The Star-Spangled Banner, Jacobins and Abolitionists
"While France rises up, and proclaims the Decree, that tears off our Chains, and bid Millions be Free"- new research on the song which became the anthem for "the land of the free".
"Millons be Free" is a Jacobin song which originally celebrated the idea of the French Revolution, whose tune became the American national anthem. Oskar Jensen sings us the melody and tells us a story involving Alexander Hamilton, the advocate of women's rights Mary Wollstonecraft, Haydn and Hummel at a drinking society, a Liverpool lawyer William Roscoe and William Pirsson, a Chelmsford bookseller who immigrated to the USA.
Oskar Jensen is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, based at Newcastle University working on a project called The Invention of Pop Music: Mainstream Song, Class, and Culture, 1520鈥�2020. His books include Vagabonds: Life on the Streets of Nineteenth-Century London and he also worked on The Subversive Voice research project.
You can find more from his research on 主播大秀 Sounds in episodes of the Arts & Ideas podcast called Victorian Streets, Napoleon in Fact and Fiction and Eliza Flower and non-conformist thinking.
Producer: Jayne Egerton.
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