America at 250: A View from Britain, with “The Rest Is History”

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. If I can generalize a little bit for one moment, we Americans are not terribly modest about our place in the world.

We think of the United States as not just the mightiest in the military sense or the wealthiest in the economic sense, but in in some way the most important, the most central, the city on the hill, in the famous historical phrase, the nation that others look up to or should. America rejected monarchy and asserted the right to self-rule during the revolution. And that was the great shot heard round the world, and everybody, supposedly, has been playing catch-up ever since. That's the prevailing view in a nutshell, the historical cliche.

Now my guests today have a very different view of the matter. Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland are the historians who host The Rest is History, a terrific podcast from the UK. And I wanted to see what America's 250th anniversary looks like from a few thousand miles to the east in Great Britain. So we're going to spend our program today with Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook of The Rest is History.

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