Revolutionary America features conversations with authors of new scholarship on the transformative era spanning the 1750s through the 1820s across the Americas. Featuring interviews that explore political upheaval, social change, and the many meanings of “revolution” in this period, the channel highlights work on independence movements, constitutional formations, imperial crises, and the lived experiences of diverse peoples navigating a rapidly changing world. Co-directed by Edward Blum and Amy Weitzman, and produced in collaboration with the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR), Revolutionary America brings cutting-edge historical research to scholars, students, and the interested public.
Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago's Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent with John William Nelson (UNC Press, 2023)
Edward Blum interviews John William Nelson, Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago’s Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent (UNC Press, 2023)
In early North America, carrying watercraft—usually canoes—and supplies across paths connecting one body of water to another was essential in the establishment of both Indigenous and European mobility in the continent’s interior. The Chicago portage, a network of overland canoe routes that connected the Great Lakes and Mississippi watersheds, grew into a crossroads of interaction as Indigenous and European people vied for its control during early contact and colonization. John William Nelson charts the many peoples that traversed and sought power along Chicago’s portage paths from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, including Indigenous Illinois traders, French explorers, Jesuit missionaries, Meskwaki warriors, British officers, Anishinaabe headmen, and American settlers. Nelson compellingly demonstrates that even deep within the interior, power relations fluctuated based on the control of waterways and local environmental knowledge.
Pushing beyond political and cultural explanations for Indigenous-European relations in the borderlands of North America, Nelson places environmental and geographic realities at the center of the history of Indigenous Chicago, offering a new explanation for how the United States gained control of the North American interior through a two-pronged subjugation of both the landscapes and peoples of the continent.
15 Oct 2026
The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People's Constitution with Jesse Wegman (Celadon Books, 2026)
David N. Gellman interviews Jesse Wegman on The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People’s Constitution (Celadon Books, 2026).
Jesse Wegman tells the story of James Wilson, a Founding Father whose bold vision shaped American democracy but whose legacy was lost to scandal.
As a young lawyer, James Wilson made a celebrated case for American independence in an essay that inspired the famous words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” He went on to write the first draft of the Constitution and, along with the more famous James Madison, played perhaps the essential role in its ultimate creation.
Wilson believed that in a democracy, the people were the ultimate source of all power. He argued successfully for a strong central government and a powerful presidency and unsuccessfully for a president elected by popular vote and a Senate apportioned by population. He was recognized for his ideas and leadership. But only a decade after the Constitution was ratified, he died of malaria in the back room of a North Carolina tavern while hiding from his creditors.
Instead of going down as one of the nation’s great political thinkers, Wilson was virtually written out of history. But in The Lost Founder, Wegman brings to life the most prescient of the earliest patriots and makes a convincing argument that scandal should not diminish the life and relevance of a brilliant, complicated man whose vision for his country could not be more relevant today.
11 Oct 2026
Creating an Informed Citizenry: Knowledge and Democracy in the Early American Republic with George D. Oberle (U Virginia Press, 2025)
When the founding fathers of the United States inaugurated a system of government that was unprecedented in the modern world, they knew that a functioning democracy required an educated electorate capable of making rational decisions. But who would validate the information that influenced citizens’ opinions? By spotlighting various institutions of learning in Creating an Informed Citizenry: Knowledge and Democracy in the Early American Republic (U Virginia Press, 2025), George Oberle provides a comprehensive look at how knowledge was created, circulated, and consumed in the early American republic.
Many of the founders, including George Washington, initially favored the creation of a centralized national university to educate Americans from all backgrounds. Over the first half of the nineteenth century, however, politicians moved away from any notion of publicly educated laypeople generating useful knowledge. The federal government ultimately founded the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, to be run by experts only. Oberle’s insightful analysis of the competing ideas over the nature of education offers food for thought as we continue to grapple with a rapidly evolving media landscape amid contested meanings of knowledge, expertise, and the obligations of citizenship.
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