Professor John McCurdy

speaker

426 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 17 Apr

Professor John McCurdy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.

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Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society · Sex Work in the American Revolution · 17 Apr 2026 podcast

And so there's an attempt to sort of bring everybody back in line with laws like the Stamp Act, the Quartering Act, the Sugar Act, the Currency Act, which the Americans hate because they see this as an infringement on their rights and also say, well, Parliament has never legislated us before.

And now Parliament is stepping in to do this.

So this will begin in 1765, this sort of what we might call misunderstanding or certainly change in parliamentary law.

And it takes about 10 years from that to progress to a full scale war.

Yes.

So there's a there's frustration and control.

And then again, the sense that the American colonies had pretty much been on their own, what Edmund Burke called salutary neglect, that the colonies did their best when they were sort of left alone.

No taxation without representation.

Yeah, exactly.

So the Americans would say Parliament is taxing us, but we don't have any seats in Parliament.

It gets pretty bloody.

So, again, they're about 10 years of back and forth before shots are fired at two small towns in Massachusetts, Lexington and Concord.

The British have sent a large army to Boston and they're trying to round up weapons and ammunition on the countryside.

And this knowingly leads to a confrontation and an exchange of bullets.

It takes about a year and a half, four or less, maybe about a year from those shots.

Those shots are in April of 1775.

to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia declaring independence, of course, 250 years ago this year on July 4th.

Then this begins a very bloody war, which lasts for eight years.

There was a sense that if these colonists have weapons, they're going to start using them against British soldiers, which they do.

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