Most revolutions end in failure. If they succeed in toppling the bad old regime, they often create a new one that is worse. "Like Saturn," a French journalist observed in the early 1790s, "the Revolution devours its children." Why was the American Revolution different? Legal scholar and political analyst Jonathan Turley explores this question in his new book, Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution. How did the Americans avoid the horrors other Revolutions? In this conversation we discuss the American Revolution, the history that American revolutionaries carried with them and informed their world, and the role of firebrands like Thomas Paine and Robespierre, and political theorists James Wilson and James Madison.

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On this episode of the Revolution 250 Podcast, host Professor Robert Allison welcomes Captain B.J. Armstrong, a 27-year officer in the United States Navy, Associate Professor of War Studies and Naval History at the U.S. Naval Academy, and Director of the Naval Academy Museum.

BJ Armstrong's books include Small Boats and Daring Men, about irregular warfare in the Revolution. HIs regular series of blog-posts, "The Maddest Idea," explores the development of the Continental and the United States Navy.

Their conversation explores one of the most daring and often overlooked decisions of the American Revolution: the creation of an American navy. Armstrong discusses the “maddest idea” debated by the Continental Congress in 1775, when a fledgling rebellion challenged the world’s most powerful maritime empire by taking to the sea. From small-boat raids and irregular warfare to the intellectual legacy of naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan, the discussion connects the Revolution’s naval origins to broader questions of maritime strategy and national power.

Together, Allison and Armstrong examine how the Revolutionary generation imagined sea power, why maritime history is central to understanding the struggle for independence, and what the early American Navy can still teach us today.

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In this episode of the Revolution 250 Podcast, host Robert J. Allison welcomes Richard Howell of the Nathanael Greene Homestead for a conversation about the life and legacy of one of the most remarkable commanders of the American Revolution, Nathanael Greene.

Born into a Rhode Island Quaker family and raised as an ironmaster, Greene’s path to military leadership was anything but ordinary. Yet he would rise to become one of George Washington’s most trusted generals, playing a decisive role in the Southern Campaign of the Revolutionary War. Howell and Allison explore Greene’s unlikely rise from self-educated militia officer to strategic mastermind, whose campaigns in the Carolinas reshaped the course of the war.

The conversation also examines Greene’s enduring legacy, from the preservation of his Rhode Island home to the broader challenge of remembering Revolutionary figures whose leadership unfolded far from the famous battlefields of Lexington and Concord. What made Greene such an effective commander, and why does his story still matter today?

Join us for a lively exploration of strategy, character, and the complicated legacy of one of the Revolution’s most brilliant generals.

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