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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Why did an antislavery movement emerge at the time of the American Revolution, both in the American colonies and in Britain? Christopher Brown asks this question and many more in Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. The American Revolution on both sides of the Atlantic brought together strands of thought and feeling which had been latent, as men and women grappled with questions of power and justice. Abolition was one way for Britons to restore their moral capital, and drew on many sources—economic, moral, religious. In a fascinating study Christopher Brown upends much of what we thought we knew about the antislavery movement, and allows us to see the 18th-century world with fresh eyes.

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We talk with historian Ryan Cole about memory, gratitude, and the young republic’s most celebrated guest. Cole's new book, The Last Adieu: Lafayette's Triumphant Return, the Echoes of Revolution, and the Gratitude of the Republic , explores the extraordinary 1824–1825 return tour of Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette. Nearly fifty years after the shots at Lexington and Concord, Lafayette’s journey across all twenty-four states became a rolling national reunion, a living bridge between the Revolutionary generation and a rising America eager to define itself.

Lafayette’s visit was more than ceremonial pageantry. It was a reaffirmation of republican ideals, a masterclass in civic memory, and perhaps the most unifying event of the early nineteenth century. From parades and banquets to emotional reunions with aging veterans, the tour rekindled revolutionary spirit at a moment when the nation stood at a crossroads.

This conversation reminds us that anniversaries are not simply about looking backward. They are about renewing vows. Lafayette’s farewell tour shows how a grateful republic honors its past while quietly shaping its future.

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. Why did Philadelphia matter so deeply to both the British and the Continental Army? How did strategy, logistics, and personalities shape the campaign that culminated in Brandywine, Germantown, and the winter at Valley Forge? And what did the occupation of the revolutionary capital mean for civilians caught between armies? Michael C. Harris tells this story in his new book, Fighting for Philadelphia: Forts Mercer and Mifflin, the Battle of Whitemarsh, and the Road to Valley Forge. This campaign around the new country's largest city, in the marshes, woods, and fields of Pennsylvania and New Jersey was a critical turning point testing the resilience of the American people and military and reshaping the war's momentum. .

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Who was Thomas Jefferson? Do we really need another book about him? Andrew Burstein has written other books on Jefferson, and his new book, Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate Portrait answers both questions with depth and grace. Jefferson was an extraordinarily interesting person, and Burstein navigates his ambition, friendships, rivalries, political controversies, and intellectual inquiries. Biography, Burstein shows, is not just storytelling but interpretation, recovering what Jefferson and his generation thought they were doing as they built a new nation, reconsidering the Revolution as lived experience rather than legend/ Burstein shows Jefferson and his contemporaries as vividly human architects of an unfinished experiment.

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On today’s episode of the Revolution 250 Podcast, host Professor Robert Allison charts a course across storm-tossed legal waters with historian Suzanne Amy Foxley, author of The American Experience of British Prize Law, 1776–1804.

From the decks of daring privateers to the hushed chambers of admiralty courts, Foxley reveals how the American Revolution was fought not only with muskets and cannon, but with writs, warrants, and meticulously argued cases. Together, they explore how captured ships became “prizes,” how neutral nations navigated perilous seas of diplomacy and commerce, and how early Americans learned to play a global legal game while still inventing their own nation.

Listeners will discover the human stories behind the paperwork: sailors gambling their lives for profit and patriotism, merchants insuring fortunes against the tides of war, and judges wrestling with British legal traditions in a world suddenly unmoored from the Crown.

It’s a conversation where maritime adventure meets courtroom drama, and where the Revolution emerges as a battle for legitimacy as much as liberty. Set your compass, trim your sails, and join us for a voyage into the law that helped shape America’s place on the world’s oceans

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