America's Violent Birth (with Joseph J. Ellis and Holger Hoock)
About this episode
The episode explores the violent aspects of America's founding through conversations with historians Holger Hoock and Joseph J. Ellis.
“America’s founding is not just your conventional heroic struggle for noble ideas and ideals,” says historian Holger Hoock on today’s episode of The World in Time . “It is also a profoundly violent civil war—America’s first civil war—and a civil war in the British Empire.” This second, war-torn episode of Lapham’s Revolutionary America, a special series of The World in Time , collects historical dispatches from the battlefields, excerpting two conversations that Lewis Lapham recorded: one with Hoock about his 2017 book Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth , the other with Joseph J. Ellis, from 2022, about The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773–1783. The ad-free, unabridged Substack edition of the episode concludes with an audio version of an essay adapted from Peter C. Mancall’s new book, Contested Continent: The Struggle for North America, c. 1000 to 1680 , the most recent and chronologically earliest addition to The Oxford History of the United States, other volumes of which include Gordon S. Wood’s Empire of Liberty and Richard White’s The Republic for Which It Stands . Titled “The Mystic River Massacre,” Mancall’s essay takes…
People in this episode
Guests: Holger Hoock, Joseph J. Ellis
Topics covered
- American Revolution
- Civil War
- Historical Dispatches
- Colonial Violence
- Founding of America
- Historical Conversations
Keywords
- American history
- violence
- civil war
- historical analysis
- revolutionary America
- colonial history
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: The Oxford History of the United States
Books & works: Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth, The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773–1783, Contested Continent: The Struggle for North America, c. 1000 to 1680, The Mystic River Massacre
More episodes of The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly
- Lapham’s Revolutionary America: Jill Lepore and Gordon S. Wood
- Lapham's Revolutionary America [Teaser]
- Michael Pollan on Consciousness
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