(upbeat music) - Hello, and welcome to "Prairie Pulse."

Coming up a little bit later in the show, we'll hear music from Blue Red Roses.

But first, joining me now is our guest, Dr. Donald Johnson, associate professor at NDSU of history and author of the acclaimed book "Occupied America: British Military Rule and the Experience of Revolution."

Dr. Johnson, thanks so much for joining us today.

- Thank you for having me.

- Before we get to your book, tell the folks a little bit about yourself, maybe your background, where you're originally from.

- Sure, I grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC in Maryland.

And I received my, I did my graduate training at Northwestern University in Chicago.

And I've been here in Fargo and at NDSU for almost eight years now, you know, kind of coming up to teach this stuff at NDSU.

You know, I kind of got interested in the Revolution and early American history more generally just kind of growing up around the capital.

You know, we, my mother was a school teacher, so, we didn't have a ton of money growing up.

And so, a lot of what we did for fun over the summer was kind of go downtown and see monuments and museums and things like that.

And that really kind of gave me the history bug to go on and explore this a little bit more.

- Yeah, Washington, DC can do that for you, to anybody.

- [Donald] Absolutely.

- But, you know, we're close to July 4th as we are talking here, and your specialty being colonial America, you know, again, was that what sparked your interest in that?

Was being, growing up around DC and all that?

- Yeah, I mean, first growing up around DC and then, specifically, kind of on the book, which is about military occupation in the American Revolution, you know, that, I started writing it in graduate school.

And it was around the time of kind of the height of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan in the United States.

And it kind of got me thinking about different circumstances and the ways that different populations react to civil wars and revolutionary movements and hostile military occupations.

And it just got me thinking kind of, as I read more and more about the revolutionary time period, you know, that no one had really studied exactly what happened kind of, with the British military occupations, at least in a systemic way.

And so, I wanted to kind of look at how the experience of military occupation during the eight years of war, 1775 through 1783, and how that kind of shaped Americans' political consciousness and changed their opinions in both directions about the British Empire and the revolutionary movement.

- Well, and again, a lot of people just look at July 4th as a holiday.

- Right.

- But maybe we should think about what it's all about.

So, what really led the American Revolution, and what did Great Britain specifically do to sort of alienate the colonists?

- Yeah, I mean, the simple answer is taxation.

You know, I mean that's kind of the textbook answer, right, is the idea that there were taxes that were levied on the colonists by Great Britain, specifically by the Parliament, which was seeking to kind of recoup some war debt from a previous struggle, the French and Indian War.

And, you know, the simplest answer is that American colonists resented these taxes, kind of remonstrated against them for about a decade.

And when peaceful measures didn't work, they resorted to kind of more radical ideas and more, and, eventually, armed protest and rebellion.

The more complicated story is how the colonies fit into the British Empire more generally.

The British Empire was founded on an idea, and, you know, we kind of think of this as a little bit counterintuitive today, where we think of the revolution as this struggle of kind of liberalism or republicanism against a tyrannical empire.

In fact, in the 18th century, Great Britain and the British Empire was one of the freest societies on earth.

It was governed ever since 1688 by a constitutional monarchy, one that still stands today.

And the problem was representation.

The problem was that Parliament was levying taxes like the Stamp Act, the Sugar Act, the Townshend Duties, and eventually the tea tax, without going through what many colonists saw as proper constitutional channels.

The idea being that under the British system, Parliament could only levy taxes if people were represented in that body.

And Americans, you know, did not have representation in Parliament.

And so, a lot of the arguments, you know, and we kind of tend to simplify this as American colonists saying, you know, well, we don't wanna pay any taxes.

What you actually see from a lot of, especially the early revolutionary leaders, is arguments that says, you know, we're willing to pay these taxes.

We're willing to, you know, do whatever we need to do to contribute to the upkeep of the empire, but we want to do it in ways that are decided by our legislators.

So, essentially, they're saying, send us the bill and we'll figure out how to pay it, but don't kind of impose these duties and taxes on us externally.

- Well, can you talk a little bit about, you know, not everybody was for the revolution.

So, some of the colonists, obviously, probably wanted to remain with Britain.

- Absolutely.

I mean, the classic estimate is, John Adams wrote in 1776 that around a third of the population was gung ho for independence or for revolution.

About a third of the population could swing either way.

And then about a third of the population was fundamentally loyalist, wanted to remain with Great Britain.

A lot of these people were folks whose livelihoods depended on the empire, the United, or what became the United States was an integral part of a transatlantic and even kind of worldwide British economy.

There were goods, you know, trans shipped from New York that came from India, that came from China, that came from South America and the Caribbean as well as from Europe.

And a lot of the people, especially in port cities and especially kind of those with mercantile interests were very invested in that and worried that independence or a prolonged rebellion would interrupt those trade links and that kind of economic prosperity.

The other main element of it was, and more and more historians are are demonstrating now, was kind of a cultural and religious aspect.

A large proportion of colonial Americans were Anglicans.

And the head of the Anglican Church is the the king or queen of England.

And so, many of them saw kind of a rebellion against the monarch as kind of a rebellion against the head of their church and against their religious faith.

And then, yeah, finally, the American colonists, you know, even up through 1775, 1776, saw themselves as fundamentally British and kind of culturally, as well as politically, and many didn't want to give up that link to the mother country.

- Yeah, and of course still intrigued with the royalty as doing today.

- [Donald] Exactly.

Exactly.

- Right, you know, talk about the Declaration of Independence just a little bit.

- [Donald] Sure.

- You know, why the importance of it even though Britain still occupied America at the time?

- Yeah, I mean, and the importance is kind of, because there were British troops and kind of a lot of British power remaining in North America.

So, the Revolution actually, you know, it begins early in 1775, you know, over a year before the Declaration of Independence is actually ratified by the Continental Congress.

It begins kind of with these sporadic regional battles Lexington and Concord in April of 1775 is kind of the big one, but there's also skirmishes in Virginia and South Carolina, New Hampshire, New York City, and everywhere.

And for about a year, it was nearly a local affair.

The Continental Congress existed, and, you know, was trying to coordinate things, and certainly built up institutions like the Continental Army, which is formed in the summer of 1775.

But there was no clear kind of unified resistance, at least at the kind of inter colonial level.

What there was were local revolutionary committees and statewide, or, at the time, kind of colony wide congresses and conventions that were kind of governing local areas and beginning to remove British officials from power.

But there needed to be kind of a larger coordinating effort from above.

The other part of it was there needed to be a state.

You know, the British colonies in rebellion didn't have as much standing as they would as an independent country.

And so, in order to seek help, for example, from potentially friendly powers like France and Spain and Russia, and the Netherlands, the United, or the Continental Congress decided that they needed to define kind of their own agenda as a nation building project, as kind of an independent nation which would make it easier kind of diplomatically for these other countries, which were rivals of Great Britain and were anxious to kind of stick a, put a stick in their eye, that the United States was actually kind of a country and that it wouldn't go on and kind of just go back to Great Britain once the war was done.

- Yeah, and with that, how did the Colonial Army defeat Britain?

Of course, when you think about it, they had to be the underdog, and would think that they didn't have the superior military strength.

- They absolutely did not.

You know, and at no point in the war did the Continental Army or colonial forces ever have, you know, either a numerical, or certainly a training advantage over the British Army.

The British Army coming out of the French and Indian War was one of the, if not the most, fearsome fighting force in the world.

What the revolutionaries were able to do was adopt a very specific strategy of avoiding major battles.

And it's what military historians call kind of a Fabian strategy where, essentially, the goal is to keep the army as intact as possible and in the field.

And the idea being that the British Army, which was a thousand miles from home, under supplied, increasingly inable to get food and provisions in North America, would eventually kind of get tired of the fight and sue for peace.

The other aspect of it was diplomatic, and in kind of two folds.

One was aimed at Great Britain.

The idea that if they could show that the army couldn't necessarily outright defeat the British Army but could cause them enough headaches, then Parliament, which already had a number of people sympathetic to the American cause in it, would eventually kind of force King George to stop the war and negotiate a settlement.

And the other diplomatic angle being with those other countries, with France and Spain and the Netherlands, especially, but especially with France, who was the other kind of major empire, major European empire of the period.

And it was a lot of kind of deft diplomacy by Benjamin Franklin and John Adams and others, along with kind of a crucial military victory at Saratoga, which brought the French into the war, and that not only added troop strength to the North American theater, but it made Britain defend its empire all across the world.

And so, the French began striking British Caribbean islands.

They began prepping for an invasion of Ireland and potentially an invasion of Britain itself.

And so, it forced Britain to kind of reconsider the conflict, not just as suppressing a rebellion, but as fighting kind of a worldwide imperial war, in addition to the Continental Army.

- Yeah, and, you know, most people know about Washington, Jefferson, Madison.

You mentioned Franklin and Adams, but who are some of the other key figures who helped shape this young nation?

- Sure, I think a couple of really, you know, names that people might know, but not know why are people like John Dickinson.

You know, Dickinson, it's hard to overstate his importance, especially in the early periods of the Revolution.

In the 1760s, under a pseudonym of the Pennsylvania Farmer, he wrote several kind of widely published tracts, repudiating Parliament's right to tax the colonies without representation and proposing a kind of negotiated solution, a kind of Atlantic parliament or representation for the colonies.

He also drafted, at the very last moment, in 1775, what we now call the Olive Branch Petition, which was essentially a document the Continental Congress sent to George III listing their demands and saying kind of, you know, we're willing to have peace, but if we don't hear something from you, if we don't, you know, have any movement on Parliament's end, we're gonna go to war.

Another figure that I think deserves a lot more recognition, especially nowadays, is George Mason.

Mason was a Virginian, a planter, a neighbor of George Washington, a prominent lawyer.

And he drafted, he had a hand in drafting Virginia's first constitution, but his main contribution was the Virginia Declaration of Rights.

And it was America, the first kind of articulation of fundamental rights that were guaranteed to Americans and to all humankind.

This is in kind of late '75, early '76.

So, I'd say, yeah, I'd say Dickinson, Mason, and a lot of these early revolutionaries, the third and final name I'll mention is Samuel Adams.

You know, we tend to think of him as just kind of a guy on a beer bottle now.

And actually, it's Paul Revere on the beer bottle.

It's not even Samuel Adams, but he was crucial in organizing the resistance in Boston.

He was the mastermind of the Boston Tea Party.

And a lot of that kind of early resistance that spurred the colonists to armed resistance.

In fact, it's, one of the factors that caused the outbreak of violence at Lexington and Concord was an order to arrest Samuel Adams and his his co-conspirator, John Hancock, that on, in April of 1775, that sent troops out to Concord.

- You know, despite various interpretations and the addition of amendments, how or why has the Constitution survived over 200 years?

- I think really because of its flexibility.

You know, it allows different states to govern, for the most part, kind of based on the interests of their population, you know.

Aside from the Bill of Rights and future amendments, it doesn't really spell out doctrinaire things or kind of how states or counties or towns or even anything should be run.

It guarantees each state a republican form of government.

It guarantees representation of free people.

And, this is amended in the Civil War to include all people, and to abolish slavery.

And it creates this framework by which there's a strong national government which can pursue things like defense of the country, diplomacy, internal policing and taxation, but also which leaves certain elements to local governments.

And I think, you know, it's kind of that sweet spot between kind of the British system, which is that kind of overarching parliament and kind of what the Americans were fighting for in the Revolution, which was more local autonomy, more freedom for kind of local towns and counties and states.

- You know, I know you teach some courses.

Do you find students are interested in the time period?

Or do they not know much about it when they come to class?

- Both.

You know, my class on revolutionary America is consistently the best enrolled of any of the classes I teach.

You know, this past year, actually had a waiting list for the first time on that.

And, you know, I feel like, and it's one of the classes that gets the most diverse student body.

I mean, most of my classes, it's a lot of history majors, education majors, you know, people who are pursuing this field.

In my revolution class, it's, you know, it's a lot of people from all angles of the university, right.

We got engineering, business, ag, people like that.

So, I find there's tremendous interest, but the students don't come in with a very clear picture.

They come in knowing certain things about the founding fathers.

They know, you know, maybe a couple of battles in the Revolution.

They might have read about George Washington or Benjamin Franklin, or watched some of the excellent kind of PBS documentaries that are out about these things.

But they don't come in really with, and I find that they end up surprised by just how messy the time period was and how complex it was.

- Well, we are out of time.

So, with your book, if people want to get a copy of your book, where can they go?

- Pretty much anywhere books are sold.

They have copies at the Barnes & Noble in Fargo.

I believe also at Zandbroz downtown, and always kind of on the Pennsylvania University Press website or the Jeff Bezos company that, you know, I don't know if I should mention.

- Well, anyway, so, thank you so much for joining us today.

- Absolutely.

It was a pleasure.

- All right.

Stay tuned.

There is more to come.

(upbeat music) Blue Red Roses from Battle Lake, Minnesota craft melody laden hooks with an organic groove and nostalgic sound.

Mary and Dan Olson collaborate in their songwriting process, and their chemistry on stage is genuine and inviting.

(upbeat music) ♪ Roses going strong ♪ ♪ More than an hour for a little something ♪ ♪ Taking on the town ♪ ♪ If the home's where the ghosts go dancing ♪ ♪ And dark days are gone ♪ ♪ I'm undecided ♪ ♪ There's no right or wrong ♪ ♪ No sight, no blindness ♪ ♪ Is it the other way around ♪ ♪ Out of control's never felt so frightening ♪ ♪ You and I, we been getting dizzy ♪ ♪ Stop spinning ♪ ♪ Let's walk off the world tonight ♪ ♪ Walk off the world tonight ♪ ♪ You and I, we been getting dizzy ♪ ♪ Stop spinning ♪ ♪ Let's walk off the world tonight ♪ ♪ Let's walk off the world tonight ♪ (upbeat music) ♪ Duck down the alley ♪ ♪ I can't escape from the advertisements ♪ ♪ My cell is vibrating ♪ ♪ My soul's becoming more dependent ♪ ♪ Dark days are gone ♪ ♪ Replaced by viber moments ♪ ♪ Hold up your phones ♪ ♪ Do you feel united ♪ ♪ I can't find my way around ♪ ♪ Out of control's never felt so frightening ♪ ♪ You and I, we been getting dizzy ♪ ♪ Stop spinning ♪ ♪ Let's walk off the world tonight ♪ ♪ Walk off the world tonight ♪ ♪ You and I, we been getting dizzy ♪ ♪ Stop spinning ♪ ♪ Let's walk off the world tonight ♪ ♪ Let's walk off the world tonight ♪ ♪ Let's walk off the world tonight ♪ ♪ Let's walk off the world tonight ♪ (mellow guitar music) ♪ I don't wanna lose it ♪ ♪ I don't wanna lose it now ♪ ♪ I don't wanna give it up ♪ ♪ It's a part of who I am now ♪ ♪ You say it's a matter of time ♪ ♪ That I find a way to live a new life ♪ ♪ I don't wanna lose it now ♪ ♪ I don't wanna lose it now ♪ ♪ I don't wanna lose hope ♪ ♪ I don't wanna live in doubt ♪ ♪ I don't wanna give it up ♪ ♪ It's a part of who I am now ♪ ♪ You say it's a matter of time ♪ ♪ That I find a way to live a new life ♪ ♪ I don't wanna lose it now ♪ ♪ No, I don't wanna lose it now ♪ ♪ I won't lose hope ♪ ♪ I know I'm the one to figure it out ♪ ♪ I won't lose hope ♪ ♪ I know I'm the one to figure it out ♪ ♪ I won't lose hope ♪ ♪ I know I'm the one to figure it out ♪ ♪ I won't lose hope ♪ ♪ I know I'm the one to figure it out ♪ ♪ I don't wanna lose it ♪ ♪ I don't wanna lose it now ♪ ♪ I'm not gonna give it up ♪ ♪ It's a part of who I am now ♪ ♪ You say it's a matter of time ♪ ♪ That I find a way to live a new life ♪ ♪ But I don't wanna lose it now ♪ ♪ No, I don't wanna lose it now ♪ ♪ Now ♪ - Well, that's all we have on "Prairie Pulse" this week.

And as always, thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008, and by the members of Prairie Public.