The Nation Was Born Bickering

Rick Atkinson on the Revolution we misremember

Rick Atkinson has spent thirteen years living inside the American Revolution. He talks about the founders like friends because he’s pored over letters and diaries from the patriots and the British. As Rick tells it, everyone in the story is more interesting than we imagine. King George is far more nuanced than the Hamilton portrayal (but we still love Jonathan Groff forever). British soldiers were more skilled and more emotionally strained than the “lobster backs” characterization captures. And the founders weren’t just fighting the British. The Revolution was also a terrible, violent, bloody civil war.

In Rick’s riveting, painstakingly-researched telling, America was born bickering and still manages to make progress. Rick doesn’t buy into American exceptionalism, but he sees parts of our past and our opportunities as exceptional. This conversation was the perfect semiquincentennial celebration for me. I hope it will be for you, too. - Beth

Topics Discussed

• The Revolution as America's first civil war

• Why Britain lost a war it was expected to win — and the role of allies

• The human cost: Valley Forge and the letters of Sergeant Oliver Reed

• The women of the Revolution and "remember the ladies"

• Reliable and unreliable narrators in history

• American exceptionalism, reconsidered

• Outside of Politics: the glory of fair food

Want more Pantsuit Politics? Subscribe to ensure you never miss an episode and get access to our premium shows and community.

Episode Resources

• The Fate of the Day, Volume 2 of the Revolution Trilogy (Rick Atkinson)

• The British Are Coming, Volume 1 of the Revolution Trilogy (Rick Atkinson)

• The Liberation Trilogy, Atkinson’s WWII histories (Macmillan)

• John Adams, the biography Atkinson references (David McCullough)

• John Adams, the HBO miniseries with Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney (HBO)

• The American Revolution, the Ken Burns documentary (PBS)

• Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, full text (Library of Congress)

• The Declaration of Independence, full transcription (National Archives)

Episode Transcript

Coming soon…

Show Credits

Pantsuit Politics is hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers. The show is produced by Studio D Podcast Production.

Our theme music was composed by Xander Singh with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima.

Our show is listener-supported. The community of paid subscribers here on Substack makes everything we do possible. Special thanks to our Executive Producers, some of whose names you hear at the end of each show. To join our community of supporters, become a paid subscriber here on Substack.

To search past episodes of the main show or our premium content, check out our content archive.

This podcast and every episode of it are wholly owned by Pantsuit Politics LLC and are protected by US and international copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property laws. We hope you'll listen to it, love it, and share it with other people, but not with large language models or machines and not for commercial purposes. Thanks for keeping it nuanced with us.