Lessons from the American Revolution | First Draft with Susan Demas & Historian Richard Bell

• Richard Bell’s The American Revolution and the Fate of the World reframes the Revolution as a global conflict, not a local uprising.

• Myths of moral inevitability collapse under the reality of chaos, contingency, and worldwide consequence.

• Enslaved, Indigenous, and immigrant lives were central to both the Revolution’s victories and its unfinished promises.

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In The American Revolution and the Fate of the World, Richard Bell dismantles the storybook myth of America’s founding, revealing the Revolution as a global war that reshaped economies, empires, and identities far beyond Boston or Yorktown. Its rhetoric of freedom masked deep contradictions — victories built on the labor, displacement, and suffering of those denied the liberty it proclaimed. Enslaved people, Indigenous nations, and foreign allies emerge not as background figures but as co-authors of history, whose actions and sacrifices helped shape the modern world that followed.

The Revolution’s most enduring legacy, Bell argues, is the understanding that freedom is not a finished achievement but an ongoing, collective experiment. Two and a half centuries later, true patriotism lies not in blind reverence, but in honest revision — having the courage to tell the full story, even when it challenges the one we were taught to believe.

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