As many as 100,000 enslaved people fled successfully from the horrors of bondage in the antebellum South, finding safe harbor along a network of passageways across North America via the Underground Railroad. Yet many escapes took place not by land but by sea.

William Grimes escaped slavery in 1815 by stowing away in a cotton bale on a ship from Savannah to New York, enduring days without food or water before settling in Connecticut. Frederick Douglass disguised himself as a free black sailor, using borrowed papers to board a train and then a steamboat from Baltimore to New York, reaching freedom in less than 24 hours. Thomas Jones, a formerly enslaved man from North Carolina, escaped in 1849 by hiding on a ship bound for New York, relying on his maritime knowledge as a steward to evade detection and later reuniting with his family in the North.
This was a secret world of stowaways and the vessels that carried them to freedom across the North and into Canada. It sprawled through the intricate riverways of the Carolinas to the banks of the Chesapeake Bay to Boston’s harbors.

Today’s guest is Marcus Rediker, author of “Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea.” We see the Atlantic waterfront as a place of conspiracy, mutiny, and liberation.

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2025 marks the eightieth anniversary of Germany’s surrender and the fall of the Third Reich. Likewise, World War II is the single most studied conflict in human history. But most Western accounts offer a one-dimensional interpretation: the war was a noble crusade against fascism, creating a convenient parable about good and evil. But this depiction ignores a far messier reality. But what went through the minds of the actual heads of state that led their nations through the war? Did they fight according to our understanding, or did they want to defend their nations’ global empires and ancient legacy?

A case can be argued that World War II was not a battle in which democracy triumphed over totalitarianism but rather a massive colonial war waged by rival empires. The war formally ended the era of British and Japanese colonialism but established in their places the highly militarized Soviet and American states, whose access to nuclear weapons threatened the possibility of annihilation.

As we grapple with the legacy of the war and its influence on geopolitics today, historian and today’s guest Paul Thomas Chamberlin urges us to reconsider the conflict from a new perspective in his book “Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II.”

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As the American Revolution broke out in New England in the spring of 1775, dramatic events unfolded in Virginia that proved every bit as decisive as the battles of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill in uniting the colonies against Britain. Virginia, the largest, wealthiest, and most populous province in British North America, was led by Lord Dunmore, who counted George Washington as his close friend. But the Scottish earl lacked troops, so when patriots imperiled the capital of Williamsburg, he threatened to free and arm enslaved Africans—two of every five Virginians—to fight for the Crown.

Virginia’s tobacco elite was reluctant to go to war with Britain but outraged at this threat to their human property. Dunmore fled the capital to build a stronghold in the colony’s largest city, the port of Norfolk. As enslaved people flocked to his camp, skirmishes broke out. “Lord Dunmore has commenced hostilities in Virginia,” wrote Thomas Jefferson. “It has raised our countrymen into a perfect frenzy.” With a patriot army marching on Norfolk, the royal governor freed those enslaved and sent them into battle against their former owners. In retribution, and with Jefferson’s encouragement, furious rebels burned Norfolk to the ground on January 1, 1776, blaming the crime on Dunmore.

The port’s destruction and Dunmore’s emancipation prompted Virginia’s patriot leaders to urge the Continental Congress to split from Britain, breaking the deadlock among the colonies and leading to adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Days later, Dunmore and his Black allies withdrew from Virginia, but the legacy of their fight would lead, ultimately, to Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.

Chronicling these stunning and widely overlooked events in full for the first time is today’s guest, Andrew Lawler, author of A Perfect Frenzy: A Royal Governor, His Black Allies, and the Crisis that Spurred the American Revolution. He offers a new perspective on the American Revolution that reorients our understanding of its causes, highlights the radically different motivations between patriots in the North and South.

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