Support for Ben Franklin's World and the Doing History to the Revolution series comes from the

Omaha Institute of Early American History and Culture and the William and Mary Quarterly,

the leading journal of Early American history since 1943.

Welcome to Ben Franklin's world.

Podcast about early American history with Liz Covert.

The study of history is key to understanding who we are and how we can affect the better future.

Ben Franklin's world will introduce you to historical people and events that have impacted and shaped our present day world.

And now here's your host, Liz Koval.

Hello and welcome to episode 154 of Ben Franklin's World,

the podcast dedicated to helping you learn more about how the people

and events of our early American past have shaped the present day world we live in.

Declaring independence from Great Britain required the formation of new governments.

And in the last episode of the Doing History to the Revolution series, episode 153, we explored

the rise of some of those new forms of government.

But why did Americans want new governments?

And how did their interactions and experiences with their old colonial governments

inform their decisions to create new governments? Barbara Clark Smith is a government's

decision to create new governments. Barbara Clark Smith is a curator in the Division of Political History at the Smithsonian's

National Museum of American History.

She wrote a book called The Freedoms We Lost, Consent and Resistance in Revolutionary America,

which explores both how Americans interacted with their governments before the revolution,

and how their participation in the revolution led to changes in government and the ways they interacted with it.

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