# Ep. 24: Court \& Country in the First British Empire **URL:** **By** Anthony Comegna **Published:** October 10, 2017 --- We’re inclined to look at 18th-century America and see the grand legacy of freedoms won, but what about the freedoms we lost? The colonists governed themselves and had little need for imperial management; colonists all over disparaged the idea of monarchy and Tom Paine smashed it to pieces; the world’s most powerful state lost its most vigorous appendages, and the settlers expanded all sorts of civil rights to new cohorts. We remember the triumphant victory of a new nation-state, and the gains made by some toward exercising a greater control over that state; but revolution bred counter-revolution. [“The Indictment and Trial of Sir Richard Rum”](http://www.teachushistory.org/second-great-awakening-age-reform/resources/sir-richard-rum-comic-play-about-drinking) Bushman, Richard. From Puritan to Yankee: Character and Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1967. Rorabaugh, W. J. The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1979. Smith, Barbara Clark. The Freedoms We Lost: Consent and Resistance in Revolutionary America. New York: The New Press. 2010. Young, Alfred, ed. Beyond the American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press. 1993.