“Before he was twenty, George Washington had bought and sold and parlayed himself into nearly three thousand acres of prime land,” William Hogeland writes in Autumn of the Black Snake: George Washington, Mad Anthony Wayne, and the Invasion That Opened the West. “If he could amass enough land this way, he might build plantations, grow tobacco, marry well, become a burgess, join the Ohio Company, maybe even buy an officer’s commission in the British army. … Prospects were lengthening, and the view lay westward.”

This third installment of Lapham’s Revolutionary America, a special series of The World in Time, brings together a pair of conversations about the westward and eastward beginnings of American empire. The episode opens with a conversation between Lewis Lapham and William Hogeland about the conquest of the Ohio River Valley. Then, Lapham sails the Atlantic with Eric Jay Dolin, author of Rebels at Sea: Privateering in the American Revolution. 

The ad-free, unabridged edition of this episode, available on the Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, concludes with  a reading of “The Battle at Fort Necessity: How a Young George Washington, Fortune-Seeking in the Ohio Country, Helped Start the Seven Years’ War,” an excerpt from Hogeland’s Autumn of the Black Snake, performed by the author.