#1666 Ten Books on the American Revolution

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 25 August 2025

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Frequent guest, Lindsay Chervinsky, makes a late summer appearance to discuss Ten Books on the American Revolution. Ken Burns recently said the American Revolution was the most important event since the birth of Jesus. Our listeners have asked for advice about what to read as July 4, 2026, looms over American life. Lindsay is current with recent scholarship; Clay’s approach is more biographical. They agreed that you cannot go wrong with Rick Atkinson's trilogy on the revolution, and reading anything by Joseph Ellis is great. Clay recommended Ellis's book Passionate Sage, on John Adams, while Lindsay recommended Founding Brothers. Listen to the podcast for lots more great book recommendations and their lively discussion. This episode was recorded on August 18, 2025

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everyone, welcome to this introduction to this week's podcast.
0:03.1	Lindsay Chervinsky is back. Oh, how I have missed Lindsay Tervinsky.
0:06.7	And I know you have, too.
0:08.1	We've become very close friends.
0:09.7	We've met now twice in person.
0:11.4	We had a debate about which was the indispensable founding father in Vail.
0:16.0	And then at Weems in the northern neck of Virginia, we had a conversation about the founding fathers and religious liberty.
0:22.9	A huge and important and growingly important conversation in American life these days.
0:28.2	I believe, I will predict, that the Supreme Court reverses the 1960s case, which prohibited prayer in schools. I believe that is about to happen in the next term
0:42.0	or two. It's so great to have her. We did 10 books on the American Revolution. She had nominated
0:48.5	10. I nominated 10. I didn't know whether this program would be as interesting as it was, but it was.
0:53.9	And so I named a bunch, Chernouse, Hamilton, Joseph Ellis's, John Adams, Gordon Woods, the
1:00.3	Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, Merrill Peterson, Thomas Jefferson, the New Nation, David
1:04.5	McCullough, 1776.
1:06.9	And she named a whole bunch of her own favorites, which I'm writing down, and she's going to send
1:11.6	them to me.
1:12.6	We'll post them on the website.
1:13.6	We got into an interesting conversation about, you know, how, if you want to know about the American Revolution,
1:18.6	how actually do you go about it?
1:20.6	Well, you can read original source documents and were flooded with them thanks to the great
1:25.6	digital revolution, and so you could now spend the rest of your life reading documents from the period 1765 to 1809.
1:35.3	You could literally spend the rest of your life online reading documents about the founding generation,
	...

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