Twelve episodes on the world that produced the founding — the colonial labor systems, the tax disputes, the intellectual inheritance, the land laws, the economic structures, and the events that turned grievance into revolution. Reading the founders without this context is reading without understanding what they were responding to.
Parliament repealed the Stamp Act on March 18, 1766. On the same day it passed the Declaratory Act — full authority to bind the colonies "in all cases whatsoever." The colonists celebrated the repeal....
March 22, 1765. Parliament passed the first direct internal tax on the colonies. What it actually said. What it taxed. Why the enforcement mechanism mattered more than the tax itself.
Parliament passed the Tea Act in May 1773. It reduced the price of tea in the colonies. Six months later, 342 chests were destroyed in Boston Harbor.
Five colonists killed. The town of Boston produced a narrative. Samuel Adams produced propaganda. And John Adams — a committed patriot — took the defense of the British soldiers. Six were acquitted.
Between 1773 and 1799, free and enslaved Black Americans petitioned Massachusetts, the Continental Congress, and the federal Congress using the Revolution's own language — "natural and unalienable rig...
The Declaration said all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights. The same men who signed it owned other human beings. This episode does not explain that away.
The primary documents from colonial labor systems — 1607 to 1776 — cover indentured servants, convicts transported under the Transportation Act, German redemptioners sold at the dock, and the Virginia...
In 1776, three-quarters of Virginia's tidewater land was legally locked in the hands of aristocratic families — impossible to sell, divide, or leave to anyone but the eldest son.
On July 31, 1790, a Quaker potash maker became the first person in American history to receive a patent. It was signed by George Washington and countersigned by Thomas Jefferson.
Before 1790, American printers routinely pirated English books because it was cheaper than paying American authors for new work.
Before you can own land you have to read the deed. Before you can patent an invention you have to write the specification. Before you can vote you have to read the ballot.
John Adams said the Revolution happened in the minds of the people fifteen years before a shot was fired at Lexington.