This week on Dave Does History on Bill Mick Live, we kicked off a historic journey—one that charts the long and winding road from the colonial village green to Independence Hall. The mission? To understand not just what happened in 1776, but why it happened—what stirred the soul of a people to throw off the world’s most powerful empire in the name of something they called liberty.
In this first episode of our new series, Dave lays the cornerstone by drawing a sharp and necessary distinction between two words we often treat as interchangeable: freedom and liberty. With stories ranging from Captain Levi Preston’s 1840s recollections to the tale of Joseph in Genesis, Dave shows how liberty—unlike mere freedom—is a deeply rooted condition of the soul. It is not the ability to do whatever one wants. It is the right to self-govern, the responsibility to live uprightly, and the power to say no to tyranny.
Levi Preston did not go to war because of taxes or tea. He went to war because “we had always been free, and we meant to be free always.” That simple phrase echoes across the centuries as both a rebuke to our modern complacency and a reminder of our noble inheritance. Liberty was not an abstraction to men like Preston—it was a habit, lived and taught, passed down not in textbooks but in village councils, church pews, and family stories.
As we begin this march toward July 4, 2026—the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—Dave challenges us to look inward. Do we still carry liberty in our hearts? Do we understand it as our Founders did: as ordered liberty, not license… as responsibility, not indulgence?
If not, we risk losing it—not to foreign tyrants, but to our own indifference.
So grab your walking stick and your moral compass. The road to 1776 is long, and the ghosts of those who walked it first are watching to see if we still understand what they fought for.
DAVE DOES HISTORY 
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