Washington and the American Revolution

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the first President of the US, George Washington, and the people and ideas that caused the American Revolution. In 1774 a tobacco farmer from Virginia with nice manners and a quiet lifestyle was moved to put himself forward as the military leader of the most massive rebellion the British Empire had ever suffered. George Washington had been a stout upholder of the status quo, regularly lending money to his ne’r-do-well neighbour simply to keep him in the plantation to which he had become accustomed. He even wrote a book on how to behave properly in polite society.What drove mild mannered George Washington to revolution? Washington may have been a moral man, but by anyone’s account he was no scholar, so who provided the intellectual inspiration behind that grandest of Enlightenment documents, the American Constitution.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Carol Berkin No other episodes
  Professor of History at The City University of New York
• Simon Middleton 3 episodes
  Lecturer in American History at the University of East Anglia
• Colin Bonwick No other episodes
  Professor Emeritus in American History at Keele University

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Programme ID: p004y28v

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/p004y28v

Auto-category: 973 (History of the United States)