Revolutionary Beginnings

We all know how the American Revolution ends, but do we really understand its beginnings?

In the mid-1750s, far from Philadelphia, New York, Boston, or Charleston, and farther still from London, Paris, or Madrid, the choices made by British settlers, French colonists, and Indigenous peoples in a place they knew as the Ohio Country sparked a global war with revolutionary implications.

Nothing about their actions was inevitable, nor could they have known of what was to come.

We tell the story of the crisis that made a revolution possible beginning today with the launch of the newest podcast from RRCHNM’s R2 Studios, Worlds Turned Upside Down.

Season One explores the Seven Years’ War – the most important war in American history – and the unintended consequences of Great Britain’s victory over the French in North America.

It’s hard to imagine an American Revolution, a Declaration of Independence, or even a United States without the war. It’s even harder to understand why some of British American people who loved the empire at the war’s end could turn against it in the years that followed, how Indigenous peoples sought to influence events on their own terms, and how the conquest of New France reshaped the balance of power in the Atlantic world.

This story is as vast as it is intimate and small. To help tell it, we’ve partnered with an ever-growing team of leading early American scholars, whom you can learn more about below. In the show notes for each episode of the podcast, you’ll find a list of these scholars’ books and articles that will help you go deeper into the stories we tell over the course of the series.

As one of my mentors Dr. Karin Wulf once observed, “history is the context in which decisions are made.” We invite audiences to join us on this early American journey as we explore the history behind a revolutionary world we think we know, but in all ways, it’s so much bigger.

“The Crisis” begins now. Listen on your favorite podcast app or at R2Studios.org.

We gratefully acknowledge the following contributors to Worlds Turned Upside Down:

Fred Anderson, Ph.D. | Professor of History Emeritus, University of Colorado-Boulder
Zara Anishanslin, Ph.D. | Professor of History, University of Delaware
Rick Atkinson | Independent historian
Wendy Bellion, Ph.D. | Sewell C. Biggs Chair in American Art History, University of Delaware
Christopher Brown, Ph.D. | Professor of History, Columbia University
Trevor Burnard, Ph.D. | Wilberforce Professor of Slavery and Emancipation, The University of Hull (England)
Tara Bynum, Ph.D. | Assistant Professor of English, University of Iowa
Benjamin Carp, Ph.D. | Professor and Daniel M. Lyons Chair of History, CUNY-Brooklyn
Kate Carté, Ph.D. | Professor of History, Southern Methodist University
Christian Crouch, Ph.D. | Associate Professor of History and American and Indigenous Studies, Bard College
Kathleen DuVal, Ph.D. | Professor of History, University of North Carolina: Chapel Hill
Matthew Dziennik, Ph.D. | Professor of History, United States Naval Academy
S. Max Edelson, Ph.D. | Professor of History, University of Virginia
Hannah Farber, Ph.D. | Assistant Professor of History, Columbia University
Julie Flavell, Ph.D. | Independent Scholar (Scotland)
Patrick Griffin, Ph.D. | Madden-Hennebry Family Professor; Thomas Moore and Judy Livingston Director, Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame
Emma Hart, Ph.D. | Professor of History, the Richard S. Dunn Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania
George Ironstrack | Citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, Assistant Director, the Myaamia Center, Miami University (Ohio)
Maeve Kane, Ph.D. | Associate Professor of History, University of Albany
Jon Kukla, Ph.D. | Historian
Shira Lurie, Ph.D. | Assistant Professor of History, Saint Mary’s University (Canada)
Hayley Madl, Ph.D. student in Indigenous History | George Mason University
John G. McCurdy, Ph.D. | Professor of History, Eastern Michigan University
Alexandra Montgomery, Ph.D. | Manager, Center for Digital History, George Washington’s Mount Vernon
Brooke Newman, Ph.D. | Associate Professor, Virginia Commonwealth University
Mary Beth Norton, Ph.D. | Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History Emerita, Cornell University
Andrew O’Shaughnessy, Ph.D. | Professor of History, University of Virginia.
Hannah Knox Tucker, Ph.D. | Assistant Professor History, Copenhagen Business School (Denmark)
Serena Zabin, Ph.D. | Professor of History, Carleton College