One for the Books: An Independence Day Interview with Historian John Ferling

As a lover of history books, not to mention as an editor of them, I've wished for a long time that there were more conversation to be found online about all the interesting work that historians are doing. There are certainly some lively websites and blogs, and a handful of excellent podcasts, but the avid history reader is underserved compared to the fiction lover or sports fan.

I think this is slowly changing--for example, I've been happy to see a growing community of historians and history enthusiasts on Twitter. (One quick way to find the latter is search under the hashtag #Twitterstorians.) But it's still a challenge to find in-depth discussion of new work in history, especially as serious books reviews have so drastically diminished in newspapers and magazines. 

So I'm making a modest effort to expand what's available with a new podcast, One for the Books, where I'll be talking to historians about their new titles, works in progress, and sometimes other topics. As I'm posting this on Independence Day, I could think of no better person to talk to than John Ferling, who has spent a long and productive scholarly career studying the American Revolution. He has just published a superb new book titled Whirlwind: The American Revolution and the War That Won It--a sweeping, and stirring, history of coming of American independence. Unlike many books on the Revolution, this one looks carefully at both the political struggle and the military one, and at how each of those influenced the other. Ferling also emphasizes--in a break from the last few decades of scholarship-- the economic factors that he believes drove the colonists toward a break from the mother country. 

Click the orange button above to hear the interview. You can also download it from SoundCloud or from Libsyn. I hope you'll enjoy this talk as much as I did and that you'll check back for future interviews; you should soon be able to subscribe to the podcast via iTunes and other sites, and I'll update this post when those feeds are active. I would welcome comments, positive or negative, about this interview, or suggestions about other authors you'd like to hear on the podcast. 

John Ferling

For more about John Ferling, or to buy Whirlwind, visit his website, which includes links to online and independent booksellers.

UPDATE- July 8, 2015: You can now find a dedicated webpage for this podcast at OnefortheBooks.net. You can subscribe to it via an RSS feed by clicking the symbol at the top of the podcast page, or by putting this URL into your RSS reader: http://oneforthebooks.net/rss. Soon it should also be available through iTunes and I'll update again then.

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