1776 and the Worldwide Drive for Freedom

**Brigid Bergen** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. I'm Brigid Bergen, sitting in for Brian today. I hope you're taking care of yourself. I hope you're staying hydrated and keeping cool. It is hot out there. As we continue to recognize the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on the 4th of July, you're probably going to hear the familiar story themes a lot. Philadelphia, the document, the founding fathers. But our next guest has written a history of the American Revolution that barely starts in Philadelphia at all.
Her book argues that the ideals we celebrate is ours. Liberty, equality, consent, and the pursuit of happiness weren't invented in 13 colonies and exported to the world. They were already happening around the world and the revolution grew out of that global moment as much as it shaped it. The tile comes from a less quoted line of Thomas Payne's, a founding father, Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. The chapters of the book open in not Boston, but in a slave trading castle on the coast of Ghana, a famine in Bengal, a besieged rock at Gibraltar, a Seneca cornfield in what's now upstate New York. Each one is a different window onto what freedom actually meant to the very different people living through this era, including the enslaved and the indigenous.
It's a bigger, messier, and maybe in some ways, more honest picture of how the United States came to be.
Sarah Pearsall is a professor in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University and author of the new book, Freedom Round the Globe, A World History of the American Revolution. Professor Pearsall, welcome to WNYC.

**Sarah Pearsall** (1:58)
So nice to be here. Thank you for having me.

**Brigid Bergen** (2:01)
Listeners, if you're old enough to remember the 1976 bicentennial, we want to hear from you. Fifty years later at 250, are you thinking about the Revolution or the Founding Fathers or themes of Independence Day any differently? What does freedom mean in 2026? What about democracy? Or if you remember the celebrations themselves of 1976, call and share your stories, the Stars and Stripes, everything, the parades. Call and tell us what you remember.
212-433-WNYC, the number 212-433-9692.
You can call or text that number. Professor Pearsall, let's talk about the title of your book. As I mentioned, it comes from Thomas Paine, political philosopher and pamphleteer of the American Revolution. Patriots love to quote common sense, calling America, quote, an asylum for mankind, but you point out the line right before it, freedom has been hunted round the globe. So what did Paine mean and why did you build the whole book on that lesser known phrase?

**Sarah Pearsall** (3:10)
Well, I became very interested in his idea about freedom being hunted. What he meant really was that freedom was being hunted down and destroyed around the globe, that there was a lot of oppression in a global register across a lot of different places. But of course, it also for me was an interesting launching point to think about how people around the globe were looking for, searching for, hunting for freedom. And freedom, of course, has held different meanings for people.

**Brigid Bergen** (3:53)
So, the usual story, of course, is that in 1776, the idea of liberty went out into the world.
You argue it ran the other way. That, you know, walk us through some of that. What were people in Bengal or the Caribbean or West Africa already saying about slavery and freedom before the Declaration was drafted?

**Sarah Pearsall** (4:16)
Well, in fact, it was quite a lively discussion. And in part, because of British imperial victories in the Seven Years' War, which ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1763, the British Empire was enlarged. There were many more British colonies, including in Canada, including in the Floridas, including in the Caribbean, and also new kinds of forts and entrepôse of empire in places like India, in places like West Africa. And in fact, it's the acceleration of slavery as both a literal experience, as for example, in those West African slave trading forts, but also in a lot of other places, as well as a symbol of oppression by this new imperial government.
It's in fact that acceleration that is making people think more about freedom and what it means. And I think if we start to see that bigger picture, then we actually have a more honest accounting. And we also see in fact what happened in the 13 colonies with which people are familiar in new ways.

**Brigid Bergen** (5:43)
I understand you made a formal rule for yourself while writing this book. Every single chapter has to begin somewhere other than the 13 colonies. A tavern in St. Kitts, a hall at Versailles.