Dr.

Josh Canale, thank you so much for joining us.

- Thanks for having me.

Excited to be here.

- Great.

Well let's, let's start with this.

I always like to know what drew you into history.

- So that's a tough question, but I always loved history.

Like even as a little kid and I can remember and maybe like fourth grade or so mean, I was always interested in like the presidents and that kind of stuff.

I'd buy those like books on like trivia.

And I had a fourth grade teacher who every week she'd have like, you know, individual reading time and I always had one of these like president's books and I was always reading, it was like chapters about the presidents and their times, the presidents and their times, you know, major events, things that were going on.

And she would say to me all the time like, you gotta read something else.

Like you cannot just read that book.

You have to finish a book so that you can move on.

And I was like, but I really wanna read this.

Like, I wanna know more about the history.

So I mean, I just always had this passion to like understand the past.

And as I got older I realized kind of like almost by accident that history was a way to answer the questions that I had.

You know, why are we where we are?

How did we get here?

What's the path to move forward?

So history was always kinda like this beacon, even when I didn't know it was a beacon, I guess for me, you know, calling me to these kind of stories and learning about people.

And it's some of the stories we really want to dive into today.

I bet one of those presidents you read about was probably George Washington.

Yeah.

But you know, so often when we think of the American Revolution especially we, we think of those big names.

Yeah, we think of our founding fathers, but what do we miss by not considering some of the stories of just ordinary people?

Yeah.

I mean, don't get me wrong, the big names are super important.

You, you, you can't have a revolution to be successful without a Washington at the leadership.

You don't have the Declaration of Independence without Jefferson.

But if you overlook those common people, you lose really the diverse story of what the American Revolution is.

And you miss people like Crispus Attucks for example.

He is one of the first martyrs of the revolution.

He's this mixed race, African native American sailor who's considered one of the first martyrs of the revolution dying on the streets of Boston during the Boston Massacre.

I mean, you miss the Daughters of Liberty.

You miss these women who to boycott the British taxes.

They decide we're not gonna wear British-made goods anymore.

We're going to make our own in this sign of sacrifice and patriotism.

You Ms.

Joseph Plum Martin, the Connecticut farm boy, 14 years old, who wants to serve at 14 because of what happened at Lexington in Concord.

He can't serve at 14, but he serves at 15 and he lives throughout the entire war.

He's at Yorktown.

He is also famously writes about like the trials and the sufferings of being a, a soldier and an underpaid underfed, underappreciated, rebel army.

I mean, you miss all these things.

If you just focus on the political and the military leaders, you miss that this was a divisive civil war.

It's complex, it's complicated in history.

We like to think it's like this straight line, nice and neat, but it's not, it's complicated.

And if you overlook the common people, you miss the complexities and you really miss that.

This was an inclusive story about the nation's founding.

Right.

An inclusive and complicated story.

Interesting.

You, you've mentioned so many Oh yeah.

Examples there.

But if you could just, again, an an ordinary person, if we could hone in on someone whose experience really helps us understand the revolution different.

So one name that you're probably not gonna forget, and I'll quiz you on this if I see you ever again, right, is George Robert Twelves Hewes, I mean mouthful of a name.

And he is like the Forrest Gump of the early part of the revolution.

He is literally everywhere.

It's so interesting to follow this guy's life.

But before the revolution even begins 1763, he is a shoemaker in Boston and he talks about this in his memoirs later in life.

He's like in his eighties and he dictates his memoirs and he talks about being invited to the home of John Hancock.

You know, that same John Hancock, that big signature of that big name, right?

And he's invited to Hancock's house and he talks about, as an elderly man, I was super nervous.

I got washed up, I got scrubbed up, I put on my best clothes, super nervous.

He has to go around the kitchen door, not the front door.

And he has to wait on Hamilton.

Hamilton comes and you know, receives them.

And these aren't friends.

This is a ritual between haves and have nots or whatever you wanna call it, right?

Social elites and working class.

And Hancock goes through the rituals and Hughes goes through the rituals.

He, you know, invites him to have a drink.

You have a good new year, all that kind of stuff.

But the revolution comes and Hughes experiences, the Boston massacre, he's there at the famous ting of a loyalist.

He's there at the Boston Tea Party.

He's a privateer, he's a militia member.

Something changes with him so that when he's an elderly man dictating those memoirs, he talks about his experience in the Boston Tea Party.

And he says, while we were there, he says, you know, I did recognize a face as we're throwing tea into the harbor.

He goes, and it was, it was Hancock, he says, and we kind of, we saw each other, we recognize, but we both go back to what we're doing, throwing that tea in.

Was Hancock there?

Probably not.

So it's like, does that matter?

It definitely matters because something changed in Hughes.

He has this transformative moment of the American Revolution where he sees, it's not Hancock.

This guy I was nervous about seeing it is the revolutionist put these guys on the same playing field.

They're equals now in Hughes's mind, even if he wasn't there, that's what the transformation can do to from subjects to citizens of a new country.

- Wow.

Some of these events were, were risky for a variety of reasons.

What kinds of risks were those everyday people taking that we may not appreciate today?

- I mean It's a divisive civil war and I think, we don't generally like to think about this, but it was a civil war.

We like to think it's two militaries engaging each other.

And most people are probably somewhat familiar that there were loyalists, right?

But making decisions about loyalty, that's a risky decision every day.

And it doesn't change throughout the war and the loyalists, I mean, you got patriots, you got the loyalists.

Loyalists are like 20 to 25% of the population.

When you like to dismiss them, it's like, oh, there was probably this small group, but they were pretty sizable.

And there's actually even a bigger group that most probably people aren't familiar with.

And that's a term the Patriots would've been very familiar with.

And that's the disaffected, you're not affected to the the Patriot cause that encompasses loyalists.

But that group grows from that 20, 25% I mentioned to include neutrals.

People just wanna survive, religious pacifists.

There's probably, you know, thousands of those guys.

People who don't wanna accept continental currency 'cause it's probably not worth anything.

It's paper money by a rebel government.

People who don't put candles in their window to commemorate a major event.

All these individuals are disaffected in the Patriots.

You're not with us, you're against us.

And they have to form a new government with these people in the community.

So they're gonna immediately start asking people, take a side, take an oath, make a decision, so to speak.

It's these committees, they use a lot of coercive tactics.

They, they monitor movement, they open mail, they imprison without a trial.

So every decision is a risky decision during a civil war.

That's a revolution.

- Do you have any specific story that really captures that tension?

- Yeah, I mean, just in general about how you're gonna publicly make a statement on your loyalty.

Let's go back, you know, 1765.

So a lot of people think, you know, the revolution is the war.

Even Adams says the revolution begins before the war.

Like that's where the revolution is.

1765 stamped act, the beginning of the protests.

In a lot of ways the stamped act is a tax on paper.

So newspapers, wills, deeds, contracts, it is everywhere.

It impacts everyone.

So everybody hates it.

There's protests, there's boycotts, there's all sorts of things.

And anyone who's associated with this kind of dreaded tax, they're going to get some anger from their neighbors and community members, Albany, New York, we can get a kind of cool example.

Albany's a small town, which most of these towns where most people probably knew of each other.

And there's a rumor circulating this one guy, Henry Van Shaack, he solicited the role, he wants to be the stamp collector.

So he gets called down to local tavern, a lot of politics at local taverns at this time.

He gets called down to this local tavern and he comes in and they start applauding him, Hey, he's just a great guy.

Everyone knows him and they're, they're trying to ingratiate themselves.

We just wanna know, did you accept this role?

Did you ask for this role?

And he's like, no, great.

They're like, absolutely, that's great.

How about take an oath that you never will ask for that?

And he's like, no, I'm not gonna do that.

And he leaves, he gets invited a second time, come back to the tavern.

I mean, if you're Van Shaack, I mean your fear levels raising up by the moment again, they say the cheers, the claps, he's a great guy.

But a little bit of like the booze, the hisses, the jeers, the criticism.

And they say again, take the oath.

And again, he's like, no, I'm not gonna do this.

He leaves, he gets word that they're getting angrier.

I mean, they're at a tavern, so they're probably drinking, right?

And that violence could be an answer.

So I mean, what do you do if you're Henry Van Shaack?

I mean, who do you go to?

Magistrates, local police.

Basically.

He goes to these local police and he's like, Hey, you know, I got the situation on my hands here.

Can you help me?

Absolutely.

Just one thing, you gonna take that oath?

Even the magistrate, even the magistrates wanna know that.

So he ends up fleeing his house because that group at the tavern that is in a tavern at one point swells to about 400 people.

And they're coming down the street to his house to demand at his house that he take the oath, he gets word.

'cause I mean, apparently a 400 person crowd is not quiet.

He hides out in the snow overnight to avoid them as they're throwing furniture through his windows.

Next day he comes to town and is like, I'll take that oath, right?

I mean, that's the tensions of revolutions, right?

And making these types of decisions.

When a community knows who you are, What do these stories reveal about our founding that really still matter and resonate today?

So the stories that still resonate today, I mean, I think, you know, participation in politics like that, that's something that's so important.

Then you can look at any primary sources and there's people that are getting involved in politics.

I mean, they're in boycotts, they're in, you know, they're in discussions in taverns, they're in committees, they're all sorts of places.

They're volunteering, they're learning, they're participating.

And in a lot of ways, you know, it's kind of interesting, the continental Congress, those big names again, they form what's called the Continental Association.

And it's this ambitious plan in 1774 in response to the British laws passed, the punished Boston for the Boston Tea Party.

And their plan, these big names, the Adams, the Washingtons, the Patrick Henry is we're gonna have a continental wide boycott.

No importing British goods, no consuming British goods, no exporting until these laws are taken off.

The thing is, the continental Congress, we forget a lot of times is they're a recommending body, an illegal recommending body.

They have no power, they have no authority.

They're sending these guys back to their home colonies like, you know, hopefully we'll do these things.

So they don't just have no authority, they also have no mechanism.

And in this continental association they've got all these suggestions.

And the last one is they say every town, every county, every village form a committee to enact these policies, go out there and do it.

And in that moment, you have a democratization of this revolution where 7,000 plus Americans who previously had almost no involvement in politics, are now empowered to be political actors, to get involved.

And they do some coercive things, like I said, don't get me wrong, but that idea of overnight, that you can have a change in a society that can turn people that from subjects to citizens is pretty, it's pretty profound just because they're participating in politics.

Amazing.

Dr.

Canal, thank you so much for sharing your time and expertise with us.

We really appreciate it.

- I appreciate it.

Thank you for having me.