Benjamin Carp, Ph.D.

Daniel M. Lyons Professor of American History | Brookyln College | Graduate Center of the City University of New York

Benjamin L. Carp is the Daniel M. Lyons Professor of American History at Brooklyn College and teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His latest book is The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution. He also wrote Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America (Yale, 2010), which won the Cox Book Prize from the Society of the Cincinnati in 2013, and Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (Oxford, 2007). He has written about nationalism, firefighters, wet nurses, Benjamin Franklin, and Quaker merchants in Charleston, for scholarly journals like Early American Studies, Civil War History, New York History, the William and Mary Quarterly, and popular publications such as BBC History, Colonial Williamsburg, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. He received his B.A. from Yale University and his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, and he previously taught at the University of Edinburgh and Tufts University.

July 29, 2025

Episode 17: The Tyranny

In the wake of the Boston Tea Party, Parliament passes a series of coercive and intolerable acts to punish the tea destroyers and bring order to British America. Featuring: Benjamin Carp, James Fichter, and Mary Beth Norton. ...
June 30, 2025

Episode 16: The Tea

British Americans' unquenchable thirst for tea and a looming financial disaster for the East India Company leads to a new crisis in North America when seven tea-laden ships are sent to the colonies in 1773.