Liberty and the American Experience

Free Thoughts
E57 -

Jim Powell joins us for a discussion on how the tradition of liberty in the United States was established and how it subsequently flourished.

Download Episode
Subscribe:
Apple Podcasts
Google Podcasts
Spotify
RSS
Hosts
Trevor Burrus
Research Fellow, Constitutional Studies
Aaron Ross Powell
Director and Editor
Guests
Jim Powell

Jim Powell, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, is an expert in the history of liberty. He has lectured in England, Germany, Japan, Argentina, and Brazil as well as at Harvard, Stanford, and other universities across the United States. He has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Esquire, Audacity/​American Heritage, and other publications.

He is the author of several books, including The Triumph of Liberty: A 2,000-Year History Told through the Lives of Freedom’s Greatest Champions (Free Press, 2000), with a foreword by Paul Johnson. This book chronicles heroic struggles against tyranny, slavery, war, and mass murder. Powell’s book FDR’s Folly, How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression (2003) reported a wide range of findings—ignored by political historians and biographers—about the unexpected consequences of New Deal policies.

Jim Powell claims that liberty is relatively rare thing in the span of human history.

Why does it seem like liberty has gained a toehold and flourished in the United States in a way it hasn’t in other places around the world? And then, once it was established, how did liberty grow in America?

Show Notes and Further Reading

Jim Powell, The Triumph of Liberty: A 2,000 Year History Told Through the Lives of Freedom’s Greatest Champions (book)

Captain John Smith, Writings with Other Narratives of Roanoke, Jamestown, and the First English Settlement of America (book)

William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation (book)