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\nOn July 4\, 2026\, America will celebrate 250 years of independence. \;
\nWhen we think of the Am erican Revolution\, we often picture a parochial drama: thirteen colonies squaring off against the British Crown in a spirited bid for independence. But this version of the story is only half the truth&mdash\;and perhaps n ot even the most interesting half. In this riveting program\, historian an d author Richard Bell invites audiences to rediscover the Revolution as a world war that unleashed chaos\, opportunity\, and transformation across s ix continents. From the sugar fields of the Caribbean to the court of the King of Mysore\, from refugee camps on the Canadian frontier to political uprisings in Sierra Leone and Peru\, the war that gave birth to the United States was never simply America&rsquo\;s own. It was a seismic global eve nt that redrew maps\, toppled hierarchies\, catalyzed migration\, and acce lerated new movements for liberty&mdash\;and for empire.
\n\;In this program\, Bell traces the far-flung reverberations of the war throug h the lives of the people it displaced\, empowered\, or destroyed. Patrons will encounter a Native matriarch struggling to preserve a transatlantic military alliance\, a Prussian officer reinventing himself in a foreign ar my\, and a Boston schoolteacher shipwrecked thousands of miles from home. Along the way\, the Bell explores how the Revolution stirred a transoceani c refugee crisis\, ignited antislavery activism\, and inspired uprisings f rom Ireland to India. The program offers a bold new framework for understa nding the Revolutionary War not as a tidy founding moment but as a sprawli ng\, high-stakes struggle fought on land and sea\, shaped by commerce\, di plomacy\, propaganda\, and contingency. This is the American Revolution as you&rsquo\;ve never seen it before: complex\, global\, and astonishingly relevant to the modern world. \;
\nPresenter: Richard Bell is Pr ofessor of History at the University of Maryland and author of \;the b ook "Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and their Astonishing O dyssey \;Home" which was a finalist for the George Washington Prize an d the Harriet Tubman Prize. He has \;held \;major research fellows hips at Yale\, Cambridge\, and the Library of Congress and is the recipien t of the National Endowment of the Humanities Public Scholar award and the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship. \;His \;new book\, "The American \;Revolution \;and the Fate of the World"\, was published by Penguin i n November 2025. He maintains a list of upcoming events at Richard-Bell.co m.
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