mental Health Project on the life and struggles of James Otis, Jr.

https://www.nmmhproject.org/jamesotisjr

https://revolutionaryspaces.org/

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