The History of the Americans

It is August, 1680 in New Mexico. The rebelling Pueblo Indians have sprung their ambush and quickly killed 400 Spaniards. About 2500 survivors have concentrated in two groups, at the government buildings in Santa Fe, and 70 miles to the south at Isleta Pueblo. Each has reason to believe that everybody else has died, and they are alone. The Indians beseige Santa Fe, but Governor Antonio de Otermín leads a successful defense. Still, they are isolated and out of food, and determine to retreat to the recently established mission at El Paso. The southern group, under Lieutenant Garcia at Isleta, make the same decision. This is the history of that harrowing retreat, another amazing story of survival in the European settlement of today’s United States. It is also the only time in American history that rebelling indigenous peoples entirely expelled an established European settlement from their territory. The Spaniards would, of course, eventually reconquer New Mexico, but not until 1692. The settlement of the New Mexican refugees at El Paso would make it – for the moment – the third most populous settlement of Europeans in North America, and the functional beginning of the eventual New Spanish territory, Mexican state, Republic, and American State of Texas. Maps of the Pueblo Revolt Subscribe to my Substack! X – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Primary references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) John L. Kessell, Pueblos, Spaniards, and the Kingdom of New Mexico Charles Wilson Hackett, “The Revolt of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico in 1680,” The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association, October 1911. Charles Wilson Hackett, “The Retreat of the Spaniards from New Mexico in 1680, and the Beginnings of El Paso, I,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, October 1912. Charles Wilson Hackett, “The Retreat of the Spaniards from New Mexico in 1680, and the Beginnings of El Paso, II,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, January 1913.

In August 1680, an alliance of Puebloan peoples, led by a mysterious religious man named Po’pay (also spelled Popé), launched a surprise attack that forced the Spanish entirely out of New Mexico 82 years after they had first settled it. Po’pay’s rebellion would combine elements that will remind longstanding listeners of King Philip’s War in New England and Opechancanough’s surprise attack in Virginia in March 1622. Unlike the Wampanoags and the Pamunkeys, however, Po’pay would achieve his war aims. Along the way we examine the causes of the revolt, the preparations for the ambush, and the terrible first days setting up the siege of Santa Fe, which will be taken up next time. Maps of the Pueblo Revolt Subscribe to my Substack! X – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans #98 A Kingdom of God on the Rio Grande Primary references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) John L. Kessell, Pueblos, Spaniards, and the Kingdom of New Mexico Charles Wilson Hackett, “The Revolt of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico in 1680,” The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association, October 1911. Herbert E. Bolton, The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest Andrew L. Knaut, The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 David Roberts, The Pueblo Revolt: The Secret Rebellion that Drove the Spaniards

In 1677, the longtime residents of the old and remote county of Albemarle in northern Carolina, a collection of cranks and dissidents who had fled from Maryland and Virginia and were used to living free of interference from the Carolina proprietors and the Crown’s tax collectors, revolted against new attempts to collect duties on tobacco. Quite astonishingly, they succeeded! And not without some history comedy along the way. In the long history of the Americans, it is easy to ignore Culpeper’s Rebellion. Virtually all surveys of American history do. Albemarle was small, a literal backwater, and not even the most important part of Carolina. Historians of North Carolina, however, see it as a truer reflection of the American Revolution, a century later, than the other colonial upheavals of the 1670s. The Albemarle rebels were an early example, in their democratic tax-avoiding free-trading don’t-tread-on-me resistance, of ideas that would later be taken up throughout English North America.  Subscribe to my Substack! X – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans #158 The Free County of Albemarle #160 The Official Founding of North Carolina Primary references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) Lindley S. Butler, A History of North Carolina in the Proprietary Era 1629-1729 Noeleen McIlvenna, A Very Mutinous People: The Struggle for North Carolina, 1660-1713 Hugh F. Rankin, Upheaval in Albemarle: the Story of Culpeper’s Rebellion, 1675-1689

Twenty-five year-old bookseller Henry Knox, his 19 year-old brother Will, and teamsters led by John Becker, Sr., move a long “noble train” of 59 pieces of salvaged artillery from Fort Ticonderoga to Cambridge. The route crossed frozen rivers and the not-dreamlike Berkshire Mountains under unbelievably arduous conditions. As word spread, crowds of Americans would turn out to cheer them on, and serve them cider and whiskey. The artillery, when hoisted to the commanding heights of Dorchester above Boston, would drive the British from their long occupation of that city, and they would never return. It is a story of initiative, ingenuity, tenacity, survival, and charismatic leadership, and was perhaps the first miracle of many that would bless the American Revolution. Map of the Noble Train’s route (not reflecting all the river crossings discussed in the episode): Subscribe to my Substack! X – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Primary references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) William Hazelgrove, Henry Knox’s Noble Train: The Story of a Boston Bookseller’s Heroic Expedition That Saved the American Revolution Thomas M. Campeau, Major, U.S. Army, “The Noble Train of Artillery: A Study Comparison of Current Doctrinal Concepts of the Mission Command Philosophy in History.” (Master’s thesis, pdf)

Exactly 250 years ago, a rotund twenty-five year-old Boston bookseller named Henry Knox was riding his horse between Springfield and Worcester Massachusetts, on his way to George Washington’s headquarters in Cambridge. Washington’s ragtag, ill-equipped Continental Army had kept the British garrison under General Thomas Gage bottled up in Boston and Charlestown since the summer of 1675.  Washington had a whole load of problems, including insufficient arms for his men, many with expiring enlistments that threatened to shrink his force by half or more.  He also had almost no artillery, just 12 small cannon that Henry Knox, among others, had learned to operate while training with the local militia.  Geographically, the Boston of that era was essentially a bubble of land connected to the mainland by an incredibly narrow neck at Roxbury.  Two hills loomed over the city from across the water – Breed’s Hill in Charlestown to Boston’s north, which the British had captured at great cost in the summer, and Dorchester Heights, to Boston’s south, which the British had not captured. This is why it was very important – world historically important – that Henry Knox, on that day exactly 250 years ago, was commanding a convoy of artillery comprising 58 pieces and weighing more than 60 tons, pulled on purpose-built sleds by teams of oxen and horses all the way from Fort Ticonderoga, 300 miles away, over rivers and the Berkshires, during the coldest winter in memory. Within just a few days those guns would be in Cambridge, and not long after that, on the sixth anniversary of the Boston Massacre, would be entrenched on Dorchester Heights and open fire on the city and ships below.  Henry Knox’s big guns would drive the British from Boston, for good.               The tale of that “noble train” of artillery, as Knox famously referred to it, is one of the more astonishing stories of military innovation, indefatigable perseverance, and inspired leadership in a war that had more than its share of such moments. It was also among the most important, because it came at a desperate period when the Americans needed a victory or the entire project of the Revolution might have fallen apart. Map of Boston in 1775: Subscribe to my Substack! X – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Primary references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) William Hazelgrove, Henry Knox’s Noble Train: The Story of a Boston Bookseller’s Heroic Expedition That Saved the American Revolution Thomas M. Campeau, Major, U.S. Army, “The Noble Train of Artillery: A Study Comparison of Current Doctrinal Concepts of the Mission Command Philosophy in History.” (Master’s thesis, pdf) Alexander C. Flick, “General Henry Knox’s Ticonderoga Expedition,” The Quarterly Journal of the New York State Historical Association, April 1928.

In the last episode on the Timeline, “Bacon’s Aftermath 1: Diplomacy and Conspiracy 1677-1685,” we looked at the political and geopolitical aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion. This time we tackle the changes inside Virginia’s society and economy in the years following Bacon’s Rebellion, some of which may have been because of the Rebellion, and others of which probably would have happened anyway. The first half of the episode looks at the governorship of Thomas, Lord Culpeper, and his deft efforts to give effect to the Crown’s desire “to substitute the benevolent despotism of the king for the rapacious local despotism that had brought on one rebellion and threatened to bring on another.” In the second half, we consider the rise of Black slavery in Virginia and the decline of indentured servitude in the quarter century following Bacon’s Rebellion, the economic foundations of the shift, and the untended and somewhat surprising social consequence that by the early 18th century Virginia was a much more stable society than it had been when it had depended on English indentured servants. My Substack X – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Primary references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom John C. Coombs, “The Phases of Conversion: A New Chronology for the Rise of Slavery in Early Virginia,” The William and Mary Quarterly, July 2011. “An Act Concerning Servants and Slaves” (Virginia, 1705)

Matthew Restall is an historian and author of over forty books, focusing on the Spanish Conquest era in the Americas; on Aztec and Maya history; on the history of colonial Mesoamerica, primarily Yucatan but including Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize; on the historical African diaspora in the Americas; and on the history of popular music. Matthew is most recently the author of The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus, the topic of and inspiration for this conversation. Finally, he is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History and Anthropology, and Director of Latin American Studies, at Pennsylvania State University. We discussed the phenomenon of “Columbiana,” the vast mythology that has befogged the history and biography of Christopher Columbus, the man, almost entirely for purposes that he himself would not have understood.  His book, which I quite recommend, addresses nine such “lives” and the historical mysteries around them.  We touch on the four of those that I thought would most appeal to longstanding and attentive listeners – his early life and his pitching for the funding for the “Enterprise of the Indies” – which are the first two lives, and the curious resurrection of Columbus in the 19th century as the founding “grandfather” of the United States, followed by his last “life” – so far – as the great hero of Italian-Americans. This last leads to a discussion of the perception of Columbus today.  Along the way we go down numerous rabbit holes, including that there is, even today, a direct descendant of Columbus who bears the title “Admiral of the Ocean Sea.” Other relevant links Matthew Restall, The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus History Impossible Podcast, “War for the Frontiers of History and America (w/ Jack Henneman of The History of the Americans)”: Apple and Spotify Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus X – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans

This episode looks again at the causes of Bacon’s Rebellion in light of what we have now learned, before turning to the region of the Chesapeake in the years after the Rebellion. There are two big themes in the post-Bacon Chesapeake. The first, the subject of this episode, is geopolitical. After Bacon, what changed in intercolonial affairs, in the relationship between the Chesapeake colonies and England, and between those colonies  and the indigenous nations? The second theme, for part 2, is essentially domestic. How did Virginia itself change politically, economically, and socially, with a special emphasis on the terms of labor and the types of people performing it? Along the way we look at the crazed conspiracy theories that roiled not only Virginia and Maryland, but England, how they affected the various protagonists, led to the negotiation of the “Covenant Chain” between the Iroquois and New York and the other English colonies of North America, and how the end of Bacon’s Rebellion unleashed explosive growth of the trade in enslaved Indians from the Carolinas and points south. My Substack Check out the new merch store! X – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) James D. Rice, Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom Josias (Josiah) Fendall Other episodes mentioned Notes on Virginia 1644-1675 The Free County of Albemarle Rogues and Dogs and Fendall’s Rebellion

It is late January 1677 in Virginia. Loyalists under the command of Governor Sir William Berkeley had suppressed Bacon’s Rebellion just after New Year. Now Berkeley was prosecuting the surviving leaders of the rebellion, and loyalist units were looting the estates of wealthy Baconistas to recover losses they had suffered during the war. Then a fleet from London materialized at the mouth of the James, carrying three royal commissioners and a thousand “red coats,” English regular infantry. Their mission, per Charles II, was to suppress the rebellion – which Berkeley and his supporters had already done – and to discover the root causes of the rebellion. They were not prepared to intervene in a peace they had not fought for, which peace Berkeley was determined to shape to the advantage of his faction. Berkeley’s first interest was in justice for himself and his allies, the loyalists who had defended the government of the Crown; the commissioners were focused on the fiscal priorities of the Crown, and were therefore intent on moving beyond the war – bygones – and getting Virginia back to the important work of growing tobacco. There would be consequences. My Substack Check out the new merch store! X – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) James D. Rice, Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia Charles McLean Andrews, Narratives of the Insurrections, 1675-1690 Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom Stephen Saunders Webb, 1676: The End of American Independence Wilcomb E. Washburn, Review of Webb, 1676: The End of American Independence, Pacific Historical Review, May 1985. John M. Murrin, Review of Webb, 1676: The End of American Independence, The William and Mary Quarterly, January 1986.

Last episode ended with Sir William Berkeley, on the deck of a ship in the James, watching Jamestown burn to the ground in the wee hours of September 19, 1676. The rebels under Nathaniel Bacon were ascendant, and Berkeley resolved to return to his refuge on the Eastern Shore and plot the next phase of his increasingly desperate war. Little did he know that the tide of the war was about to turn again in his favor. This episode begins in London in the summer of 1676, where Crown officials were just beginning to figure out what to do about the turmoil in Virginia, over which they had incomplete and very emotional news. Charles II made some decisions with long-term consequences for Virginia. At about the same time, in a stroke of luck – good or bad, depending on one’s point of view – Bacon died rather horribly. He had done a good job building an organization with an orderly succession plan, but the rebellion had lost its most charismatic leader. A few weeks before Bacon died, at the end of September, the first of several armed merchant ships arrived in the Chesapeake, and after learning about the revolt their captains pledged their service to Berkeley. They would provide crucial support in an amphibious war against rebels along the James and York rivers. One of the captains, Thomas Grantham of the powerful 500-ton Concord, emerged as a courageous and wise diplomat, and would do more than anyone to end the rebellion in early January, 1677. At the end of the war, Berkeley mopped up, and prosecuted and executed most of the leaders of the rebellion. Richard Lawrence, however, disappeared, and was never seen again. The episode ends with the arrival of royal commissioners and a thousand English regular infantry at the end of January, which would be more bad news for Sir William Berkeley. My Substack Check out the new merch store! X – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) James D. Rice, Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia Charles McLean Andrews, Narratives of the Insurrections, 1675-1690 Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia

Virginia Governor Sir William Berkeley has fled to the Eastern Shore with a small group of loyalist planters and a detachment of perhaps only fifty armed men. Nathaniel Bacon has occupied Berkeley’s estate near Jamestown, and dispatched men to capture loyalist ships anchored there. Bacon’s “navy” has out in search of Berkeley, but Berkeley turned the tables in an audacious amphibious attack and grabbed control of the Bay and the rivers. While Bacon was mucking around in the Dragon Swamp hunting notionally allied Pamunkeys, Berkeley recaptured Jamestown. Loyalist victory seemed at hand, but Bacon forced Berkeley to retreat from Jamestown a second time in part by grabbing the wives of loyalist planters and using them as human shields, and this time the rebels burn it to the ground. At the end of the episode, it appears that the rebels had the upper hand. Little did they understand that the loyalist cause was far from lost, and the rebellion was, unbeknownst to anybody, on the brink of disaster. My Substack Check out the new merch store! X – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) James D. Rice, Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia Various authors, for the National Park Service, “Mapping the Dragon: AN INDIGENOUS HISTORY OF BACON’S REBELLION” (pdf) Charles McLean Andrews, Narratives of the Insurrections, 1675-1690

Nathaniel Bacon and his army of volunteers have returned from beating up on the friendly Occaneechees (Occaneechis) on the Roanoke River in southern Virginia. It is election day, and Henrico County will elect Bacon and his sidekick, James Crews, to the Virginia Assembly, which has been called into session on June 5, 1676. This episode describes the dramatic session of that Assembly, which began with Bacon’s arrest and ended with he and his army holding the Assembly at gunpoint. Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia, demonstrates his own flair for the dramatic along the way, but by the end of this episode has taken refuge with other loyalists on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Oh, and there is a “manifesto.” Never a good sign. Check out the new merch store! My Substack X – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) James D. Rice, Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia Matthew Kruer, Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America Nathaniel Bacon, “Declaration of the People,” July 30, 1676 Nathaniel Bacon, “Bacon’s Manifesto,” July 1676

The Susquehannocks, having successfully escaped from their beseiged fort on Piscataway Creek in Maryland, fled through the Virginia Piedmont to set up winter quarters on the James and Roanoke Rivers. In January 1676, they launched a measured counterattack. The settlers on the frontier panicked and evacuated. Rumors of war spread. The horrors of King Philip’s War loomed large, especially in the thinking of Sir William Berkeley, the governor. A fundamental debate over how to respond to those Susquehannock attacks set up the confrontation between Nathaniel Bacon and his populist – and it should be said, hard-drinking – frontiersmen on the one hand, and Berkeley and his loyalist supporters on the other. Along the way we consider Governor Berkeley’s background and the experiences that shaped him, and the political challenges that he now confronted. The episode ends with Bacon’s massacre of the Occaneechees (Occaneechis), heretofore allies of Virginia, on their island in the Roanoke River. Check out the new merch store! X – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) Matthew Kruer, Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom James D. Rice, Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia Various authors, for the National Park Service, “Mapping the Dragon: AN INDIGENOUS HISTORY OF BACON’S REBELLION” (pdf)

The year is 1675, and we are in Virginia. All kinds of social, demographic, fiscal, and economic pressures have been building for decades, and the common people are restive. There have been a string of small revolts and disruptions in the years since 1660, but they all failed for lack of effective leadership. The “masterless men” in the colony needed a leader, and the leader, when he arose, would need a cause. Nathaniel Bacon, a ne’er do well son of a wealthy gentleman in English, would be that leader. He arrived in Virginia in 1674 with a fat bankroll, sent there by his father after he got in a scrape with the law. By 1675 he owned two plantations, one of them at the falls of the James River, just at the edge of Indian country. The spark that would set off the chain of events that would lead to Nathaniel Bacon stepping forward as the leader of a rebellion would be the theft of some hogs by Indians in Northern Virginia who had been stiffed for payment in an ordinary trading transaction. The English colonials would blow their response, and blunder into war. Waging that war would be Nathaniel Bacon’s cause. Check out the new merch store! X – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Map of relevant indigenous nations c. 1675 (Credit Matthew Kruer) : Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) Matthew Kruer, Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom James D. Rice, Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia Charles McLean Andrews, Narratives of the Insurrections, 1675-1690

We are back in Virginia, finally! In my defense, offered in response to the many listeners who have asked for “more Virginia,” the thirty years before the Third Anglo-Powhatan War and Bacon’s Rebellion are almost blank spaces on published timelines of Virginia history, most noting only the legalization of slavery in 1661. Well, we are now on the brink of the civil war known as Bacon’s Rebellion, which was ramping up as the tide was turning in King Philip’s War in the spring of 1676. To understand that sorry state of affairs, however, we have to step back and look at the evolution of Virginia in the years between 1644, the onset of the last Anglo-Powhatan War, and 1675. How was it that civil war broke out among the English of Virginia during the tumultuous 1670s? This episode explores the root causes of the civil instability that led to Bacon’s Rebellion, and will therefore be more thematic than narrative. Along the way we consider the severe gender imbalance in Virginia, the sorry state of indentured servants, the persistance of a brutally high death rate into the second half of the century, the relentless efforts of Virginia’s great planters to control the growing population of “masterless men” who roamed the colony, and the arrival in the region of the Susquehannocks, much reduced from the peak of their power mid-century, but still a formidable military force. Check out the new merch store! X – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom Matthew Kruer, Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America “The Sadder But Wiser Girl For Me” (YouTube)

I got the idea for this episode talking to a bartender in Prague. The place was empty, and the fellow was garrulous and quickly said he loved American history, which naturally prompted me to suggest a podcast where he could find some. The barkeep called my bluff – “did I know who Augustine Herrman was?” Uh, noooo. It turns out he was a Bohemian – now we would say Czech – from Prague who became one of the wealthiest and most influential men in mid-17th century English and Dutch America, particularly in New Netherland and Maryland. He would live and trade in the early colonies for more than 40 years before his death in Maryland in 1686, and such diverse characters as Pieter Stuyvesant and Lord Baltimore would rely on him for their most sensitive diplomatic matters. Most famously, Herrman would draw the most detailed map of the Chesapeake Bay, at a time when maps were evidence in the settling of disputes between empires. Hermann’s map would, among other things, determine the border between Virginia and Maryland on the Eastern Shore, and – through twists and turns – play a role in the establishment of the colony of Delaware. The Czechs are understandably proud of Augustine Herrman, so in gratitude to that bartender and his surprising knowledge of 17th century America, this episode is about Herrman, through the story of his map. Augustine Herrman’s Map: Augustine Herrman’s woodcut of New Amsterdam, mid 1650s: X – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) Earl L. W. Heck, Augustine Herrman: Beginner of the Virginia Tobacco Trade, Merchant of New Amsterdam and First Lord of Bohemia Manor in Maryland Christian J. Koot, “The Merchant, the Map, and Empire: Augustine Herrman’s Chesapeake and Interimperial Trade, 1644–73,” The William and Mary Quarterly, October 2010.

Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify Dr. Phillip W. Magness is an economic historian and the David J. Theroux Chair in Political Economy at the Independent Institute. Magness’ research has appeared in multiple scholarly venues, including the Economic Journal, the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of Business Ethics, the Southern Economic Journal, and Social Science Quarterly. He is the author of several books including, most recently, The 1619 Project Myth, which is the subject of this conversation. Our conversation was wide-ranging, including an overview of the original 1619 Project of the New York Times, conceived of and edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones; how it was a departure from similar historical projects of the Times before it; the strengths of the 1619 Project; the particular shortcomings of the Project’s claims about the economic consequences of slavery; the attempt by the 1619 Project to tie slavery to capitalism; the actual anti-slavery origins of capitalist theory, starting with Adam Smith; the anti-capitalism ante-bellum arguments in the philosophical defense of slavery; the flawed scholarship of the “New History of Capitalism” school; the Project’s distortion of the importance of cotton to the American economy before the Civil War, and the strange rehabilitation of “King Cotton” theory; the criticisms of leading historians of the colonial and revolutionary era of Hannah-Jones’s claims about the importance of slavery to support for the American Revolution in the South; the status of the “20 and odd” enslaved Blacks who were brought to Jamestown in 1619; the varied influence of the Sommersett ruling in the colonies; Lord Dunmore’s famous declaration after the American Revolution had begun; Hannah-Jones’s dismissive response to academic criticisms of her claims; that Hannah-Jones was correct in her assessment of Abraham Lincoln’s advocacy of “colonization” as a solution to emancipation; the New York Times’s strange unwillingness to correct its 1619 Project errors transparently, as it would otherwise do in other contexts; the explicit political and policy agenda behind the 1619 Project; the slow walking-back of some of the Project’s most controversial claims via ghost-editing; the insertion of The 1619 Project in public school curricula; and how to develop a school history curriculum that does give a balanced treatment of the history of slavery and Reconstruction. X – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) Philip W. Magness, The 1619 Project Myth Nikole Hannah-Jones and other authors, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story An interview with historian James McPherson on the New York Times’ 1619 Project An interview with historian Gordon Wood on the New York Times’ 1619 Project Philip W. Magness, “The 1619 Project Unrepentantly Pushes Junk History” Jake Silverstein, New York Times Magazine, “We Respond to the Historians Who Critiqued The 1619 Project” (free link)

This is the last episode of our telling of King Philip’s War. We cover the fate of the last Algonquian sachems, including the daring capture of Annawon, and the consequences of the war for the Indians who fought it and the colonies of New England. We consider the wisdom of the war, and especially the morality, or lack thereof, in the fighting of it. Finally, we explore the fates of the main characters who were still alive at the end of the fighting. [Errata: Sam from Marietta, Georgia points out that in referring to the marker on Benjamin Church’s gravestone I said it was a Ranger tag, and it should be a “tab.” Good correction, insofar as I don’t need a lot of Rangers rolling their eyes, or worse.] X – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War James D. Drake, King Philip’s War: Civil War in New England, 1675-1676 Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War Matthew J. Tuininga, The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People Daniel Gookin (Wikipedia)

Maps of New England during King Philip’s War In May 1676 the tide of King Philip’s War had turned against the Algonquians of southern New England, but the New English settlers didn’t know it yet. They would soon. Suddenly, in a matter of a few weeks, the Algonquian resistance collapsed. This episode looks at that collapse through the eyes of Benjamin Church, whose men would finally catch and kill Metacom on August 12, 1676. Along the way, Church would persuade the Sakonnets, a Wampanoag group, to switch sides. They would teach him a new way of war, and Church would eventually be considered the “first American ranger,” at least by people who haven’t thought to give that credit to Nompash, the Sakonnet commander who taught Church. X – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Regicides on the Run! Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) Thomas Church, The History of Philip’s War: Commonly Called the Great Indian War, of 1675 and 1676 Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War Matthew J. Tuininga, The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People Eric B. Schultz and Michael J. Tougias, King Philip’s War Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War

Maps of New England during King Philip’s War March 1676 had been catastrophic for the settlers of New England. Algonquians allied with Metacom (King Philip) attacked all across the frontier, forcing the evacuation of far-flung towns in both Massachusetts and Plymouth, and destroying Providence, Rhode Island. The tide, however, was about to turn. The New English captured Canonchet, the leading military commander of the Narragansetts on April 3, 1676. Less than three weeks later, the Algonquians would win a decisive tactical victory at Sudbury, Massachusetts, but shortly thereafter their alliance would begin to fracture because of a shortage of food, a vicious epidemic, the dawning realization that the English had many more fighting men, and – perhaps most importantly – attacks by the Mohawks from the west. The coastal Algonquians, who had lived mostly at peace with the English for more than 50 years, were now between the ultimate rock and hard place. Along the way, both sides, but especially the English, would miss many opportunities for peace, and the war would continue in spite of catastrophic losses by both sides. X/Twitter – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) Matthew J. Tuininga, The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People  Eric B. Schultz and Michael J. Tougias, King Philip’s War. William Hubbard, Sermon of May 3, 1676, before the General Court of Massacchusetts.

Maps of New England during King Philip’s War After the Great Swamp Fight, Josiah Winslow turned away overtures from the Narragansetts for a ceasefire, incorrectly believing he had the upper hand. Instead, he pursued the Narrangansetts, stumbling into the “hungry march,” in which Winslow and his starving militia were lured to the north by the Narragansetts, who were moving to join the Nipmucs and the Wampanoags in attacks on Massachusetts border towns. February and March would see a string of catastrophic losses, from the English point of view, and thrilling triumphs, from the Indian point of view. Famously, the destruction of Lancaster would result in the capture of Mary Rowlandson, who would go on to write an account of her captivity that would be New England’s first bestseller. By the end of March, even Providence had burned, notwithstanding a last appeal from Roger Williams, his last meaningful appearance in history. The situation in New England was desperate. As often happens, however, for the English it was darkest just before the dawn. X/Twitter – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) Matthew J. Tuininga, The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People James D. Drake, King Philip’s War: Civil War in New England, 1675-1676 George Ellis and John Morris, King Philip’s War Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God

Maps of New England during King Philip’s War It is the fall of 1675, and “King Philip’s War” rages on. The English colonies of Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Connecticut have been at war with the Wampanoag nation and its powerful allies, the Nipmucs, since late June. The Indians are beating the English everywhere, in part because the English cannot easily distinguish friendly and neutral Indians from enemies. The still neutral Narragansetts were the most powerful nation in the region. Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth did not, however, believe that the Narragansetts were in fact neutral, in part because some of their young fighters had gone rogue and joined with Nipmucs and also because the Narragansetts would not turn over Wampanoag refugees who had taken shelter in their lands. Paranoic fear of the Narragansetts would lead the New English to the most catastrophic diplomatic and military blunder in the history of European settlement up to that time. This is that story. And don’t miss the “trees of death”! Errata: In this episode I describe a possible friendly fire incident late in the Great Swamp Fight in which a group of Indians emerged outside the fort and colonial militia fired upon them. A sergeant had yelled out that they were friendlies, but after hesitating Benjamin Church concluded that they weren’t and had his men shoot at them, during which exchange Church himself was wounded.  I speculated that Church might have been correct, insofar as I had not read that there were Indian allies along with the thousand or so English involved in that campaign against the Narragansetts.  Within a day of posting the episode, however, I read in James Drake’s excellent book from 1999, King Philip’s War: Civil War in New England, 1675-1676, that in there were, in fact, 150 Mohegans and Pequots there with the Connecticut Regiment. It still isn’t certain that Church was wrong and the sergeant was correct, but the presence of those friendlies with Connecticut’s soldiers obviously tips the balance against Church’s judgment. X/Twitter – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – The History of the Americans Podcast – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) Matthew J. Tuininga, The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War Thomas Church, The History of Philip’s War: Commonly Called the Great Indian War, of 1675 and 1676 The Great Swamp Fight (Wikipedia)

This is an encore presentation of a Sidebar episode we originally posted on Memorial Day 2023. It seems even more relevant today, strange as that may seem, consumed as we are now about questions of war and peace, and the role of elite universities, such as Harvard, in our own national project. On May 30 – Memorial Day — 1895, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., a Harvard man and then a justice on the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, delivered an address to the graduating class of 1895 in Cambridge.  The speech, known as “The Soldier’s Faith,” is in and of itself fascinating substantively and also for its indirect effects. Regarding those, Theodore Roosevelt, another Harvard man, read the speech some seven years later and determined to appoint Holmes to the Supreme Court on account of it.  Beyond that, the speech is incredibly prescient, in certain respects, and eloquent, even poetic, on the question of personal courage and purpose to a degree that will seem alien to most Americans today, perhaps especially those of us who have never served. In this special episode for Memorial Day, we read (almost all of) “The Soldier’s Faith” with annotations and digressions, which we hope you find worthy to reflect upon. We conclude with a look at the historical context, the United States on the brink of its own imperial moment, and the national imperative to unite North and South at the dawn of a new century. X/Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode Stephen Budiansky, Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas “The Soldier’s Faith” John Pettegrew, “‘The Soldier’s Faith’: Turn-of-the-Century Memory of the Civil War and the Emergence of Modern American Nationalism,” Journal of Contemporary History, January 1996. George Root, “Just Before the Battle Mother” (YouTube)

Matthew J. Tuininga is Professor of Christian Ethics and the History of Christianity at Calvin Theological Seminary in Michigan. He is author or editor of several books, including most recently The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People, which has been an important source for this podcast’s series on King Philip’s War. This episode is useful context not only for our series on King Philip’s War, which is still very much in progress, but also many of the other stories we’ve told about early New England. We talk about the intersection of religion and war in 17th century Massachusetts, the sheer difficulty of colonialism, the evolution of Puritan evangelism in the decades between the landing of Mayflower and King Philip’s War, the slow development of racialist thinking, the rise of racial hostility against Indians first among the settlers on the frontier to the distress of the Puritan elites in Boston, the influence, or not, of the younger generation of settlers and Indians on the coming of the war, whether Uncas of the Mohegans was a great and shrewed leader or merely treacherous, whether King Philip’s War was inevitable, the “war guilt,” or not, of Samuel Mosely and Edward Hutchinson, the wisdom of John Winthrop, Jr., whether King Philip’s War was “worth it” from the perspective of the settlers, the influence of the fog of war on Puritan decisions, KPW as counterinsurgency, historical myths of recent vintage that inflate Christian Indian deaths, the validity of Native American oral tradition as an historical source, and the importance of narrative history in getting people excited about history. X: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast

Maps of New England during King Philip’s War At the end of July 1675 two important things were happening at once. King Philip, known as Metacom to his people, and the sunksqua Weetamoo, were in flight along with at least 250 of their people.  Reports coming into the colonial militias in the Fall River area suggested that Philip and Weetamoo intended to cross the Providence River and head for Nipmuc country. Farther north, at almost exactly the same time, Massachusetts Bay Colony had heard rumors that the Nipmucs had joined, or were soon to join, King Philip’s Wampanoags. The Nipmucs occupied the strategically important territory between the settled towns of Massachusetts Bay near Boston and places like Springfield on the Connecticut River.  From the Bay’s point of view, it was important to determine whether the Nipmucs were in the war or would remain neutral. Since Edward Hutchinson had succeeded in extracting a purported treaty from the Narragansetts, Massachusetts dispatched him into Nipmuc country with Thomas Wheeler and twenty horsemen to do the same. Sadly for all the people of New England, Hutchinson and Wheeler would set in motion a chain of events that would cause this awful war to spread everywhere in the region east of the Connecticut River. The New English would find themselves waging a brutal counterinsurgency, with all the tactical problems of irregular war in our own time. X/Twitter – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – The History of the Americans Podcast – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War Matthew J. Tuininga, The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War

This is the second of two “Sidebar” episodes in honor of the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s famous ride, which we will celebrate on the night of April 18 by putting two lights in a window of our house.  Last time we explored the prelude to the ride in the months before the final crisis that triggered the march of the British “Regulars” on Lexington and Concord. This episode is the story of Paul Revere’s “midnight” ride on the night of April 18-19, 1775, including the famous lanterns of Old North Church, the fraught trip across the Charles River under the guns of HMS Somerset, his spectacular horse Brown Beauty (one of the great equine heroes of American history), the “waking up the institutions of New England” that night in raising the alarm not just on the road to Lexington and Concord but throughout eastern New England, and his astonishing capture and release. And, sure, William Dawes and Dr. Samuel Prescott. Maps of Paul Revere’s Ride X/Twitter – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – The History of the Americans Podcast – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride John Hancock’s Trunk o’ Papers

April 18, 2025 is the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s “Midnight Ride” to alarm the towns around Boston that the “Regulars” were marching out to capture artillery and ammunition at Concord, or perhaps to arrest Samuel Adams and John Hancock. This was but the last of a series of crises that rocked New England in the months before the midnight ride and the battles of Lexington and Concord the next day. This episode explores those crises, known as the “Powder Alarms,” and Paul Revere’s central role in the resistance movement among Boston Whigs – including the famous Sons of Liberty – during those fraught years before the shooting began. [Errata: I implied that Dr. Benjamin Church’s betrayal of the Patriot cause wouldn’t be understood “for years,” but in fact it was uncovered during the summer of 1775, after the shooting had begun, when one of his letters to the British was intercepted. He was permitted to leave the country in lieu of imprisonment, and sailed for the West Indies. His ship disappeared at sea and Church was never seen again.] X/Twitter – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – The History of the Americans Podcast – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride Portrait of Paul Revere by John Singleton Copley Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Paul Revere’s Ride” Intolerable Acts Thomas Gage

It is July 1675 in New England. On June 23, fighting men of the Wampanoag nation and of Plymouth Colony had begun killing each other and enemy civilians in earnest. The question was whether this still small conflict would remain a local and short dust-up within Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoag lands encompassed by the colony’s borders as defined by the New Englanders, or would it spread more widely? That question was very quickly answered – the wildfire of King Philip’s War would spread to encompass virtually all of New England east of the Connecticut River and up the coast of Maine. This episode explains how it happened. The image for this episode on the website is a drawing of King Philip – Metacom – by Paul Revere, who 250 years ago today (April 8, 1775), was riding to Concord to warn the locals, not yet on the famous Midnight Ride but on a false alarm that turned out to be an unplanned dress rehearsal. Maps of New England during King Philip’s War X/Twitter – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – The History of the Americans Podcast – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War Matthew J. Tuininga, The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War

After Massasoit’s death in 1660 or 1661, his son Wamsutta became sachem of the Pokonoket community and the leading sachem of the Wampanoag confederation, and early on he followed Algonquian custom and changed his name.  He asked the men of Plymouth Colony, longstanding allies of his nation, to give him an English name, and they proposed Alexander.  His brother Metacom also took an English name, Philip. Alexander would soon die under circumstances that deeply concerned the Wampanoags, and his brother Metacom, now known to the English as King Philip, assumed the paramount sachemship. During the 1660s and 1670s, a series of crises would degrade the now fifty year alliance between Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoag confederation, with war narrowly averted in 1671. Then, in early 1675, the Harvard-educated Christian Indian John Sassamon would be found dead, murdered by someone. Plymouth prosecuted and executed three Wampanoag men on scanty evidence, a violation of Philip’s sovereignty. Misunderstandings piled on top of outrage, and pressure built on both Philip and the Plymouth authorities to mobilize. The deputy governor of Rhode Island tried to broker peace, but events moved too fast. On June 23, 1673, the war began. Errata: (1)Toward the end of the episode, I said that the town of Mattapoisett was “just east of New Bedford.” Oops. There is a town with that name there today, per Google maps, but in 1675 the place with that name was on the water near Swansea, where the Taunton River flows into Mt. Hope Bay. (2) At another point, I said there had been “almost forty” narratives written about the war. Since there were at least 29, I should have said “almost thirty.” Maps of New England during King Philip’s War X/Twitter – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – The History of the Americans Podcast – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War Jill LePore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity Matthew J. Tuininga, The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People John Easton, A Relation of the Indian War (pdf) Philip Ranlet, “Another Look at the Causes of King Philip’s War,” The New England Quarterly, March 1988.

This episode looks at the background causes of the brutal war between the New English colonies of Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, and Connecticut and their indigenous allies against a tribal alliance including both the Wampanoags and the Narragansetts between 1675 and 1678. King Philip’s War is the most widely used name of that bloody and arguably existential war. In surveys of American history, it is often the only event between the founding of Jamestown, Plymouth, and Massachusetts Bay and the end of the 17th century that rates more than a sentence or two. This is for good reason, insofar as King Philip’s War changed the trajectory of New England’s history. It is thought to be the bloodiest war in American history as a proportion of the affected population. As many as 1000 colonists died, including perhaps 10 percent of the English men of military age. Three thousand Indians were killed, and as many as a thousand were sold into slavery abroad. The war altered the relationship between the European colonists and the Indians of the region to a far greater degree than the Pequot War or any of the other conflicts that had preceded it, shattered the military and cultural power of New England’s most powerful indigenous nations, and so devastated the English that by some estimates per capita wealth in the region did not return to the level of 1675 until the eve of the American Revolution a century later.  The New England frontier, for better or worse, did not advance for forty years after King Philip’s War. Suffice it to say, we should understand the issues that broke the long peace in the summer of 1675, almost exactly 350 years ago. Maps of New England during King Philip’s War X/Twitter – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – The History of the Americans Podcast – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War Jill LePore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity Matthew J. Tuininga, The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People Pekka Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America Philip Ranlet, “Another Look at the Causes of King Philip’s War,” The New England Quarterly, March 1988.

This episode ties up the loose ends that remained at the end of the expedition of Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette in 1673. Among other things, we explore the ultimate fate of Jolliet’s optimistic vision that a canal could bridge the continental divide in Illinois, allowing sailing ships to travel from Lake Erie all the way to the Gulf. Along the way we learn all sorts of factoids, including the fate of the Carolina Parakeet, snippits from the earliest history of Chicago, including the origin of the name of that city, its first non-indigenous resident, and the resolution of Marquette’s pervasive gastrointestinal issues. [Errata: About five minutes along I saw that Jolliet arrived at Quebec about July 29, 1673. Should have been1674. Oops.] X/Twitter – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – The History of the Americans Podcast – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) Mark Walczynski, Jolliet and Marquette: A New History of the 1673 Expedition John William Nelson, Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago’s Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent  Francis Borgia Steck, The Jolliet-Marquette Expedition, 1673 (pdf) Jean Baptiste Point du Sable

In the summer of 1673, two now famous Frenchmen and five others who are all but nameless traveled by canoe from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan at the Straits of Mackinac to central Arkansas on the western bank of the Mississippi River, and then back again. Louis Jolliet was a new sort of Frenchman, a natural born North American, having come into this world in Quebec in 1645, now a fur trader and voyageur. Jacques Marquette was the more usual sort, having been born in France in 1637.  By the time of the expedition Marquette was a Jesuit priest, long known to the nations of North America as a “Black Robe.” The episode begins with an overview of New France in the years between Samuel de Champlain’s death in 1635 and 1661, when it languished because the Five Nations of the Iroquois had it entirely bottled up. The expedition was a marker of New France’s rapid expansion after King Louis XIV began to rule in his own right that year. Along the way, our heroes become the first Europeans to visit Iowa (Go Hawks!), see some extraordinary painted monsters, learn the importance of the calumet, and find a short portage in the eastern continental divide at a place soon to be called Chicago. Map of the route (visible in the shownotes for the episode on the website), credit Illinois State Museum X/Twitter – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – The History of the Americans Podcast – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) Mark Walczynski, Jolliet and Marquette: A New History of the 1673 Expedition Francis Borgia Steck, The Jolliet-Marquette Expedition, 1673 (pdf) Piasa “monsters” (Wikipedia) Carignan-Salières Regiment (Wikipedia) Beaver Wars (Wikipedia)

This is the last of a three-episode series on the Dutch “raid on America” in 1673, during the Third Anglo-Dutch War. Commander Cornelis Evertsen the Youngest of the Admiralty of the Dutch province of Zeeland – “Kees the Devil” – and a privateer named Jacob Benckes had pillaged English possessions in the Indies. By late June 1673 their fleet of at least 12 ships was sailing to the Chesapeake Bay, where the year’s crop of tobacco from Virginia and Maryland had been loaded on merchant ships to sail by convoy to England. Arriving there on July 10, Evertsen and Benckes fought two English warships in the second Battle of the James River, and captured or destroyed thousands of hogsheads of tobacco. As they left with their haul, they grabbed a ketch with, among other people, a couple of the New Jersey rebels on board. They gave Evertsen important intelligence about the shoddy defenses of New York. By the end of July, only three weeks after arriving at the Chesapeake, Kees the Devil would reconquer New Netherland. But not before a brave English soldier got decapitated by a cannon ball. X/Twitter – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – The History of the Americans Podcast – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) Donald G. Shomette and Robert D. Haslach, Raid on America: The Dutch Naval Campaign of 1672-1674 John E. Pomfret, Province of East New Jersey, 1609-1702: The Rebellious Proprietary Robert C. Ritchie, The Duke’s Province: A Study of New York Politics and Society, 1664-1691 Battle of the James River (1667) (Wikipedia)

This is the second of three episodes about a daring Dutch raid on the West Indies and the English colonies of North America during the Third Anglo-Dutch War. The extended raid, led by Commander Cornelis Evertsen the Youngest of the Admiralty of the Dutch province of Zeeland and a privateer named Jacob Benckes, was a sideshow in that war, yet its consequences were far-reaching.  Among other accomplishments, Evertsen, known to his fans as Kees the Devil, and Benckes, “subdued three English colonies, depopulated a fourth, captured or destroyed nearly 200 enemy vessels, inflicted a serious injury upon the Virginia tobacco trade, wiped out the English Newfoundland fisheries, and caused unending panic in the New England colonies.” This episode covers the first phase of the “raid on America,” in which Evertsen’s squadron sails from Zeeland for the South Atlantic, aiming to capture the English East India fleet at St. Helena. Failing that, the squadron sailed for South America and the Indies, eventually meeting up with Benckes at Martinique. After capturing prizes and burning down St. Eustatius, the episode ends with Evertsen and Benckes headed toward the rich tobacco fleet then gathering in the Chesapeake. X/Twitter – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – The History of the Americans Podcast – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) Donald G. Shomette and Robert D. Haslach, Raid on America: The Dutch Naval Campaign of 1672-1674 Map of the land campaign against the United Provinces in the Third Anglo Dutch War: Third Anglo-Dutch War (Wikipedia) Cornelis Evertsen The Youngest (Wikipedia) The Fifth Column Podcast

This is the first of three episodes about a daring Dutch raid on the West Indies and the English colonies of North America during the Third Anglo-Dutch War. The extended raid, led by Commander Cornelis Evertsen the Youngest of the Admiralty of the Dutch province of Zeeland and a privateer named Jacob Benckes, was a sideshow in that war, yet its consequences were far-reaching.  Among other accomplishments, Evertsen, known to his fans as Kees the Devil, and Benckes, “subdued three English colonies, depopulated a fourth, captured or destroyed nearly 200 enemy vessels, inflicted a serious injury upon the Virginia tobacco trade, wiped out the English Newfoundland fisheries, and caused unending panic in the New England colonies.”  They recovered New York for the Dutch to the great if fleeting joy of much of its citizenry, and so demoralized the English that Parliament turned against the war and forced Charles II to sue for peace. The story is best understood in the context of the Anglo-Dutch Wars, which have been in the background of many of our episodes. This episode, therefore, is a primer on the first two Anglo-Dutch wars, and the run-up to the third, which will feature in the next episode. Map of the Low Countries at the relevant time (note the corrider denoted the “Bishopbric of Leige” connecting the Dutch Republic to France): X/Twitter – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – The History of the Americans Podcast – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Useful background episode: https://thehistoryoftheamericans.com/the-fall-of-new-amsterdam-and-the-founding-of-new-york/ Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) Donald G. Shomette and Robert D. Haslach, Raid on America: The Dutch Naval Campaign of 1672-1674 C. R. Boxer, “Some Second Thoughts on the Third Anglo-Dutch War, 1672-1674,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 1969. Third Anglo-Dutch War (Wikipedia) Four Days Battle (Wikipedia) Raid on the Medway (Wikipedia)

In 1672, the settlers of the New Jersey proprietary colony arose in a bloodless rebellion against Philip Carteret, appointed by the proprietors as governor. The wannabe rebels formed an illegal legislature, and installed Captain James Carteret as “president,” putting them in conflict with Lord John Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, James’s father. The conflict had to do with taxes, quitrents, and title to land. John Ogden, ancestor of your podcaster, emerged as a key player in the “popular party.” By the summer of 1673, the proprietors, with the help of the Duke of York and King Charles II, had put down the rebellion. James, now virtually disowned by his father, fled to Carolina, but along the way would be captured by the Dutch captain Cornelis Evertsen the Youngest, known to his many fans as “Kees the Devil.” James, or one of his resentful allies, would describe the defenses of New York to Evertsen, setting up the Dutch reconquest of New York. X/Twitter – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – The History of the Americans Podcast – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Useful background: https://thehistoryoftheamericans.com/ohhhh-whaddabout-new-jersey/ Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) John E. Pomfret, Province of East New Jersey, 1609-1702: The Rebellious Proprietary James Carteret: The Black Sheep (Interesting blog post on James Carteret)

The first English settlers in today’s South Carolina departed England in August, 1669, but would not actually get to the coast of Carolina until April and May the next year. Along the way they would lose ships to hurricanes and incompetence, and get into a firefight with Spaniards and their Indian allies on an island off the coast of Georgia. An unknown number would die on an island in the Bahamas. And, yet, once on the banks of the Ashley River, the first English South Carolinians would lose only 12% of their population in their first 18 months, a record of survival in the first “seasoning” year matched only by Maryland in the 17th century. X/Twitter – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – The History of the Americans Podcast – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website – https://thehistoryoftheamericans.com/the-first-english-settlement-of-south-carolina/) Edward McCrady, The History of South Carolina Under the Proprietary Government 1670-1719 L. H. Roper, Conceiving Carolina: Proprietors, Planters, and Plots 1662-1729 George Bancroft, History of the United States of America: From the Discovery of the Continent Alexander S. Salley, Jr., Narratives of Early Carolina 1650-1708 (Includes narrative of Maurice Mathews) Letter from Henry Woodward to Sir John Yeamans, September 10, 1670 J. Leitch Wright, Jr., “Spanish Reaction to Carolina,” The North Carolina Historical Review, October 1964.

Notwithstanding the promising expeditions of William Hilton and Robert Sandford, by the end of 1666, with the Carolina proprietors waging war with the Netherlands and contending with plague and fire in London, the Carolina project was on the brink of failure. Then the youngest proprietor stepped forward; the venture received new vigor under the leadership of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Ashley. With his friend and confidant John Locke, Lord Ashley would develop a fantastically – some would say hilariously – detailed plan of government for Carolina that would never be put into effect, but which would inspire and confound historians and even be cited by courts into our own time, the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina.  This episode is about Ashley, Locke, and those strange Fundamental Constitutions. X/Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the website) George Bancroft, History of the United States of America: From the Discovery of the Continent Edward McCrady, The History of South Carolina Under the Proprietary Government 1670-1719 L. H. Roper, Conceiving Carolina: Proprietors, Planters, and Plots 1662-1729 Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, March 1, 1669 Jennifer Welchman, “Locke on Slavery and Inalienable Rights,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, March 1995. John Locke

Spaniards had been in South Carolina off and on since perhaps 1514, and certainly by 1521. Even in the 1660s Spaniards occasionally came up the coast to trade and visit Santa Helena on Parris Island, which had largely been abandoned to Indians. As late as 1663, however, the English had not explored even the coast of the future Palmetto State. That would change after the granting of the Carolina Proprietary in March 1663. In 1663 and 1666, two expeditions from Barbados, then perhaps the wealthiest corner of the nascent English empire, would explore coastal South Carolina, and set the stage for the first surviving English settlement on that coast, the town of Charleston in 1670. This is the story of those two expeditions, the first by William Hilton, after whom Hilton Head was quickly named, and the second by Robert Sandford, who named the Ashley River. X/Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the website) Edward McCrady, The History of South Carolina Under the Proprietary Government 1670-1719 L. H. Roper, Conceiving Carolina: Proprietors, Planters, and Plots 1662-1729 Alexander S. Salley, Jr., Narratives of Early Carolina 1650-1708 (Includes narratives of William Heaton and Robert Sandford) Charles Towne John Vassall John Yeamans Cape Fear Settlements William Hilton Bermuda Sloop Henry Woodward

New Jersey is something of a puzzle, especially as a matter of early colonial history.  The future Garden State rates barely a mention in most surveys of American history until it becomes a primary battleground of the American Revolution.  That happens, however, not because of anything in New Jersey that was particularly worth defending in and of itself, but because of its location between the two most important cities in English North America in 1776, New York and Philadelphia.  But even that is puzzling.  One look at the map tells us that New Jersey is fundamentally a big fat peninsula between the two most commercially important rivers of mid-17th century North America – the lower Hudson and the Delaware.  It certainly seems strategic. It is therefore a little surprising that it was not settled in any meaningful way until after most of lower New England, Long Island, New York, Maryland, and Virginia. With few exceptions, the Dutch settled on the east bank of the Hudson, and the Swedes on the west bank of the Delaware.  New Jersey did not come in for meaningful European settlement until after the Duke of York took over New Netherland, and even then took ages to really get off the ground. Why was that? This episode answers that question! Selected references for this episode John E. Pomfret, Province of East New Jersey, 1609-1702: The Rebellious Proprietary The Concession and Agreement of the Lords Proprietors of the Province of New Caesarea, or New Jersey, to and With All and Every the Adventurers and All Such as Shall Settle or Plant There George Carteret Ohhhhh! The New Jersey Game Show (SNL)

In recognition of the holiday(s),* this is a revision of one of the podcast’s earliest episodes, Introduction to the Columbian Exchange. The “Columbian Exchange” refers to the interhemispheric transmission of diseases, food crops, populations, cultures, and technologies in the years after Columbus’s famous First Voyage. The term was invented in 1972 by the famous biological historian Alfred W. Crosby Jr. of the University of Texas at Austin. The original episode focuses on the impact of diseases and crops that moved from one hemisphere to the other following 1492. It is replete with interesting factoids! The revisions include thoughts on the human consequences, including to the indigenous peoples of the Americans and Africans swept up in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and how we might think about it now. *I think you know what I’m saying here. To each his own. Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the website) Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, 30th Anniversary Edition Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492-1650 Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian, “The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food, and Ideas” University of Zurich, “Syphilis May Have Spread Through Europe Before Columbus”

This blessedly short episode encapsulates the types of English colonial government in the 17th and 18th centuries, which were chartered corporations, proprietary “counties palatine,” and royal colonies directly ruled by the Crown through a governor and advisors. Technically abstruse as these distinctions may have been, they would become increasingly important starting in the 1670s, and will be useful background for much of what comes next. X/Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Links to selected English-American charter documents Charter of Massachusetts Bay, March 4, 1629 Charter of the Colony of New Plymouth Granted to William Bradford and His Associates, 1629 Sir Robert Heath’s Patent for Carolana, October 30, 1629 The Charter of Maryland, June 20, 1632 Charter of Carolina, March 24, 1663 Charter of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, July 15, 1663 Charter for the Province of Pennsylvania, February 20, 1681 Avalon Project 17th Century Documents

David T. Beito’s most recent book, and the subject of this conversation, is The New Deal’s War On the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR’s Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance (buy it through the link!), published by the Independent Institute in 2023. The presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal have now largely passed from living memory.  When I was in junior high school in the 1970s, however, many of the teachers had not only lived through the New Deal but remembered it as an almost sacred moment.  We watched scratchy black-and-white movies in class about the great success of FDR’s New Deal in ending the Great Depression, the soundtrack blaring with “Happy Days Are Here Again.”  David Beito’s book is about the dark side of all that, the almost crazy abuse of American civil liberties under FDR’s administration.  FDR’s Congressional allies, including future Supreme Court Justices Hugo Black and Sherman Minton, rifled through individual tax returns and more than 3 million Western Union telegrams to find dirt on outspoken opponents of the New Deal. They proposed criminalizing “false” news. They used regulatory power and private coercion to drive virtually any criticism of the New Deal from the new medium of radio.  And, finally, they put more than 100,000 Americans of Japanese descent into concentration camps built by the famous Works Progress Administration, and kept them there long after any argument for military necessity had passed.  And that isn’t the end of it by any means! And please listen to the last part, in which we discuss the frosty even if perhaps unsurprising silence with which academic historians have responded to David’s excellent book. Listen on Apple, if you prefer, or Spotify. X/Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 and Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast

In August 1664, an English fleet acting under the orders of James, Duke of York, the brother of King Charles II, materialized off Manhattan and forced the bloodless surrender of New Amsterdam and New Netherland. It is easy – too easy – to conclude that this was inevitable because New England had roughly 17 times the population of New Netherland. It was in fact a foundational move in the construction of the English empire of the 17th century, and the product of the machinations of first cousins in conspiracy with each other: Sir George Downey, the “second” graduate of Harvard College and one of the most devious people in English politics ever, and John Winthrop the Younger, the pious Governor of Connecticut Colony, son of the leader of the Puritan Great Migration, and a stone cold operator of the first order. In the end, Peter Stuyvesant was out of moves. [Errata: Harvard’s first commencement was not in the spring of 1642, as I said in the episode, but on September 23, 1642] X/Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the website) Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America J. Franklin Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland, 1609-1664 Richard Nicolls, Proposed Terms for the Surrender of New Netherland Grant of March 12, 1664 from Charles II to his brother, James, Duke of York L. H. Roper, “The Fall of New Netherland and Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Imperial Formation, 1654-1676,” The New England Quarterly, December 2014. Jonathan Scott, “‘Good Night Amsterdam’: Sir George Downing and Anglo-Dutch Statebuilding,” The English Historical Review, April 2003. Steve Martin, “Mad at my Mother,” Let’s Get Small. List of most populous cities in the United States by decade (Very interesting Wikipedia page if you love data and history)

While the English were consolidating their territory on most of the eastern seaboard of North America in the 1600s, Spanish Florida plugged along with its sole city at St. Augustine, with little European population growth. That simple fact obscures remarkable changes in the civil society of the future Sunshine State. From the 1570s, after the Jesuits had given up, until the 1720s, a small band of Franciscan friars, at no time numbering more than around fifty, built a network of wood and thatched missions throughout the region. They converted tens of thousands of Florida Indians to Catholicism, many practicing with such diligence that a visiting Frenchman wrote that the Apalachee were “scarcely distinguishable [in their practices] from Europeans who had been Christians for centuries.”  The relationship between the Franciscans in Florida and the indigenous peoples was not only different than anywhere in English or Dutch North America, it was different from everywhere else in the Spanish New World, including New Mexico at the same time, and California and Texas in the following century. As a result, the relationship between the Spanish and the Indians of Florida was symbiotic, one of shared religion, trade, and mutual support rather than conquest. Unfortunately, it would all fall apart when the English Carolinians marched south looking for people to enslave. Map of Spanish Missions in Florida 1560s – 1720s: X/Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the website) Michael Gannon (ed), The History of Florida Wreck of the La Nuestra Senora de Atocha

We are back to Spanish Florida after a long hiatus, with the story of St. Augustine, La Florida after the founding of the city and the slaughter of the Huguenots at Fort Caroline until the construction of the Castillo de San Marcos in the 1670s. The city would almost fail, and in 1607 the Spanish Crown ordered that it be shut down and that Spain withdraw from Florida all together. That order would be promptly rescinded when the English landed at Jamestown. It is a story of courageous Catholic evangelism, Indian wars, relentless epidemics, and pirates, climaxing in the raid of the dread pirate Robert Searles in 1668. That attack would, ironically, result in a renewed commitment by the Spanish government to sustaining the city which would ensure its long-term survival as the oldest continuing town in the United States. X/Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the website) Carrie Gibson, El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America Michael Gannon (ed), The History of Florida Susan Richbourg Parker, “St. Augustine in the Seventeenth-Century: Capital of La Florida,” The Florida Historical Quarterly, Winter 2014 Diana Reigelsperger, “Pirate, Priest, and Slave: Spanish Florida in the 1668 Searles Raid,” The Florida Historical Quarterly, Winter 2014 List of Cuba–United States aircraft hijackings

In March 1663, after 97 years of failed attempts by first the Spanish and then the English to establish settlements in North Carolina, King Charles II granted eight aristocrats a vast territory extending from the coast of today’s North and South Carolina to the Pacific Ocean. These eight Lords Proprietor – George, Duke of Albemarle; Edward, Earl of Clarendon; William, Lord Craven; John, Lord Berkeley; Anthony, Lord Ashley; Sir George Carteret; Sir William Berkeley, who was again the governor of Virginia; and Sir John Colleton – would almost unwittingly authorize in their new colony a remarkably free and democratic society of small farmers, rivaled only by Roger Williams’ Rhode Island in its respect for individual liberty. X/Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the website) Lindley S. Butler, A History of North Carolina in the Proprietary Era 1629-1729 Noeleen McIlvenna, A Very Mutinous People: The Struggle for North Carolina, 1660-1713 George Bancroft, History of the United States of America, Vol. 1 Charter of Carolina – March 24, 1663 Charter of Carolina – June 30, 1665

On July 29, 2024, President Joe Biden visited The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The President referred to LBJ as “master of the Senate,” which reminded me of the opening pages of Robert Caro’s book of the same name. That introduction is itself a masterful description of the suppression of Black voters in the South, the meaning of voting, the history of the Senate, its historical resistance to civil rights, and LBJ’s role in changing all that. It is also filled with interesting observations about timeless aspects of American politics, and since I enjoyed re-reading it I’m going to read it for you with some annotations along the way.  Oh, and it turns out that President Biden, who knows a thing or two about the Senate, left a few things out for the audience in Austin. Finally, I again recorded early in the morning outside in the Adirondacks, so there are a lot of tweeting birds in the background. Non-birdie recording will resume next time. X/Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the website) Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Vol. 3) Remarks by President Biden Commemorating the 60th Anniversary of the Civil Rights Act | Austin, TX The other volumes in Caro’s biography (I highly recommend the first two, and haven’t yet read the fourth): The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Vol. 1) Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Vol. 2) The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Vol. 4)

In the early 1660s, a motley crew of free-thinkers, republican veterans of Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army, and Quakers would build the freest place in all the English world, the County of Albemarle in northeastern North Carolina. Protected from the north, and incursions by Virginia royalists, by the Great Dismal Swamp, from the east by the treacherous waters of the Outer Banks, and from Indians by the skilled diplomacy of fur trader Nathaniel Batts, the settlers would prosper as small farmers and free tradesmen. Their leaders would include John Jenkins, veteran of Fendall’s Rebellion in Maryland, and a dissident Virginian planter and sheriff named William Drummond. Together they would resist attempts by the proprietors to exert control over their land and lives, and would extend the franchise to all free Englishmen in the colony. This is their story. X/Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the website) Noeleen McIlvenna, Early American Rebels: Pursuing Democracy from Maryland to Carolina, 1640-1700  Lindley S. Butler, A History of North Carolina in the Proprietary Era 1629-1729 Albemarle County, North Carolina Francis Yeardley Map of Albemarle County in context

Early North Carolina, originally part of a territory called Carolana, is all but ignored in most surveys of American history.  After a fast start – both the Spanish and the English had short-lived settlements there in the 16th century before anywhere north of the future Tar Heel State had been settled by Europeans – a long period of failure followed until the late 1650s, when it hosted a quirky rural society of free-thinkers, democratically-inclined veterans of the New Model Army, and Quakers. In this overview episode we’ll bring together those long decades of failure!  Longstanding and attentive listeners will have passing familiarity with some of this, having heard it in bits and pieces since very nearly the beginning of this podcast, but since I benefited from reviewing it I thought you might too. X/Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the website) Lindley S. Butler, A History of North Carolina in the Proprietary Era 1629-1729 Lindley S. Butler, “The Early Settlement of Carolina: Virginia’s Southern Frontier,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Jan. 1971 Sir Robert Heath

Late in the morning on June 7, 1663, soldiers of the Esopus Indians attacked the fortified Dutch settlements of New Village – now Hurley, New York – and Wildwyck, now Kingston.  New Village was fundamentally destroyed.  Wildwyck, more populous and better defended, fought off the attack but not before suffering grievous casualties.  At New Village, three Dutch men were killed, and 34 women and children were taken captive and carried away.  In Wildwyck, twelve men, including three of the garrison soldiers, died immediately, along with two children.  Eight more men were injured, including one who died a few days later of his wounds, and the Esopus Indians took ten women and children prisoner. So began the Second Esopus War. Map of the Indian nations and language groups in the area, discussed in the opening minutes of the episode: Selected references for this episode (Commission earned on Amazon links) Martin Kregier, Journal of the Second Esopus War (Translation of the diary kept by the captain of the Dutch military response to the attacks at the New Village and Wildwyck) Robert S. Grumet, The Munsee Indians: A History Marc B. Fried, The Early History of Kingston & Ulster County, N.Y.

Amanda Bellows is a U.S. historian who teaches at The New School, a university in New York City. She is the author of American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination, and a new book that is the subject of this interview, The Explorers: A New History of America in Ten Expeditions. Amanda received her Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Explorers is a series of biographical essays of people most of you have heard of – Sacagawea, John Muir, and Amelia Earhart – and people most of you haven’t heard of – James Beckwourth, Matthew Henson and William Sheppard – sewn together with the common theme of exploration. The book had come recommended to me by a couple of fans of the podcast so I jumped at the chance to have Amanda on.  I learned a lot from The Explorers, and of course have a link in the show notes on the website if you want to buy it after hearing our conversation. Books mentioned in the episode (Commission earned) Amanda Bellows, The Explorers: A New History of America in Ten Expeditions Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind X/Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Errata: Jean Nicolet went to Green Bay in 1634, not 1624 as I said toward the end of the episode.

Just before dawn on September 15, 1655, the same day Pieter Stuyvesant would extract the surrender of New Sweden on the Delaware River, more than 500 Indians of various tribes from along the Hudson paddled more than sixty canoes to New Amsterdam in lower Manhattan. They ran through town shrieking and vandalizing, but neither Dutchman nor Indian was harmed until the Indians were about to leave after having met with the city council. Then somebody shot and wounded Hendrick van Dyck with an arrow, and the Dutch militia, under the command of a drunken and incompetent officer, opened fire on the retreating Indians.  Three on each side died in the skirmish. The Indians retaliated.  Over the next few days, attacks on Staten Island and and in New Jersey would take fifty Dutch lives and more than 100 European prisoners. So began “The Peach Tree War,” which was followed by two even more violent wars at the settlement of Esopus, in today’s Kingston, New York. X/Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the website) Marc B. Fried, The Early History of Kingston & Ulster County, N.Y. D. L. Noorlander, Heaven’s Wrath: The Protestant Reformation and the Dutch West India Company in the Atlantic World Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America–The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Jaap Jacobs, “’Hot Pestilential and Unheard-Of Fevers, Illnesses, and Torments’: Days of Fasting and Prayer in New Netherland,” New York History, Summer/Fall 2015.

For more than twenty years, the Puritan colonies of New England – Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven – would do their utmost to gain control of Rhode Island, Roger Williams’s refuge committed to “soul liberty.” They hated his nest of heretics on their border, and they coveted Rhode Island’s arable land. The Puritan New Englanders would try everything short of military conquest, from subversion, to legal and military attacks on the Narragansetts, Rhode Island’s closest indigenous allies, to political maneuvering in London. At every turn, Williams would outfox them, finally obtaining a charter from Charles II that definitively established absolute religious liberty in Rhode Island, and mandated a “democratical” form of government. Rhode Island under Williams would become the freest place in the English world, and Rhode Islanders would defend their freedoms even after Williams was no longer in their government. This is that story. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul (Commission earned) James A. Warren, God, War, and Providence: The Epic Struggle of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians against the Puritans of New England (Commission earned) Joshua J. Monk, “Roger Williams’ A Letter to the Town of Providence” Jean-Pierre Cavaillé, “‘Naked as a sign’. How the Quakers invented nudity as a protest,” Clio. Women, Gender, History, June 2021.

Kenneth W. Porter, writing in The New England Quarterly in 1934, said that “Samuell Gorton could probably have boasted that he caused the ruling element of the Massachusetts Bay Colony more trouble over a greater period of time than any other single colonist, not excluding those more famous heresiarchs, Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams.”  As we shall see, he was charismatic, eloquent in speech, and often very funny in the doing of it, although nobody much considered him a laugh riot at the time. Gorton would, for example, address the General Court of Massachusetts, men not known for their happy-go-lucky ways, as “a generation of vipers, companions of Judas Iscariot.” And yet Gorton (who spelled his first name “Samuell”) would be second only to Roger Williams in shaping the civic freedom of Providence and Rhode Island. X/Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Useful background: “Roger Williams Saves Rhode Island,” The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode Kenneth W. Porter, “Samuell Gorton: New England Firebrand,” The New England Quarterly, September 1934. John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty (Commission earned) Michelle Burnham, “Samuel Gorton’s Leveller Aesthetics and the Economics of Colonial Dissent,” The William and Mary Quarterly, July 2010. Philip F. Gura, “The Radical Ideology of Samuel Gorton: New Light on the Relation of English to American Puritanism,” The William and Mary Quarterly, January 1979. Samuel Gorton (Wikipedia)

This episode is about a radically democratic political movement in Maryland in the 1650s. Veterans of the New Model Army, many of whom had been swimming in political movements like the Levellers, came to Maryland and joined with other Protestants chafing under Catholic and aristocratic rule. Blood would be shed at the Battle of the Severn, and in the aftermath Lord Baltimore would install a man named Josias Fendall as the fourth governor of his proprietary colony. Fendall, it would turn out, decided he agreed with the populists, and led a legislative revolution that, for a time, would make Maryland the most politically radical government, other than in Rhode Island, anywhere in the English world. X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Primary reference for this episode Noeleen McIlvenna, Early American Rebels: Pursuing Democracy from Maryland to Carolina, 1640-1700 (Commission earned)

In May 1660, Oliver Cromwell now dead, Charles II was restored as King of England. The 59 judges who in 1649 had signed the death warrant of the king’s father, Charles I, were declared regicides, and exempted from the general amnesty Charles II offered to most people who had opposed his father. Some of the regicides were caught immediately and most gruesomely executed.  Others fled to Europe.  Three of them fled to New England.  Their names were Edward Whalley, William Goffe, and John Dixwell. This is their story, an epic tale of bounty-hunting across old New England, a tale woven with the anti-Royalist attitude of the Puritans and concern for their status after the Restoration. And, of course, there is the mysterious “Ghost of Hadley,” a depiction of which is the art for the episode on the website for the podcast. [Errata: I am reliably informed by New Haveners that I blew the pronunciation of “Whalley,” which apparently is pronounced like the cetacean rather than the diminutive for Walter. Also, I said “Morris” when I meant “Harris” at least once for entirely unknown cognitive reasons. Finally, I said that the attack on Hadley was in June 1675, when in fact it was June 1676.] X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode (Commission received on Amazon links, if clicking through the website) Robert Harris, Act of Oblivion: A Novel Matthew Jenkinson, Charles I’s Killers in America: The Lives & Afterlives of Edward Whalley & William Goffe Christopher Pagluico, The Great Escape of Edward Whalley and William Goffe Edward Elias Atwater, History of the Colony of New Haven Until its Absorption Into Connecticut

This is the story of the New Haven Colony from 1643 until is absorption by Connecticut in 1664. We look at the colony’s economic, military, and geopolitical successes and disasters, and the famous story of the “Ghost Ship,” perhaps the most widely witnessed supernatural event in early English North America. Finally, confronted with the restoration of the Stuarts in England, the Puritan colonies of New England, the greatest supporters of Oliver Cromwell and the Commonwealth, struggle to establish their legitimacy under the monarchy. Connecticut Colony secures a charter from Charles II, and through a series of power plays absorbs New Haven Colony and puts an end to its theocratic government of the Elect. X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode (Commission received on Amazon links, if clicking through the website) Edward Elias Atwater, History of the Colony of New Haven Until its Absorption Into Connecticut First Anglo-Dutch War (Wikipedia) The United Colonies of New England I: The New England Confederation Begins (1643-1652) (Apple podcasts link) The United Colonies of New England II: Confederation or Absorption (1644-1690) (Apple podcasts link)

Of the organized Puritan settlements in New England in the first half of the 17th century – Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Connecticut being foremost – the New Haven Colony was in some respects the most peculiar.  It was probably the wealthiest of the four United Colonies of New England on a per capita basis, the most insistent on religion’s role in civil governance, and the least democratic, being, basically, not democratic.  The men who founded it, Theophilus Eaton and the Reverend John Davenport, had great expectations and ambitions for spiritual communion and commercial profit, most of which would come to naught. It would survive as an independent colony less than 25 years. This is the story of its founding, at a place called Quinnipiac. X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode (Commission received on Amazon links, if clicking through the website) Edward Elias Atwater, History of the Colony of New Haven Until its Absorption Into Connecticut Josephine Dodge Daskam Bacon, History of the Colony of New Haven, Before and After the Union With Connecticut

Dr. James Horn is President and Chief Officer of Jamestown Rediscovery (Preservation Virginia) at Historic Jamestowne.  Previously, he has served as Vice President of Research and Historical Interpretation at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Saunders Director of the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, and taught for twenty years at the University of Brighton, England.  He has been a Fulbright Scholar and held fellowships at the Johns Hopkins University, the College of William and Mary, and Harvard University.  He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.  A leading scholar of early Virginia and English America, Dr. Horn is the author and editor of numerous books and articles including three that we have leaned on extensively in this podcast, A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America; 1619: Jamestown and the Forging of American Democracy; and most recently A Brave and Cunning Prince: The Great Chief Opechancanough and the War for America. (I’ll get a little tip if you buy them through the links above.) Our conversation focuses on the extraordinary life of Opechancanough, the fascinating man who twice led the Powhatan Confederacy in wars to expel English settlers from the James River and the Chesapeake.  As longstanding and attentive listeners know, Opechancanough may or may not have been the same man as Paquiquineo, taken by the Spanish in the Chesapeake in 1561, received in the court of Philip II, christened Don Luis de Velasco in Mexico City, and returned to his homeland in 1570. Jim persuades me that Opechancanough was, in fact, the same man.  Along the way I learn, a bit too late, how to pronounce various names properly. X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast

In order to understand the history of English North America during the 1640s to the 1660s, one really needs to know at least something about the English Civil Wars, Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth, and the restoration of the Stuarts in 1661. This episode is a high level look at that period, oriented toward the events and themes most important to the history of the Americans. But there are still some great details, including a graphic description of the execution of Charles I, and an elegy of sorts, to Sir Henry Vane! It must be said that British listeners and others who know a lot about this period will no doubt find this overview tediously shallow and rife with rank generalizations and even error.  Guilty as charged. The American analogy would be to cover the years between the run-up to our own Civil War and the Reconstruction of the South in one podcast episode. Absurd! And yet here it is. X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode (Commission received on the Amazon links) Jonathan Healey, The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England 1603-1689 George Bancroft, History of the United States of America (Vol 1) Robert Harris, Act of Oblivion: A Novel Elvis Costello, “Oliver’s Army” (YouTube)

It is the late 1640s. More than forty years before the famous witch hunt in Salem, William Pynchon’s town of Springfield, Massachusetts Bay Colony, was roiled by the strange doings of Hugh and Mary Parsons, an unhappy and anxious couple with poor social skills. In that dark, solitary place on the edge of the North American wilderness, anxiety, depression, a bad marriage, and conspiracy theories combined with bad luck and no little neurosis to produce an epic tragedy, preserved for us by many pages of deposition transcripts taken by Pynchon. True crime, Puritan theology, rumor mongering, strange doings, and the inherent justice of the New English courts combine for a fantastic story. And, of course, there is some great trivia: What does “wearing the green gown” mean? Closing disclaimer: This episode is absolutely not in recognition of “Women’s History Month.” X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World David M. Powers, Damnable Heresy: William Pynchon, the Indians, and the First Book Banned (and Burned) in Boston Nachman Ben-Yehuda, “The European Witch Craze of the 14th to 17th Centuries: A Sociologist’s Perspective,” American Journal of Sociology, July 1980. Useful prerequisite: The Life and Times of William Pynchon

This episode tells the story of three “lost voices” from early Maryland, surprising people who remind us of the complexity of the 17th century Atlantic world. Mathias de Sousa was of African descent, and is called “the first Black colonist” of Maryland. He would skipper a pinnace in the Chesapeake, trade with the local tribes, and sit in the Maryland Assembly. Margaret Brent was a stone-cold businesswoman, executor for the estate of Leonard Calvert, and would become famous for demanding not just one vote, but two, in the Maryland Assembly. Trust me when I say she had her reasons. Finally, there is Mary Kittamaquund Kent, “the Pocahontas of Maryland.” Her similarities to the actual Pocahontas were, it must be said, something of a stretch. X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode David S. Bogen, “Mathias de Sousa: Maryland’s First Colonist of African Descent,” Maryland Historical Magazine Spring 2001. Lois Green Carr, “Margaret Brent – A Brief History”, Maryland State Archives. Kelly L. Watson, “‘The Pocahontas of Maryland’: Sex, Marriage, and Diplomacy in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake,” Early American Studies, Winter 2021.

Joe Kelly is professor of literature and the director of Irish and Irish American Studies at the College of Charleston, and the author of Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of America’s Origin.  In addition to Marooned, in 2013 Joe published America’s Longest Siege:  Charleston, Slavery, and the Slow March Towards Civil War, which details the evolving ideology of slavery in America. He is also author of a study of the Irish novelist James Joyce, censorship, obscenity, and the Cold War (Our Joyce:  From Outcast to Icon). This conversation, which was great fun, covers a whole range of topics familiar to longstanding and attentive listeners, but with a new and provocative perspective.  We talk about John Smith, Sir Francis Drake – who literally takes up a chapter in Joe’s book – the Sea Venture wreck, the role of the commoners in the struggle to survive on Bermuda, and the political philosophy of Stephen Hopkins, the one man to spend years in Virginia and then go on to sail on the Mayflower as a Stranger among the Pilgrim Fathers.  Was Hopkins the moving force for or even the author of the Mayflower Compact, and the true original English-American political theorist?  Finally, we have it out over the fraught question, as between Jamestown and Plymouth, which of our founding mythologies most clearly reflects the American we have become?  Joe brings a new and fascinating perspective to that timeless argument. Buy the book!: Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of America’s Origin X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast

Welcome to the first “true crime” episode of the History of the Americans Podcast, the story of Oscar Hartzell and the Sir Francis Drake estate scam, perhaps the most audacious con of the 1920s, the great golden age of the confidence man. Hartzell swindled as many as 200,000 Midwesterners, many from my own state of Iowa, out of millions of dollars posing as the rightful heir to the lost estate of Sir Francis Drake. Eventually, it would drive him insane, at least as adjudged by the director of the behavioral clinic of the criminal court of Cook County, Illinois. Enjoy! X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode Richard Rayner, “The Admiral and the Con Man,” The New Yorker, April 15, 2002 (pdf, subscription necessary) Richard Rayner, Drake’s Fortune: The Fabulous True Story of the World’s Greatest Confidence Artist John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” 1930 (pdf). Hartzell v. United States, Circuit Court of Appeals, Eighth Circuit, August 16, 1934.

William Pynchon, ancestor of the American novelist Thomas Pynchon, was the founder of Springfield, Massachusetts, a successful fur trader, merchant, and magistrate, and at age 60 wrote the first of many books to be banned in Boston. Pynchon had come to Massachusetts with the Winthrop Fleet in 1630, and soon became one of the wealthiest merchant/traders in the colony. He founded Springfield on the main trail between the Dutch trading posts near Albany and Boston, and controlled the fur trade coming down the Connecticut River from the north. He had unusually modern opinions about the Indians and Indian sovereignty, opposed the Pequot War, and was a respected leader in New England, until he ran afoul of the Reverend Thomas Hooker, the founder of the Connecticut River Towns. Their dispute would alter the map of New England forever. Pynchon was an independent thinker, especially in matters of economics and theology. In 1650, he published a book titled The Meritorious Price of our Redemption, and would be prosecuted for heresy. This episode is his story. X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast The Other States of America Podcast (Apple podcast link) Selected references for this episode David M. Powers, Damnable Heresy: William Pynchon, the Indians, and the First Book Banned (and Burned) in Boston Samuel Eliot Morison, Builders of the Bay Colony

It is now 1648. In this episode, two tough guys, Johan “Big Belly” Printz of New Sweden and Peter “Peg Leg” Stuyvesant of New Netherland, escalate their competition to control the critical Delaware River, now an essential artery for the fur trade coming out of Susquehannock territory in Pennsylvania and points farther west. Sweden and Netherland were at peace in Europe, so there would be no shooting, but all sorts of guns would be pointed without pulling the trigger or lighting the match. Eventually, the Dutch would put together the largest European army in North America since Soto and Coronado in the 1540s, and put an end to New Sweden as a political entity, raising the Dutch flag over the forts at today’s New Castle and Wilmington, Delaware. Along the way we hear the horrific story of the Katten, a Swedish ship full of settlers that ran aground just off Puerto Rico. Everybody survived the immediate crisis, only to fall into the hands of the Spanish and then the French on St. Croix. Folks, don’t let that happen to you. X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode New Sweden Part 2: The Tough Guys Arrive C. A. Weslager, New Sweden on the Delaware 1638-1655 Carl K. S. Sprinchorn and G. B. Keen, “The History of the Colony of New Sweden,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 1883.

We are back in New Sweden. In 1638, shortly after establishing Fort Christina at the site of today’s Wilmington, Delaware, Peter Minuit would die in a hurricane on the way back to Sweden. The settlers left behind would go a year and half before another supply ship came, but they would survive with remarkable pluck. They were well-housed, because the Finns among them would introduce the log cabin to these shores, and they would trade effectively with the Lenape and Susquehannock nations. Then in 1643 a new governor would arrive, Johan Printz, a 400-pound giant of a man who would boot out the New English who tried to settle on the Delaware, and keep the pressure on the Dutch who also claimed both sides of that river. Under Printz’s authoritarian and also competent administration, New Sweden would prosper, go on a building boom, and explore the interior of Pennsylvania, all in spite of very little help from home. The Dutch under Willem Kieft – we’ve met him before – wouldn’t challenge New Sweden in this period because they were under pressure from the New English to the east and the Indian groups around Manhattan. Then, in 1647, Pieter Stuyvesant would arrive to govern New Netherland, and everything would change again. X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode “The Founding of New Sweden” C. A. Weslager, New Sweden on the Delaware 1638-1655 Carl K. S. Sprinchorn and G. B. Keen, “The History of the Colony of New Sweden,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 1883. Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America–The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 “America’s Oldest Log Cabin Is for Sale”

Your podcaster spent the weekend just passed in San Francisco at the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association. I learned a lot, but especially how transparently politicized so many professional historians seem have become. This episode recounts some of what I saw and heard, and concludes with my many thoughts on the greatest benefit of learning history, whether history should be “useable,” and why deploying history for partisan political purposes, as is now happening widely and overtly, corrupts history absolutely. Along the way I suggest both philosophical and utilitarian reasons why overtly partisan historians are not doing their profession, or their students, any favors. On “Weaponizing History” (my Substack) X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast

In podcast time, we’ve been knocking around the northeast of today’s United States for just about two years, starting with the Popham colony episodes back in December 2021.  The recent high water mark, as it were, is 1647 or so, with the recovery of Maryland by the Calverts after the plundering time.  We are not entirely caught up to that date, however.  We need to get back to see what happened to New Sweden since its first year in the late 1630s, and the New Haven colony, which extended its writ to New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, deserves a couple of episodes. In the 70+ timeline episodes since Martin Pring’s expedition of 1603 and Champlain’s St. Croix settlement in Maine, we’ve talked about English, Dutch, and French settlement and exploration in today’s United States as local stories, but we have not looked at the big picture, or at least not very often. Even I’m getting confused!  So in this episode we’ll do our best to bring it all together, which ought to make the next few episodes a bit easier to follow.  X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Map of Settlements on the Delaware Selected references for this episode Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America–The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Hampton L. Carson, “Dutch and Swedish Settlements on the Delaware,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 1909. Pavonia (Wikipedia) Zwaanendael Colony (Wikipedia)

While the first English Civil War rages, Leonard Calvert returns to the Chesapeake in September 1644, after having been away for a bit more than a year. He carries commissions from Charles I to seize “London” assets in Virginia and collect a duty on tobacco for the Crown. The Royalists who run the royal colony of Virginia refuse to support Calvert and their king because they are too busy fighting the Powhatans to divide their own ranks. Meanwhile, Richard Ingle and his ship Reformation return to the Chesapeake, where he learns that Leonard Calvert has threatened to hang him if he comes to Maryland. Ingle, however, bears a letter of marque from Parliament that he interprets as a license to steal from Catholics. So, naturally, this means war. A comical war, to be sure, and almost bloodless except for three Jesuits who end up in the wrong place at the wrong time. But a war nonetheless. Ingle recruits some “rascally fellows,” and essentially conquers Maryland with the support of the colony’s Protestants. Leonard Calvert flees, and the Protestants install their own government at St. Mary’s City. To all appearances, the Calverts had been expelled from Maryland. All appearances, it would turn out, would be deceiving. The Calverts would recover Maryland within 18 months, and Ingle would die a pauper. And so it is that the University of Maryland football team bears the Calvert family crest on its helmets. X/Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode The “Plundering Time” of Maryland Part 1 Timothy B. Riordan, The Plundering Time: Maryland and the English Civil War, 1645–1646 Podcast: Rejects and Revolutionaries, “English Civil War 7: The Plundering Time”

This is the first of two episodes that recounts Maryland’s “Plundering Time,” when the English Civil War spilled into the Chesapeake. Protestants would rebel against Catholics, and Richard Ingle, a Protestant merchant-trader who had been the principal commercial link between the early Maryland colony and England, would loot the colony and almost put an end to the Calverts’ rule there. This episode is the prelude to that ugly and also comical moment. It was, ultimately, a farce of impulsivity and ego that almost redrew the map of the future United States. X/Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode That Time Maryland and Virginia Went to War Timothy B. Riordan, The Plundering Time: Maryland and the English Civil War, 1645–1646 Manfred Jonas, “The Claiborne-Calvert Controversy: An Episode in the Colonization of North America,” Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien, 1966. First English Civil War (Wikipedia) Podcast: Rejects and Revolutionaries, “English Civil War 7: The Plundering Time”

This episode will be easier to follow if you have recently listened to our previous Thanksgiving Sidebar, “Notes on Thanksgiving.” Thanksgiving is less historically genuine than many Americans were led to believe.  The Thanksgiving story, as it was long taught in school, was constructed to achieve a purpose: the unification of an increasingly diverse country around a national story. It worked incredibly well. Italians, Irish, eastern Europeans, and other immigrants who arrived in the late 19th and early 20th century learned a version of our national origin story in a celebration of community that brought the country together when it very much needed it. But that success came at a price – it could and did alienate at least some of our people who were descended from North America’s indigenous peoples, including especially tribes of New England.  The success of Thanksgiving in binding together an ever more diverse country and the alienation of people who do not celebrate the European settlement of North America is the story of this episode. X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode Sidebar: Notes on Thanksgiving (Encore Presentation) Elizabeth Pleck, “The Making of the Domestic Occasion: The History of Thanksgiving in the United States,” Journal of Social History, Summer 1999. Jana Weiss, “The National Day of Mourning: Thanksgiving, Civil Religion, and American Indians,” Amerikastudien / American Studies, 2018. Christopher Hitchens, “The Turkey Has Landed,” The Wall Street Journal, November 23, 2005. Freedom from Want The Mayflower Compact Occupation of Alcatraz National Day of Mourning Red Power Movement The Nation, “Should America Keep Celebrating Thanksgiving?” James Lee West, “A Native American Reflects on Thanksgiving”

It is early spring 1644, and Europeans are fighting Indians in New Netherland and Maryland. In Virginia, though, it is quiet. It has been twelve years since the Second Anglo-Powhatan war ended after a decade of fighting that began the day the sky fell, March 22, 1622.  On that date Opechancanough sprung his colony-wide ambush of the English settlements along the James.  Indian soldiers loyal to the Powhatan confederacy killed almost four hundred English and other European settlers on that day, and many more in the years that followed. But peace had come in 1632, and despite occasional crises that might have triggered war, the old chief had kept that peace.  We covered Opechancanough and the Second Anglo-Powhatan War in three episodes more than a year ago, “Who Was Opechancanough?,” “Opechancanough’s War,” and “After the Sky Fell,” which are definitely useful background if you have not listened to them, or haven’t listened to them in some time. The peace would end on April 18, 1644, and that is the story of this episode. X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode James Horn, A Brave and Cunning Prince: The Great Chief Opechancanough and the War for America Helen C. Rountree, Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown Robert Beverley, The History & Present State of Virginia

Salina Baker lives in Austin – my town – and has just published “The Line of Splendor,”  a biographical novel of the life of General Nathanael Greene, regarded by most historians as George Washington’s most important lieutenant. We talk about Greene’s life, his famous Southern Campaign in 1781 in which he and his men drove the British out of the Carolinas and Georgia while losing most of the battles they actually fought, his stint as Washington’s quartermaster general and his talent for logistics, his friendship with fellow boy-wonder Henry Knox, and what might have been had Greene not died shortly after the end of the war. Buy her novel through the link below! Also, if you are going to be in Denver on November 12, let me know if you can make the meet-up we’ll do late that afternoon, probably at or new the Brown Palace Hotel. Subscribe by email X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Salina B. Baker, The Line of Splendor: A Novel of Nathanael Greene and the American Revolution

The goal of this “high altitude” episode is to establish a framework for forthcoming episodes covering the period between roughly 1640 and 1670. We look at the geopolitical landscape in the territories of today’s northeastern United States and eastern Canada in the middle 17th century. The key players are the European settlers – English, French, Dutch, and Swedish – and the most important Indian nations – the Susquehannocks, the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Leni Lenapes, and the Hurons. They fiercely competed over the trade in fur, from the European point of view, and manufactured consumer products and weapons, from the Indian point of view. There would be blood. Subscribe by email X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode Eric Jay Dolin, Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America–The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Francis Jennings, “Glory, Death, and Transfiguration: The Susquehannock Indians in the Seventeenth Century,” Proceedings of the American Philosophic Society, February 1968

It is the early 1640s. The Dutch, who have done their level best to foster good relations with the local Indians because war isn’t good for business, have a new governor in charge at New Amsterdam. Willem Kieft is a man of extraordinary ego and bad judgment, a coward and a weasel. Kieft launches an incredibly violent war with the many tribes on and around Manhattan on a tissue-thin pretext. The bloodletting is shockingly wasteful and sad, even across the years. In the end, he turns to John Underhill, the Puritan captain who led the forces of the Massachusetts Bay against the Pequots years before. The results are every bit as ugly. The episode ends with a story about a stonemason named John Ogden, without whom you would not be listening to this podcast. Subscribe by email Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America J. Franklin Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland 1609-1664 Donna Merwick, The Shame and the Sorrow: Dutch-Amerindian Encounters in New Netherland Katherine A. Grandjean, “The Long Wake of the Pequot War,” Early American Studies, Spring 2011. Nicholas Klaiber, “Kieft’s War and Tributary Politics in Eastern Woodland Colonial Society” Walter Giersbach, “Governor Kieft’s Personal War,” Military History Online.

As has become our tradition around Columbus Day, we speculate on various might-have-beens – for example, what if Columbus had sailed for a different monarch? – and some of the consequences of Columbus’s voyages for humanity writ large. This episode has been revised and re-recorded from those of previous years, and includes some thoughts on “Indigenous Peoples Day,” offered by some jurisdictions (and this year as a Presidential proclamation) as a counterpoint. The image for this episode on the website post is of maize growing in Africa. Subscribe by email (or on any podcast app) X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian, “The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food, and Ideas” Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created Noble David Cook, Born To Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650

The main purpose of this micro-episode is to give you the details on the much ballyhooed Philadelphia area meet-up of fans of the podcast.  The date is this Friday, October 6, 2023.  The place will be Neshaminy Creek Brewing Company, 909 Ray Avenue, Croydon, Pennsylvania.  The official start-time is 5:00 pm, but if you can’t get there so early rest assured that I’ll be around until at least 7:30, and certainly as late as the conversation remains fun and interesting. I’ll aim to get there at 4:30 or so to check out the room I reserved, which I believe they call “the nook.”  I trust many of you will recognize me from my photo on the website or on Twitter or Facebook, but in case not I’ll be wearing a red “History Nerd” cap.  I also read a short excerpt from Yascha Mounk’s new book The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time, which I highly recommend. Mounk explores the philosophical roots of critical theory and the full range of ideas clumsily lumped together as “wokeism,” or “the successor ideology.” The book is extremely useful for understanding how we arrived at our current identity politics, and is relevant to understanding the “history wars” that have played out over the last four or five years. You can buy it through the link above.

I’m traveling and otherwise swamped right now, so it’s time for a Sidebar! In this episode we take a break from the 17th century, and look at the campaign to legalize speech about birth control in the 1920s and 1930s, a topic I wrote about more than 40 years ago. In the only original archival work I have ever done, I found a close connection, much of it by back channel, between Margaret Sanger, the most famous advocate for lawful birth control, and Roger Baldwin, the founder of the American Civil Liberties Union. Long before the full recognition of the right of free speech in the United States, which would only happen in its modern form in the 1960s and 1970s, the fight over even the right to advocate for birth control was, fundamentally, the occasion for early expansion of free expression. Along the way, we look at the persistent relevance of the Comstock Act, the mixed motives of advocates for lawful birth control, an example of “cancel culture” from a hundred years ago, and the still timely problem of organizations staying true to their mission or impairing their credibility by moving out of their lane. Subscribe by email (or on any podcast app) X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode Roger Baldwin Robert Minor The archives of the papers of the American Civil Liberties Union at Princeton University

The year is 1642. The Puritan colonies of Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Connecticut are conspiring against settlements at Providence and on Aquidneck Island, then small clusters of religious dissidents living under the protection of Roger Williams and his Narragansett allies. As the pressure mounted, the Rhode Islanders asked Williams to go to England and secure legal protection for their land and self-government. Williams would sail to England in 1643, and outmaneuver all of New England’s enemies of religious freedom. He would do this by writing an astonishing book about Indians. Among other things. Against daunting odds, Williams would persuade Parliament, then dominated by Puritans and engaged in a great civil war with the royalists loyal to Charles I, to grant him a patent for Narragansett Bay that explicitly authorized rule by the majority of citizens. Williams had secured English protection for the freest place in the world for non-conformists, independent thinkers, and, TBH, cranks. Oh. And he may well have persuaded John Milton to come out for freedom of the press. Subscribe by email Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul Roger Williams, A Key Into the Language of America Areopagitica

Sweden’s greatest king, Gustavus Adolphus, aspires for Sweden to become a maritime and commercial power in the Atlantic, and engages Dutch entrepreneurs to advise him and his councilors how to do it. The Swedes recruit Peter Minuit, the erstwhile governor of New Netherland and the man who acquired Manhattan island from the Lenne Lenape tribe in the region. Eager for a new gig in the New World, Minuit leads two Swedish ships with Dutch crews – the Kalmar Nyckel and the Gripen – to the site of today’s Wilmington, Delaware. Minuit would meet with the chiefs in the region and acquire, in one fashion or another, the west bank of the Delaware River from roughly the site of Philadelphia International Airport to Cape Henlopen. New Sweden would survive and at times prosper for 17 years, but Minuit, tragically, would not live more than six months after landing again in the New World. For more on Minuit’s career in New Netherland, you might listen to “The Purchase of Manhattan and Other Dutch Treats.” X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Subscribe by email Selected references for this episode Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America C. A. Weslager, New Sweden on the Delaware 1638-1655 C. T. Odhner and G. B. Keen, “The Founding of New Sweden, 1637-42,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 1879. Carl K. S. Sprinchorn and G. B. Keen, “The History of the Colony of New Sweden,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 1883.

The Maryland Assembly convenes, and wrestles with the Lord Proprietor over the privilege of initiating legislation. Once the tussle is resolved, the Palatinate’s government enacts a raft of new laws, which provide a glimpse into the concerns that preoccupied the first Marylanders. Among these new laws are the first recognition of slaves and slavery in English North America. Oh, and you may hear a little dog barking in the background. He’s enjoying the Adirondacks too. X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Subscribe by email Selected references for this episode Matthew Page Andrews, The Founding of Maryland George Bancroft, History Of The United States Of America, Volume 1 Jonathan L. Alpert, “The Origin of Slavery in the United States – The Maryland Precedent,” The American Journal of Legal History, July 1970.

Inspired by an email from a longstanding and attentive listener, this Sidebar episode examines an essay by Gordon Wood introducing his book The Purpose of the Past. We consider what it means to have a “historical sense,” and the humility that comes with it. We also look at the history of the debate over the purpose of history, and briefly at the difference between critical theory, on the one hand, and teaching the “ugly parts,” on the other. X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Subscribe by email Selected references for this episode Gordon Wood, The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History David Motadel, “The Political Role of the Historian,” Contemporary European History, 2023.

The Charter of Maryland having passed seals, Cecil Calvert, the Second Lord Baltimore, stayed in England to fend off political attacks against his Proprietary Colony. He asked his younger brother Leonard to lead the first settlers in the Ark and the Dove to the banks of the Potomac River. When they get there in the early spring of 1634, they meet Henry Fleet, an English trader who had been in the area since 1621, four of those years as the captive of one of the tribes in the northern Chesapeake. Fleet would turn out to be instrumental in the very successful first year of the Maryland settlement, at St. Mary’s City. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Subscribe by email Selected references for this episode Matthew Page Andrews, The Founding of Maryland George Bancroft, History Of The United States Of America, Volume 1 Wesley Frank Craven, The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century 1607-1689 A. J. Morrison, “The Virginia Indian Trade to 1673,” The William and Mary Quarterly, October 1921

George Calvert had a dream. He had grown up during the most exciting moments of Elizabeth I’s reign, a time when England was transforming from a backwater to a legitimate Atlantic power. He wanted to found a colony in North America. After a catastrophic attempt in southern Newfoundland, Calvert negotiated a charter from Charles I for a new form of colony – a “proprietary colony,” for which Calvert would be the “Lord Proprietor,” in the northern reaches of the Chesapeake. It would be known as “Mary Land,” and was the largest individual land grant in English North America. The most important provision in the charter, which conferred vast and personal powers on Calvert, was known as the “Bishop of Durham clause,” and dated from English legal precedent of more than 600 years. The roots of American legal traditions are very old. Sadly for George, he would die even before his charter “passed through seal.” Fortunately for us, his son Cecil would pick up the project and execute it wisely and effectively. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Subscribe by email Selected references for this episode Matthew Page Andrews, The Founding of Maryland Wesley Frank Craven, The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century 1607-1689 Bernard C. Steiner, “The Maryland Charter and Early Explorations of That Province,” The Sewanee Review, April 1908. The Charter of Maryland Bishop of Durham Clause County of Avalon Dig Site George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore (Wikipedia)

Longstanding listeners know that we have a tradition of talking about great speeches in American history on Memorial Day and July 4, when many such great speeches have been delivered.  If you search in your engine of choice, you will find various listicles of great Independence Day speeches. They always include Ronald Reagan’s in 1984, FDR’s in 1942 – the first 4th of July of our participation in World War II – and Frederick Douglass’s famous speech in 1852.  The pantheon of such speeches also includes the Independence Day speech of 29-year-old John F. Kennedy in 1946, the first 4th after World War II.  That speech, which was very much about one understanding of American history, is the subject of this episode. The setting for the speech was Boston’s Faneuil Hall.  The occasion was Boston’s Independence Day celebration. The context was Jack Kennedy’s first campaign for public office, for the Democratic nomination for the Massachusetts 11th Congressional District. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Subscribe by email Selected references for this episode Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917 – 1963 John F. Kennedy, “SOME ELEMENTS OF THE AMERICAN CHARACTER” INDEPENDENCE DAY ORATION BY JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY, CANDIDATE FOR CONGRESS FROM THE 11TH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT, JULY 4, 1946

Anne Hutchinson, having defeated every argument against her in the civil trial, cannot resist having the last word and in so doing condemns herself. She is banished, and after a long winter under house arrest and a second trial to excommunicate her, she joins her family and followers on Aquidneck Island, soon to be Rhode Island. So how was it that she died on the future site of a golf course in The Bronx? Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Subscribe by email Selected references for this episode Eve LaPlante, American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman Who Defied the Puritans Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop Edmund S. Morgan, “The Case Against Anne Hutchinson,” The New England Quarterly, December 1937

The Antinomian crisis in the Massachusetts Bay Colony is escalating, threatening to tear it apart just as its leaders perceive a military threat from the Pequots. Anne Hutchinson has been teaching an extreme version of the “covenant of grace” in her after-church discussion group, which has swelled to eighty people or more, including some of the leading men of Boston. Her ideas attack the authority of the conventional Puritan clergy of the Bay. She accuses all but two of them, John Cotton and her brother-in-law, John Wheelwright, of preaching a “covenant of works,” fighting words in those days. Needing to end the division, John Winthrop tries diplomacy and reconciliation, but neither Hutchinson nor her opponents show any inclination to compromise. After more than a year of theological debate, the General Court of Massachusetts banishes Wheelwright and brings Hutchinson to trial. She runs rings around them. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father Eve LaPlante, American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman Who Defied the Puritans Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop Edmund S. Morgan, “The Case Against Anne Hutchinson,” The New England Quarterly, December 1937.

Anne Hutchinson was the first famous European-American woman, and after Matoaka/Pocahontas, only the second still-famous woman in the lands now encompassed by the United States. She appears in most histories of the United States and its first colonies, including George Brancroft’s History of the United States of America, first published in the 1830s. Mrs. Hutchinson is famous because she disrupted the community of the Puritan church in Boston in the mid-1630s by attracting most of its congregation to an extreme interpretation of Calvinist theology, for which she was tried, convicted, excommunicated, and expelled, just as Roger Williams had been. An enormous amount of ink has been spilled over Anne Hutchinson over hundreds of years. Older interpretations regard Hutchinson as an extremist and deeply disruptive to the Puritan project in Massachusetts. In more recent years, there has been a lot of sympathetic writing about Hutchinson as the study of women in early America has become more popular, and the Puritans of early Massachusetts decidedly less so. In some circles she is seen as a victim of oppression. Her monument at the Massachusetts State House upholds Hutchinson as a “courageous exponent of civil liberty and religious toleration.” My own take is that her story is interesting in part because it is something of a Rorschach test – each of these interpretations are defendable to some degree, and the emphasis one or another historian puts on a given interpretation in lieu of others says as much about the author as it does about Mrs. Hutchinson. This makes the complex story of Anne Hutchinson very much a story about ourselves. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father Eve LaPlante, American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman Who Defied the Puritans Edmund S. Morgan, Roger Williams: The Church and State Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop

On May 30 – Memorial Day — 1895, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., a Harvard man and then a justice on the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, delivered an address to the graduating class of 1895 in Cambridge.  The speech, known as “The Soldier’s Faith,” is in and of itself fascinating substantively and also for its indirect effects. Regarding those, Theodore Roosevelt, another Harvard man, read the speech some seven years later and determined to appoint Holmes to the Supreme Court on account of it.  Beyond that, the speech is incredibly prescient, in certain respects, and eloquent, even poetic, on the question of personal courage and purpose to a degree that will seem alien to most Americans today, at least those of us who have never served. In this special episode for Memorial Day, we read (almost all of) “The Soldier’s Faith” with annotations and digressions, which we hope you find fun and interesting! Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode Stephen Budiansky, Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas “The Soldier’s Faith” John Pettegrew, “‘The Soldier’s Faith’: Turn-of-the-Century Memory of the Civil War and the Emergence of Modern American Nationalism,” Journal of Contemporary History, January 1996. George Root, “Just Before the Battle Mother” (YouTube)

In the spring and summer of 1637, the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, the English settlers on the Connecticut River, and their Indian allies, the Narragansetts and the eastern Niantics, would wage a war of annihilation against the Pequot tribe of southern Connecticut. It would be the most brutal fighting between Europeans and the Indians of North America since at least 1599 (when the Spanish massacred the Pueblo Indians of the Acoma mesa). It would also be the first time that Europeans set out to extinguish an Indian nation. As such, it would be, arguably, the greatest stain on the legacy of the Puritans of Massachusetts. This is the military history of that war, the causes and run-up having been covered in the last two episodes. [Errata (5/21/2023): A very longstanding and attentive listener from New Mexico corrected my pronunciation of “Acoma” – the emphasis on the first syllable rather than the second. This is especially embarrassing because I believe he has had to correct me twice, the first time a year and a half ago. The same correspondent also points out the historical debate over the number of Indians who actually died at the Acoma massacre, and what the Spanish actually did to the feet of the captives. Perhaps the Spanish merely cut off their toes, rather than cutting the foot in half.] Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode Alfred A. Cave, The Pequot War Charles Orr, History of the Pequot War: The Contemporary Accounts of Mason, Underhill, Vincent and Gardener Timeline of the Pequot War

After the killing of John Oldham and his crew at Block Island, the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony mobilized an expedition of 90 men under the command of John Endicott. The goal was to deter Pequot aggression, but Endicott would prove, yet again, to be a stern and inflexible man who would fundamentally blunder into full-scale war with the Pequots. In this episode we look at Endicott’s raid, the attempt by the Pequots to seduce the Narragansetts into an alliance, the skillful diplomacy of Roger Williams, and the attack by the Pequots on Fort Saybrook in retaliation. We end the episode with one last missed opportunity for peace. There’s a map on the website in the episode notes that is useful for sorting out the geography, if you don’t know southern New England like the back of your hand. Also, if you live in Austin or within a reasonable drive, please let me know if you will join our meet-up of listeners on June 1, 2023 at 6 pm, at a venue still to be arranged. Please send me a note by email or direct message on Twitter or Facebook to let me know if you can make it, so I can estimate attendance and pick the right place. See Jack’s interview with Jon Gabriel Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father Alfred A. Cave, The Pequot War Charles Orr, History of the Pequot War: The Contemporary Accounts of Mason, Underhill, Vincent and Gardener Timeline of the Pequot War

The Pequot War of 1636-1638 was the first time that Europeans in the lands of today’s United States launched a fundamentally offensive war to reduce an American Indian tribe to ruin. Pious as they were, concerned as they were with God’s favor, the moral athletes of the Massachusetts Bay in the mid-1630s were the first Europeans who pretty much made it their business to wipe out an American Indian tribe.  The question is, why? In this episode and the next, we look at the Pequot War, and the paranoiac misunderstandings that led to the most brutal fighting between Europeans and Indians in North America since Hernando de Soto had raged across Alabama in 1540. [See the episode notes on the website, The History of the Americans, for a map of the Indians tribes in southern New England in 1630 or so, which might be useful for following the action in this episode and the next.] Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father Alfred A. Cave, The Pequot War Charles Orr, History of the Pequot War: The Contemporary Accounts of Mason, Underhill, Vincent and Gardener Timeline of the Pequot War

This is a fun one, especially for fans of Sir Francis Drake! Longstanding and attentive listeners will remember Melissa Darby as the author of the 2019 book, Thunder Go North: The Hunt for Sir Francis Drake’s Fair & Good Bay, which was the primary source for our episode “Novo Albion and Drake’s Legacy,” which goes back to early December, 2021.  It wouldn’t hurt to listen or (re)listen to that episode before this one, but I don’t think it is essential.  Another way might be to go back and listen to it after you have heard this interview.  In the interview Melissa and I talk about the documents discovered by two women scholars, Zelia Nuttell and Eva Taylor, around a century ago, that upended the evidence for Francis Drake having claimed Novo Albion in the area of San Francisco; the ethnographic and linguistic evidence in support of the Golden Hind landing on the coast of Oregon or Washington instead of California; the plot by a famous University of California historian to manufacture Drake’s “plate of brass” to refute Nuttell’s claims and obstruct the publication of her paper; the remarkable point that the crew of the Golden Hind spent between five and ten weeks on the Northwest coast, interacting with Indians routinely, without ever having fought with them; and Drake’s legacy more generally.  Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Books referred to in this episode Melissa Darby, Thunder Go North: The Hunt for Sir Francis Drake’s Fair & Good Bay Samuel Bawlf, The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake: 1577-1580

The founding of Maryland was contentious, because its territory falls within the original mandate of the Virginia Company.  Longstanding and attentive listeners may recall that the patent from James I in 1606 conferred the right to settle along the Atlantic coast between 34 and 40 degrees, or from roughly Wilmington, North Carolina to Seaside Heights, New Jersey.  The Crown revoked the Virginia Company’s charter in 1624, after the catastrophe of Opechancanough’s war, and thereafter it was a Crown Colony with a royal governor. On the one hand, that changed the legal rights of the colonists, as they would eventually find out. On the other, it seemed like a mere governance change, because in the revocation of the charter and the establishment of the Crown Colony, James wasn’t very clear about the borders changing. That would become a problem when his son, Charles I, granted Cecil Calvert, the Second Lord Baltimore, the right to settle around the middle and northern Chesapeake for the annual rent of “two Indian arrows.” Virginians, who were already there, were more than a little grumpy about that. Lawsuits would be filed, shots would be fired, and men would be hung. [Errata: The English translator’s name was not Henry Steele, as reported in this episode, but Henry Fleet. Serves me right for not taking better notes while listening to Jeremy.] Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode George Bancroft, History Of The United States Of America, Volume 1 Timothy B. Riordan, The Plundering Time: Maryland and the English Civil War, 1645–1646 Manfred Jonas, “The Claiborne-Calvert Controversy: An Episode in the Colonization of North America,” Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien, 1966. J. Herbert Claiborne, “William Claiborne of Kent Island,” The William and Mary Quarterly, April 1921.

This is a micro-episode to talk about our forthcoming meet-up in Washington and some other stuff. Our Washington, DC meetup for fans of the podcast will be on Tuesday, April 11 at Aslin Beer Company, 1740 14th St NW. 5:30-7:30. I’ll probably arrive earlier than that to grab a table. Send me a note if you’re coming! The other stuff is mostly my reflections on the podcast, how much I appreciate you guys, telling the ugly parts, objectivity or not in history, and why I don’t provide transcripts. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Other podcasts mentioned in this episode (Apple links) The Rest is History The Other States of America History Podcast [Abridged] Presidential Histories The Fifth Column

In this episode we tell the story of Jean Nicolet, one of Samuel de Champlain’s embedded interpreters. In the summer of 1634, Champlain sent Nicolet to negotiate a treaty with a tribe known to eat their enemies on the shores of Green Bay, Wisconsin. Along the way we consider the first European encounters with cities that today have National Football League franchises, and the fraught question of Nicolet’s legendary “Chinese robe,” which was depicted on a United States postage stamp in 1934. But the serious question remains: Was Champlain still looking for a northwest passage, or playing geopolitical 3-D chess? [Errata: No sooner did I publish this episode than I realized that John Smith and other Virginians exploring the Chesapeake had certainly reached the site of Baltimore. The latest possible date is Thomas Claiborne in 1631. All such possible visits are obviously earlier than Jean Nicolet reaching Green Bay.] Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode Patrick J. Jung, The Misunderstood Mission of Jean Nicolet: Uncovering the Story of the 1634 Journey Norman K. Risjord, “Jean Nicolet’s Search for the South Sea,” The Wisconsin Magazine of History, Spring 2001. David Hackett Fischer, Champlain’s Dream Virtual Museum of New France (Cool site, btw)

Roger Williams has fled into the freezing New England winter of 1636, steps ahead of the law. He makes his way from Salem to Narragansett Bay, spending fourteen weeks schlepping from one Indian village to another, always just beyond the reach of the Massachusetts Bay authorities. Eventually, he cuts a deal with the Narragansett sachem Canonicus, who grants him land at the site of today’s Providence, Rhode Island. There, Williams establishes the first civil society anywhere in the Christian world devoted to the complete separation of church and state. It would serve as a refuge of last resort for fugitives of conscience, and establish Williams as one of the great “benefactors of mankind,” in the words of the 19th century American historian George Bancroft. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul Edmund S. Morgan, Roger Williams: The Church and State Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop The Providence Agreement of 1637 New England Historical Society – Slate Rock

It is the summer of 1634. When last we were with Roger Williams – helpfully, just the last episode – he was living in Salem, keeping his head down, and paddling around Massachusetts learning the local indigenous language and culture. But then Salem’s minister, Samuel Skelton, would die, and Williams would become the de facto leader of the Salem church. At the same time, politics in England were turning against the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Word was, Sir Ferdinando Gorges was sending an armed ship to confiscate the colony’s charter and impose a governor. The colony prepared for war, and considered it essential that God look favorably on the settlers. Roger Williams would speak up, pointing out that if He did not, it would be because of sins against Him from the government and church in Boston. This would lead to a year-long standoff between Williams and his followers over crucial matters of principle. This is the story of that confrontation, which would be the first moment in the history of the Americans when the separation, or not, of church and state would emerge as an existential question. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul Edmund Morgan, Roger Williams: The Church and State Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop

First off, a brief item of business for those of you listening in close to real time – on April 11, 2023, I’ll be in Washington with some free time in the evening.  If Washington area listeners want to do a meet up, send me a note at [email protected], through the website, or by DM on Twitter.  If we get a few takers I’ll find some place that is reasonably convenient to DuPont Circle where I will be staying, and get it organized.  I hope we can do it! In this episode we recount Roger Williams’ first few years in Massachusetts, following his refusal of the post of “teacher” at the church in Boston on the ground that it was insufficiently “separated.” In the years until 1624, Williams would begin to develop his idea that church and state must be separate. With the goal of saving Indian souls, he also deepened his understanding of the local tribes and Algonquian language and culture. He would live in Salem, then Plymouth, and back to Salem, but he spent most of his time abroad in the land, paddling his canoe from one Indian village to another. Also during these years, religious zeal in both Massachusetts and back in England, although in different form, would become even more extreme. Zealotry, it would turn out, was not all it was cracked up to be. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul Edmund Morgan, Roger Williams: The Church and State Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop

Our guest today is Kenny Ryan, host of another great history pod, Abridged Presidential Histories with Kenny Ryan. Abridged Presidential Histories Podcast with Kenny Ryan launched its first episode at the end of March, 2020, and has progressed through the American presidencies chronologically. If you have listened to Abridged Presidential Histories, you already know that it includes narrative episodes with a lot of amusing factoids told with humor in solo narrative form – I think you all know I like that sort of thing – and some very interesting interviews with historians who are expert in the relevant presidencies.  We had a wide-ranging conversation, and covered a lot of interesting stuff, including: The changing reputations of Jackson, Grant, JFK, and LBJ. Presidential histories take about 50 years to settle down, because they need to be written by people who were not politically aware as they happened. Should Martin Van Buren get more credit for “Jacksonian Democracy?” Jackson should get more credit for his handling of the Nullification Crisis. What president would Kenny like to have as a friend? Surprising answer! Who was the biggest party animal among the presidents? Should our politicians spend more time drinking and playing cards? Who were the greatest First Ladies? The influence of Dolly Madison and Lady Bird Johnson. Did young Kenny meet Lady Bird on a field trip? Austin’s moontowers. Who was the most overrated president? The revival of Calvin Coolidge’s reputation on the political right. What presidents would you invite on a pub crawl? Will Nixon be rehabilitated? Is journalism really the “first draft of history”? And much more! Jack on Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Kenny on Twitter: @APHpodcast [Abridged] Presidential Histories with Kenny Ryan (website) …and on Apple.

This is the first of several non-consecutive episodes about Roger Williams, whom we have teased a few times already.  Williams was one of early New England’s immensely consequential figures, perhaps in the long run more so than either William Bradford or John Winthrop.  While the intellectual and civic contributions of Williams were legion, there are four startlingly modern things that he essentially invented.  First, Williams argued that requiring people to attend church and worship in a particular way – a practice the English called “conformity” and essentially a universal obligation in Christian Europe for centuries – was an offense unto God. Williams thought that people must be free to find their own faith and follow their own beliefs. In a universally religious time, this amounted to a wholesale reconsideration of the “proper relation between a free individual and the state.”  Second, Williams challenged the settled relationship between the church, man’s manifestation of God on this earth, and the state.  He concluded they should be entirely separate, an idea that most Americans today take as a given. Third, Williams founded the new colony of Rhode Island, the first political entity anywhere in the world dedicated to the proposition of religious freedom and liberty of conscience.  Finally, Williams learned the local Algonquian language and studied the indigenous peoples of New England with a compassion and intellectual honesty that was, for its time, very unusual and arguably unprecedented. In order to understand Williams, however, we need to know something about Puritan theology, an introduction to which is the main topic of this episode! More exciting that it sounds! And, anyway, it will be useful background for many of the episodes to come. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode Apple Computer, “The Crazy Ones” John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America Edmund Morgan, Roger Williams: The Church and State Prenanthes serpentaria

The Winthrop Fleet has arrived, but Salem is not what they had expected. John Winthrop leads an expedition to explore Massachusetts Bay, meets Samuel Maverick – whose descendants would be consequential in the world of sports – and William Blackstone (Blaxton), and decides to move the new immigrants to Charlestown, Boston, and other future towns in the region. The winter is brutal, but it makes the Puritan settlers resilient, and their hunger is relieved when the Lyon arrives on February 5, 1631, with new supplies and a minister named Roger Williams. All that and the origin of the Boston Common and a botanical puzzle concerning “snakeweed”! Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father George Bancroft, History Of The United States Of America Volume 1 Thomas Hutchinson, The History of Massachusetts, from the First Settlement Thereof in 1628, Until the Year 1750 Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop David Hackett Fischer, African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals Gutierrezia sarothrae William Blaxton (Blackstone) Map of Boston in 1630, superimposed on today’s Boston

This episode is a backgrounder, an overview of the Puritan society, culture, and economy in New England during the seventeenth century. The objective is to set all y’all listeners up for more traditional and detailed “timeline” episodes over the coming weeks. Sort of a mega-prerequisite. We therefore discuss Puritan religious “conformity” within the context of the early 1600s, families, religion, property rights, the structure of the New England economy, and its relationship with the outside world. Oh. And the importance of beer and cake when Puritan mothers gave birth to cute little Puritan babies. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Primary reference for this episode Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America

We have arrived at the Great Migration of the Puritans to Massachusetts, which effectively began in 1628 and would continue until 1640 or so, and then abruptly end. The result would be that for almost two hundred years the non-indigenous population of New England would consist almost entirely of the descendants of a group of religious refugees shaped by a particularly tumultuous moment in English political and religious life. The “Winthrop Fleet” of 1630 led by – no surprises here – John Winthrop, would define the geography of Puritan Massachusetts. Winthrop’s leadership, which will unfold over two decades, began with one of history’s most famous sermons, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” which would in turn define the aspirations for the Puritan settlement of Massachusetts Bay. It would also be the first great expression of one aspect of “American exceptionalism,” the idea that Americans – meaning specifically Puritan English settlers in New England – would serve as an example for all the world. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father George Bancroft, History Of The United States Of America Volume 1 Thomas Hutchinson, The History of Massachusetts, from the First Settlement Thereof in 1628, Until the Year 1750 John Endecott (Wikipedia) John Winthrop, A Modell of Christian Charity David Crowther, The History of England Podcast

This episode looks at the collapse of trust between Charles I and anti-Puritan royalists and clerics, on the one hand, and Parliament, Puritans, anti-Catholic Anglicans, and lawyers and others concerned with resisting the expansion of royal power on the other, in the second half of the 1620s. The collision would end in a final and very dramatic session of the House of Commons, and would ultimately persuade tens of thousands of Puritans that they had no choice but to leave England. It would be the catalyst for the Puritan Great Migration to New England. Before we get to any of that, however, we briefly address the Twitter kerfuffle I unwittingly set off with a tweet about a BBC story on Sir Francis Drake, and the circumstances under which I do, and do not, support the renaming of things named after people who have fallen out of favor. The Twitter thread regarding Sir Francis Drake’s famous change of heart Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham Michael B. Young, “Charles I and the Erosion of Trust, 1625-1628,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, Summer 1990.

Between 1628 and 1640 perhaps 20,000 Puritans would leave England and settle in Boston and environs. Then English immigration to Massachusetts would stop as abruptly as it started. The Puritans of Massachusetts would thrive with only trivial incremental immigration for the next 200 years, creating a uniquely American society in New England, a homogeneous world with its own culture and polity that would eventually become the beating heart of the American Revolution. In this episode and the next, we talk about the theological and political forces that set the stage for the Puritan Great Migration, and the new articulation of English political liberty during the crucial second and third decades of the 17th century that arose from conflict over the scope of royal power between Sir Edward Coke and King James I. Errata: A listener pointed out that Luther posted 95 theses, rather than the 99 I somehow said and sadly missed in post-production. Must have been thinking of red balloons. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America English Reformation (Wikipedia)

This is our one hundredth episode, at least by some counts, and also our first interview. Eric Yanis, the creator and host of The Other States of America History Podcast, agreed to be our first interviewee. We chatted about a wide range of subjects, including: How the pandemic motivated both of us to start our podcasts; Eric on teaching middle schoolers in New York during the pandmic; The different ways in which we put together our episodes; The rapidly declining interest in history among college undergraduates and some of its causes, including the de-emphasis of history in primary and middle schools; Middle schoolers today have almost no exposure to history before the sixth grade — “kids today” have not even heard of “teepees”; How interest in history rises as we age – “People become more interested in history the more history they have”; Should history podcasters be intimated by academic historians, and should academics be more supportive of popular history, even if it offends their professional sensibilities? “The zone where lives can live”; A digression on the historiography of the Popham/Sagadahoc Colony and the reasons for its failure; Our fantasy pub crawl with figures from sixteenth and seventeenth century America, assuming a universal translator; Things we hear from listeners; The competing claims for the inspiration of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”; Eric discusses the legacy of New Netherland in our language, our celebration of Christmas, and in our national self-image as a “melting pot”; So maybe I should publish the podcast on YouTube. This was fun, and I hope you all enjoyed it. For those of you listening along in real time, may the season be filled with happiness, and may you give and receive excellent history books! Jack on Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Eric on Twitter: @OtherStatesPod The Other States of America Podcast (Apple podcast link)

This episode is about the trading between the Dutch of New Netherland, the English first of Plymouth and then of Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the Algonquian and Iroquoian tribes in the region during the 1620s and 1630s.  These relationships were important, both to the profitability of settlement for the Dutch and the English, and because they so destabilized the balance of power among the tribes and the Europeans that they would eventually lead to the very ugly Pequot War of 1636-38. The indigenous ceremonial currency, wampum, sat at the center of this trade, and we take a first look at its monetization by the Dutch and then the English. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode Mark Meuwese, “The Dutch Connection: New Netherland, the Pequots, and the Puritans in Southern New England, 1620—1638,” Early American Studies, Spring 2011. Paul Otto, “Henry Hudson, the Munsees, and the Wampum Revolution,” published in The Worlds of the Seventeenth-Century Hudson Valley, ed. Jaap Jacobs and Lou Roper. Albany: SUNY Press, 2014 D. I. Bushnell, Jr., “The Origin of Wampum,” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Jan – Jun 1906. Wampum (Wikipedia)

In this episode, we return to New Mexico and look at the ambitious mission-building program of the Franciscans in the Pueblos of New Mexico during the long seventy years between the founding of Santa Fe in 1610 and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Among other moments, we recount the revolt at the Jemez Pueblo in 1623. The Franciscan project, in the end, involved a huge network of missions, much of it built quite voluntarily by Indian converts. It was, in some respects, a European-Indian society quite different from that evolving in Virginia, Massachusetts, and even Florida. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode John L. Kessell, Pueblos, Spaniards, and the Kingdom of New Mexico Herbert E. Bolton, The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest Andrew L. Knaut, The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 Matthew J. Barbour, “The Jemez Revolt of 1623” Matthew Liebmann, “At the Mouth of the Wolf: The Archeology of Seventeenth-Century Franciscans in the Jemez Valley of New Mexico”

In this episode we roll back the timeline a bit to 1602, and recount the exploration and mapping of the coast of California by Sabastian Vizcaino. He would name many of the famous places along that coast, and return a hero, only to be deprived of his just reward by perfidious Spanish politics. Had that not happened, American history in the west might have unfolded quite differently. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode Iris H. W. Engstrand, “Seekers of the ‘Northern Mystery’: European Exploration of California and the Pacific,” California History, Fall 1997. Charles E. Chapman, “SEBASTIAN VIZCAINO: EXPLORATION OF CALIFORNIA,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, April 1920.

This is an encore presentation of one of most popular episodes, “Notes on Thanksgiving,” which dropped on Thanksgiving Day, 2021. This is a great pre-listen for your Thanksgiving celebration, insofar as you will be able to roll out all sorts of impressive Thanksgiving history factoids and impress those all-important in-laws! The original show notes are reproduced below. If you prefer to listen on a podcast app, here is the link for Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sidebar-notes-on-thanksgiving-encore-presentation/id1547078697?i=1000586884396 And for Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5D8jobBZe1LRKHyQp8zaiw?si=C8T_phZoR3uB6TVuQILpsw For “More Notes on Thanksgiving,” a darker version, listen here or find it on a podcast app. This November, it has been 400 years since the traditional First Thanksgiving at Plymouth Colony – Patuxet in 1621. But the history of that collaborative feast of the English and the Wampanoag Indians was lost for more than 200 years. For most of that time, Americans celebrated “thanksgiving” all over the country at different days in the autumn, decreed by local and state governments, without knowing its origin story. This episode explores the conversion of thanksgiving from a local custom to a revered national holiday. Along the way, we learn about Sarah Josepha Hale, the remarkable woman to whom Americans owe the greatest debt for the holiday they will celebrate today. There were political objections to Thanksgiving, too, rooted in exactly the debates we have today after the proper role of the federal government, and how precisely to separate church and state. Finally, we learn about the central role of football on Thanksgiving, dating from Thanksgiving of 1873, only four years after the first college football game. By 1893, Americans were playing thousands of games of football across the country on Thanksgiving Day. Oh, and we should all be grateful that President Franklin Roosevelt didn’t screw it all up, which he very nearly did. Melanie Kirkpatrick, Thanksgiving: The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience Melanie Kirkpatrick, “Don’t Let Ideologues Steal Thanksgiving” “How the Great Colchester Molasses Shortage Nearly Ruined Thanksgiving” All the Presidential Thanksgiving Proclamations 1789-2018 (pdf) The West Wing, “I get to proclaim a national day of Thanksgiving” The American Story Podcast: Sarah Josepha Hale

This Sidebar episode starts with my notes from my trip to Cuba “in support of the Cuban people,” one of the exceptions to the general ban on Americans traveling there. Those notes lead to a story from American – Cuban relations: Three “filibustering” invasions of Cuba launched from the United States in the 1840s, the strange American origin of the flag of Cuba, the election of Franklin Pierce on the platform of acquiring Cuba for the United States, and the curious swearing in of his Vice President, William Rufus King, on a sugar plantation in Cuba. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History Fulgencio Batista (Wikipedia) Franklin Pierce (Wikipedia) William Rufus King (Wikipedia) “As Cuba turns page on Castro era, economic reform gains urgency” “Economic Reforms In Cuba Over the Past Decade” “The rise of Vegas, thanks to the fall of Cuba”

This episode is about a happy-go-lucky Englishman named Thomas Morton, whom William Bradford dubbed the “Lord of Misrule,” and who would be a thorn in the side of Puritans in New England for more than fifteen years. Here’s how Bradford described Thomas Morton in Of Plymouth Plantation: …Morton became Lord of Misrule, and maintained (as it were) a School of Atheism. And after they had got some goods into their hands, and got much by trading with the Indians, they spent it as vainly in quaffing and drinking, both wine and strong waters in excess (and, as some reported) £10 worth in a morning. They also set up a maypole, drinking and dancing about it many days together, inviting the Indian women for their consorts, dancing and frisking together like so many fairies, or furies, rather; and worse practices. Frisking! And worse… But Thomas Morton was much more than that. In many ways, he was the first new American of a very particular sort, and his story reminds us that American traditions have always been in a struggle with each other. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation John G. Turner, They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain Peter C. Mancall, The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England William Heath, “Thomas Morton: From Merry Old England to New England,” Journal of American Studies, April 2007 Michael Zuckerman, “Pilgrims in the Wilderness: Community, Modernity, and the Maypole at Merry Mount,” The New England Quarterly, June 1977 John Endecott (Wikipedia)

New Netherland gets off to a rocky start, with uncommonly poor leadership. Fortunately, a very capable leader, Peter Minuit, steps forward after a catastrophic attack on the Dutch at Fort Orange by the Mohawk. Minuit would consolidate most of the settlers at New Amsterdam, and buy Manhattan from the Leni Lenape Indians on the island. Notwithstanding its representation in American lore, we fearlessly consider whether that deal was, in fact, a great bargain for the Dutch, or actually at fair market value! See Jack’s interview on The RSnake Show on Youtube. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America Jaap Jacobs, The Colony of New Netherland: A Dutch Settlement in Seventeenth-Century America Eric Yanis, The Other States of America History Podcast New Amsterdam (Wikipedia) “Honoring a Very Early New Yorker” (NYT)

This is the beginning of the story of New Netherland, the Dutch colonization of today’s New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and elsewhere in the mid-Atlantic. New Netherland was a long-ignored period in American history, but has come into its own in recent years. The Dutch and New Netherland are now seen to have had a significant impact on the early United States, with important downstream consequences. Such as the word “cookie,” which is why we Americans don’t call them “biscuits,” as the English do. In this episode we discuss the geopolitical and economic considerations that led to the chartering of the New Netherland Company in 1614 and the much larger Dutch West India Company in 1621, both motivated in part by the fantastic success of the Dutch East India Company. We end the episode just before the first batch of Dutch settlers are to arrive in New York harbor. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Jeff’s pictures of the Wessagussett site Selected references for this episode Eric Yanis, The Other States of America History Podcast Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America Jaap Jacobs, The Colony of New Netherland: A Dutch Settlement in Seventeenth-Century America Mark Meuwese, “The Dutch Connection: New Netherland, the Pequots, and the Puritans in Southern New England, 1620-1638,” Early American Studies, Spring 2011. Dutch East India Company (Wikipedia)

This is an encore presentation of our special Columbus Day episode, which originally dropped on October 12, 2021. It remains one of the most popular episodes of the History of the Americans. Last year I released it on the actual day, rather than on the Monday holiday, but this year I’ll go with the flow. One of the reasons is that all the popular and social media discourse on Columbus happens on the government holiday, rather than the anniversary itself. This episode is not actually about the culture war over Columbus Day, except in passing. Instead, we consider the larger consequences of Columbus’s “Great Enterprise,” and various counterfactuals — “what if” moments that might have made it all go quite differently, and the possible long-term consequences. Along the way we say some challenging things that will irritate almost everybody, but we know you are only listening because of your resolutely open minds! Follow me on Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Or on Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, 30th Anniversary Edition Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492-1650 Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian, “The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food, and Ideas”

We are back in Virginia. Opechancanough’s attack of March 22, 1622, the day the sky fell, has knocked the English back on their heels, but not out of Virginia. In this episode, the English react, both with domestic controversy and military force. The Virginia Company invents corporate “damage control.” King James I gives the Company all the obsolete weapons in his armory. Within a year after sky fall, more than 900 English will have died from fighting or starvation. Indian deaths may well have been more. Opechancanough asks for a cease fire, and the English agree. Or do they? Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode James Horn, A Brave and Cunning Prince: The Great Chief Opechancanough and the War for America David Price, Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Start of a New Nation Helen C. Rountree, Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown

This episode snips off some loose ends. We examine Squanto’s ambiguous and controversial legacy, and look at a few interesting Pilgrim stories through the summer of 1623 that did not fit well into the timeline narrative of the last few episodes, including Indian gambling, a miracle of prayer during extreme weather, and the decision by the leaders of the colony to end collective farming and authorize private plots so each family would be better motivated to boost food production. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Shawn’s Pictures of the Popham Colony Site Selected references for this episode Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War Nick Bunker, Making Haste From Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History Edward Winslow, Good News From New England William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation “Gambling,” The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology

By fall 1622, the new settlers sent by Thomas Weston – except those who were sick and remained in the care of the Pilgrims — left to settle in Wessagussett, twenty-two miles to the north of Plymouth at the site of today’s Weymouth.  It was in fact a great location for a settlement with one important qualification:  It was decidedly in the territory of the Massachusetts tribe, and by no means unoccupied or abandoned as Patuxet had been.  This would turn out to be a catastrophic decision, and yet it would paradoxically lead to a more durable peace for the Pilgrims at Plymouth and the tribes following Massasoit at Pokanoket.  But only after the Pilgrims made gutsy decisions and acted boldly. Along the way Squanto would die under mysterious circumstances, and a miracle of healing would change everything. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War John G. Turner, They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty Edward Winslow, Good News From New England William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation Trading Places (“I can see!”)

After some English killed one of Opechancanough’s most celebrated warriors, Nemattanew, in the belief that he had killed an English trader, the great chief Opechancanough reassured Sir George Yeardley, the governor of the English in Virginia, that “the Sky should sooner fall than Peace be broken.” This was part of Opechancanough’s extraordinarily disciplined eight year campaign to lull the overconfident English into complacency, and then ambush them. The sky would indeed fall on March 22, 1622, and the Powhatan Confederacy would kill 347 English, other Europeans, and Africans in an all-out push to eject the English from their lands. It almost succeeded. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode James Horn, A Brave and Cunning Prince: The Great Chief Opechancanough and the War for America David Price, Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Start of a New Nation Helen C. Rountree, Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown Jamestowne Society

Opechancanough, successor to paramount chief Powhatan, deserves to be remembered as one of the great indigenous leaders in American history, on the same rank as Massasoit, King Philip, Pontiac, Logan the Orator, Joseph Brant, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Geronimo. His biography, the important prerequisite to his war on the English in 1622, is nothing less than astonishing. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode James Horn, A Brave and Cunning Prince: The Great Chief Opechancanough and the War for America Carl Bridenbaugh, Early Americans Anna Brickhouse, The Unsettlement of America: Translation, Interpretation, and the Story of Don Luis de Velasco, 1560-1945 Charlotte M. Gradie, “Spanish Jesuits in Virginia: The Mission That Failed” William R. Gerard, “The Tapehanek Dialect of Virginia,” American Anthropologist, April – June 1904.

It is the fall of 1621. After the show of force at Nemasket, the cementing of relations with Massasoit, and the three day feast we now regard as “the first Thanksgiving,” the Pilgrims confront enemies within. The Pilgrims did not yet know it, but for the next year and a half they would battle perfidy, betrayal, and enemies within who would threaten them existentially.  The perfidy would come from Thomas Weston, the same investor who changed the terms of their deal at the last minute back in London, forcing them to sell critical supplies in order to make up for Weston’s unfulfilled promises, and a new batch of settlers who would shortly arrive in Plymouth at Weston’s behest. The betrayal would come, sad to say, from Tisquantum, who would play both sides against the middle and disrupt the alliance with Massasoit just when it was most important.  Before we do any of that, though, I talk about the topic of presentism, which became a social media kerfuffle in the last week or two following an opinion piece by Professor James Sweet, the current president of the American Historical Association, and his rapid apology after a backlash. [Addendum added 12/4/2022: For a well-written and balanced recap of the Sweet controversy, including thoughts on why he provoked such a strong reaction among “very online” historians, you might read “What AHA President James Sweet Got Wrong—And Right“.] Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode James H. Sweet, “Is History History?” and appended apology. Lynn Hunt, “Against Presentism.” [Commission earned on sales through the following links] Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War John G. Turner, They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty Nick Bunker, Making Haste From Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History William Bradford and Edward Winslow (presumed), Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Edward Winslow, Good News From New England

In the spring of 1621, the Pilgrims have met Samoset and Tisquantum, and were learning from Squanto to feed themselves. This they would be able to do within one growing season, something the settlers at Jamestown took many years to accomplish. They had also signed a peace treaty with the grand sachem of the Wampanoag, Massasoit. Now they are learning that Massasoit was weaker than he postured, and that even some of his own sachems were planning to rebel, just as the Narragansetts to his west were increasing the pressure on him. From May to August 1621, the Pilgrim leaders would make decisions and take actions, all very much in the fog of pre-war, that would cement the peace with the tribes closest to them, and strengthen their ally Massasoit immeasurably. They did this without any loss of life, all while constructing their settlement, growing their own food, rebuilding their families, and worshiping their God. They concluded their miraculous year with a great three-day feast, in which they were joined by almost 100 Indian warriors. Even at that “first Thanksgiving” they might have been slaughtered at any time, but had so established themselves as measured and, it should be said, useful, that no trap was sprung, no ambush launched. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War John G. Turner, They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty William Bradford and Edmund Winslow (presumed), Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth

“Welcome, Englishmen!” The Pilgrims had had been building houses and establishing defenses for Plymouth for three months before Samoset, an Abenaki sagamore representing the Wampanoag chief Massasoit, marched boldly into town. Until that moment, they had seen a few Indians watching them, but had made no contact. Now, Massasoit had to decide whether to seek a treaty with the Englishmen, or to fight them. Along the way we reconnect with Tisquantum, and tell one of the most famous stories in early English-American history with, of course, a couple of twists. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Errata: Oops, at one point I said “ancestors” once when I meant “descendants.” You’ll figure it out… Selected references for this episode Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War John G. Turner, They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty William Bradford and Edmund Winslow (presumed), Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Jonathan Mack, A Stranger Among Saints: Stephen Hopkins, The Man Who Survived Jamestown And Saved Plymouth Caleb H. Johnson, The Mayflower and her Passengers Lynn Ceci, “Fish Fertilizer: A Native North American Practice?”, Science, April 4, 1975. The Charter of New England The Three Sisters (agriculture)

It is November 11, 1620. The Mayflower has anchored in the harbor at today’s Provincetown, Massachusetts. The passengers and crew of the Mayflower had been stuffed into the small ship for at least ten weeks, and for those who didn’t go ashore in England longer than that. They were eager to get off the ship, explore the region, and find a permanent place to settle. That would prove to be more difficult than they expected, in no small part because winter in New England was much colder than at the corresponding latitude in Europe. Nevertheless, after three dramatic expeditions along Cape Cod, they found a place to call home. Unfortunately, winter was coming, and hard. If you are looking at these show notes on the website, the credit for the featured photograph for the episode, the marker at Pilgrim Spring, belongs to listener Adam Page. Thank you! Link to more of Adam’s photos of Pilgrim Spring as it is today. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War John G. Turner, They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty William Bradford and Edmund Winslow (presumed), Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth

Who were the Pilgrims, and how was it that they settled in the Netherlands, only to sail on the Mayflower for the lower Hudson River? And having done that, what was it like on board, and how was it they ended up in New England? All will be revealed, including the story of John Howland, who narrowly escaped death on the crossing and who is today ancestor to more than two million Americans, roughly 0.6% of all of us. Errata: I obviously misspoke when I said the Mayflower II sailed in the 1590s. It was the 1950s, doh! Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation John G. Turner, They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty

This episode starts at the end of the story of the Pilgrims at Plymouth by looking at the famous “Mayflower Compact,” and how Americans have spoken and written about it for more than 200 years. Was it a “document that ranks with the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution as a seminal American text,” or merely an expediency for heading off the possibility of mutiny? Everybody from John Adams to historians writing today – and now the History of the Americans Podcast! – have debated that first grassroots American social contract. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode (If you buy any of these books, please click through the links on the episode notes on the website.) Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War George Bancroft, A History of the United States From the Discovery of the American Continent to the Present Time (Vol 1) Winston Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: The New World Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People Paul Johnson, History of the American People Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America Walter A. McDougall, Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History 1585-1828 Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States Louis P. Masur, The Sum of Our Dreams: A Concise History of America Wilfred M. McClay, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story The American Yawp (Vol 1) Mark L. Sargent, “The Conservative Covenant: The Rise of the Mayflower Compact in American Myth,” The New England Quarterly, June 1988.

This year’s Independence Day “Sidebar” episode is about 18 year-old Daniel Webster’s first public speech, on the 4th of July, 1800, in front of an audience of good citizens in Hanover, New Hampshire.  The speech is interesting for a number of reasons, including that it shows how early in our history the 4th of July became the national holiday for ordinary Americans, and also that it is an early indicator that Webster would go on to become perhaps the greatest orator in American history. References for this episode Daniel Webster, “An oration, pronounced at Hanover, New-Hampshire, the 4th day of July, 1800; being the twenty-fourth anniversary of American independence.” Robert V. Remini, Daniel Webster: The Man and His Time Dierks Bentley, “Home”

This episode examines the arrival of the first Africans – Angolans, specifically – in English North America on a privateer called the White Lion. We look at the much-debated status of the new arrivals, the circumstances of their arrival, their origins in Angola under unbelievably brutal conditions, their treatment in American history over the last 145 years, and their significance in the History of the Americans. Please subscribe on your favorite podcast app and tell all your friends! Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode James Horn, 1619: Jamestown and the Forging of American Democracy John Thornton, “The African Experience of the “20. and Odd Negroes” Arriving in Virginia in 1619,” The William and Mary Quarterly, June 1998 George Bancroft, History Of The United States Of America Carl Degler, Out of Our Past Jill LePore, These Truths McCartney, Martha. “Africans, Virginia’s First” Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities, (22 Mar. 2022). Web. 28 Jun. 2022 “Here Come The Bridges” Theme Song Independence Day (Alien scene)

The year 1619 is a famous one in the history of Virginia. There were two big moments — the introduction of the “Great Charter,” which brought representative government to the future United States for the first time, and the first importation of enslaved Africans in English North America. This episode, Part 1, looks at the innovation of the Great Charter, the invention of the “General Assembly,” and the context in which representative government, if that is what it was, first came to the future United States. Please subscribe on your favorite podcast app and tell all your friends! Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode James Horn, 1619: Jamestown and the Forging of American Democracy W. W. Henry, “The First Legislative Assembly in America: Sitting at Jamestown, Virginia, 1619,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Jul., 1894) Sir Edwin Sandys (1561–1629) The Graves of the Powhatan “The Dutch”

This episode looks at the kidnapping of Squanto – Tisquantum – in 1614, along with 26 other Wampanoags, in the context of the extraordinarily robust trade between northern Europeans and the tribes along the northeastern Atlantic Coast of North America. Tisquantum would become one of the most important “cosmopolitan” Indians of the era, and in a horrifying twist of fate would become one of the last of his people to survive. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast References for this episode Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus David Hackett Fischer, Champlain’s Dream Neal Salisbury, “Treacherous Waters: Tisquantum, the Red Atlantic, and the Beginnings of Plymouth Colony,” Early American Literature, Vol 56 (2021) John Booss, “Survival of the Pilgrims: A Reevaluation of the Lethal Epidemic Among the Wampanoag,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts, Winter 2019. Squanto (Wikipedia) The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Gold) Narragansett Beer commercial

It is 1614. John Smith of Jamestown fame is now looking for a new gig, and he sets his gimlet eye on the northeast coast of North America. He travels the coast in a small boat, and by 1616 has produced a tract called “A Description of New England” with an accompanying map. He gives New England its name, and makes the case for the English settlement of the region. He would not get his gig, but his writing and fund-raising campaign would change the course of history. Along the way we notice that Smith has something quite important to say about Francis Drake. And we enthusiastically recommend Jacob Mchangama’s new book, Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast References for this episode Walter W. Woodward, “Captain John Smith and the Campaign for New England: A Study in Early Modern Identity and Promotion,” The New England Quarterly, March 2008. A Description Of New England Or The Observations And Discoveries Of Captain John Smith Melissa Darby, Thunder Go North: The Hunt for Sir Francis Drake’s Fair & Good Bay The Wizard of Oz (Melting)

On May 30, 1931, the Saturday after Memorial Day, the beleaguered President Herbert Hoover addressed a crowd of 20,000 people under sweltering heat at Valley Forge. This episode looks at that speech in the context of Hoover’s life and times. Contemporary listeners will see much that is familiar in Hoover’s speech — politicians are in many ways similar across generations — and also sentiments that we have not heard from our presidents in a long time. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast References for this episode William E. Leuchtenburg, Herbert Hoover Herbert Hoover Memorial Day Address at Valley Forge, May 30, 1931 New York Times coverage Jessie De Priest tea at White House Men at Work – “Down Under” Theme song to “All In The Family” Herbert Hoover speech of November 4, 1932

We are on the road to Plymouth. There are several strands that weave together in 1620, when the Pilgrims on the Mayflower land at an abandoned Indian village known as Patuxet, at a site John Smith had named Plymouth. One of those strands is the rise of dissident Protestantism in England, and the idea that it might best be dealt with by transplanting early Separatists to the New World. The first such project, an attempt in 1597 to make a Separatist colony on islands at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, would fail spectacularly. But it would also be an important precursor of the settlement that many — not all, but many — Americans identify as the national origin story. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast References for this episode David B. Quinn, “The First Pilgrims,” The William and Mary Quarterly, July 1966. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Pilgrim)

Samuel de Champlain returns to New France in 1615, and leads an alliance of Huron and Algonquin tribes into western New York State to attack Onondaga, the heavily fortified heart of Iroquois territory on the site of today’s Syracuse. Along the way Champlain goes fishing on Lake Huron and Lake Ontario, and we learn that he was not the first European to do. The battle itself is dramatic. The French and their allies build a huge siege tower that requires two hundred men to move in position. But not all ends well. Champlain is injured, and endures unbelievable pain in the retreat to Huronia. The outcome is a matter of some historical controversy. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode David Hackett Fischer, Champlain’s Dream Étienne Brûlé (Wikipedia) Étienne Brûlé (Dictionary of Canadian Biography) Susquehannock (Wikipedia) Casablanca (“There are certain sections of New York…”) The Fifth Column Podcast Map of Champlain’s route through Huronia and into Iroquoia: Map of Champlain’s route in 1615, from Champlain’s Dream

We’re back after our week off! In this episode we touch on our vacation driving the Natchez Trace, and then proceed briskly to the career of Samuel Argall – Pocahontas’s kidnapper – in the service of the Virginia Company and himself. Most importantly, we look at the hilariously devious ruse that Argall deployed in 1613 to “displant” the French colony on Mt. Desert Island, Maine. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode Seymour V. Connor, “Sir Samuel Argall: A Biographical Sketch,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, April 1951. Casablanca (Your papers please) Pierre Biard Natchez Trace

This episode is a “Sidebar,” which is our term for an episode that is off the timeline of the History of the Americans. This episode centers on a concurring opinion delivered by Justice Neil Gorsuch in a case handed down by the United States Supreme Court only a few days ago, on April 21, 2022. The case, United States vs. Vaello Madero, addresses a pretty unexciting question to most of us — whether the Constitution requires Congress to extend Supplemental Security Income benefits to residents of Puerto Rico to the same extent it makes those benefits available to the residents of the States. That is not the interesting part. Justice Gorsuch’s concurring opinion is, however, very interesting, an eloquent re-telling of the history of a series of cases — the “Insular Cases” — handed down in the years following the Spanish-American war, the moment in which the United States started dabbling in the European habit of true empire building. The Insular Cases are both an analytical mess and remain on the books as bad law today, as Justice Gorsuch compellingly argues. Enjoy! Selected references for this episode United States v. Vaello Madero Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States Insular Cases (Wikipedia) Plessy v. Ferguson (Wikipedia) U.S. Citizen Vs U.S. National: Differences “Breaker Morant,” epitaph scene

It is late winter, 1616.  When last we left our lovers, John and Rebecca Rolfe were in receipt of a request from the Virginia Company to come to London.  They had a young son, Thomas, barely a year old, so this must not have been an easy decision to make. This episode is about that trip to London in 1616 and 1617. The young family sailed in April 1616 on Samuel Argall’s frigate Treasurer, the same ship onto which Pocahontas had been lured and kidnapped three years before.  In addition to the Rolfes, Powhatan’s son-in-law, Uttamatomakin, came along at the paramount chief’s behest to learn what he could of the English. And the English would learn a lot about them. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast References for this episode Camilla Townsend, Pocahontas And The Powhatan Dilemma David Price, Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Start of a New Nation The Blue Brothers (Tunnel scene)

This episode is about the kidnapping and ransom of Pocahontas in 1613, the romancing of her by John Rolfe, her conversion to Christianity, and their marriage in 1614, which settled the First Anglo-Powhatan War.  We look at the two protagonists, their different personalities, their motives, and the extent of their emotional attachment. My primary source for this episode is a very interesting book written only in 2004 by Camilla Townsend, “Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma.”  Professor Townsend reads all the various accounts of Pocahontas’ life critically, in the sense of thoughtfully, trying to imagine what she must have felt under the circumstances described by the various European men who encountered her and wrote down what they believed happened. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast References for this episode Camilla Townsend, Pocahontas And The Powhatan Dilemma Mawage John Philip Sousa, “Powhatan’s Daughter March” Errata: I misspoke when I said that Thomas Rolfe would have many children – he had many grandchildren, all descended from his only daughter, Jane Rolfe, who would marry Robert Bolling. Their son John Bolling would have six children, all of whom would marry and have children of their own.

This episode is a close look at the First Anglo-Powhatan War, which began shortly after John Smith left Jamestown forever in October 1609, and ended as a formal matter with the marriage of Pocahontas and John Rolfe. The war was extremely bloody, if casualties are measured as a percentage of original population, and is noteworthy as the first true war between English settlers and the Indians of North America. Many more would come. But, before even getting to seventeenth century Virginia, we fix our gimlet eye on the historical significance of National Beer Day! Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode J. Frederick Fausz, “An ‘Abundance of Blood Shed on Both Sides’: England’s First Indian War, 1609-1614,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, January 1990 James Horn, A Brave and Cunning Prince: The Great Chief Opechancanough and the War for America National Beer Day (Wikipedia) Message of FDR to Congress re the Volstead Act Elizabeth Warren gets her a beer

After the experience of 15 months, 66 substantive episodes, and more than 180,000 aggregate downloads/listens, I thought it would be useful to reintroduce the podcast. I labored over the original introduction and still stand by it, and yet it does not really reflect the tone of the podcast as it has turned out. This episode is therefore a new introduction for both new and longstanding subscribers. It includes a description of the podcast as it has actually evolved, and also my thoughts on the need for history to be fun and interesting, the avoidance of “presentism,” and the importance of attempting to keep politics out of the teaching and telling of history. And there’s an awesome clip from “Inherit the Wind.”

Again we digress into the question of privateering and letters of marque, and then take on the stories of the two “sons” whom Christopher Newport and the paramount chief Powhatan exchanged as hostages and emissaries in 1608, the English boy Thomas Savage and the young Powhatan man Namontack. Neither are as famous as Pocahontas or, for that matter, Squanto (Tisquantum), but they were remarkable in their own right. Both would show an impressive facility for utterly alien languages and cultures, and both would be torn between loyalty to their own people and to the side that adopted them. One of them would eventually achieve the honor of giving a name to a vessel of the United States Navy. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode Christopher Clausen, “Between Two Worlds,” The American Scholar, Summer 2007 Alden T. Vaughan, “Namontack’s Itinerant Life and Mysterious Death: Sources and Speculations,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 2018. USS Namontack The Paris Declaration of 1856 (re privateering) Jimmy Buffett, “A Pirate Looks At Forty,” with Jerry Jeff Walker Malintzin (Wikipedia) Debedeavon (Wikipedia)

In this episode we look at the gruesome “starving time” in Jamestown and the resurgent Powhatan war during the seven months after John Smith’s departure in October 1609. The mortality rate at the colony was close to 80% in just that winter, and the incompetence that led to it is breathtaking. Relief comes only with the arrival of two ships from Bermuda carrying the castaways from the Sea Venture shipwreck. The Powhatans almost eject the English from Virginia, but the aptly named Lord de la Warr fatefully arrives just in time with much-needed reinforcements and supplies. If a few things had gone even slightly differently, Jamestown would not have survived, and English North America would be very different. [Errata: “De la Warr” was pronounced closer to “Delaware” than my own pronunciation in this episode.] Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode David Price, Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Start of a New Nation James Horn, A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America All That’s Interesting/Starving Time (Story about archeology at the Jamestown site that I came across after I had recorded the episode) United States state-level population estimates: Colonization to 1999 Dr. Strangelove (checklist scene)

The episode begins with current events, sorting out the correct reading of the “letters of marque and reprisals” clause of the US Constitution, which actually has nothing to do with Jamestown but touches on the Russo-Ukraine war, which is raging as we write this. We express a mix of approval of and gentle criticism of Representative Lance Gooden of Texas, who also appears to love letters of marque. For those of you listening in the future, we hope it resolves satisfactorily for the people of Ukraine. The rest of the episode is an overview of the Jamestown settlement timeline between John Smith’s departure in October 1609 and the start of the Second Powhatan War on March 22, 1622, just five days short of 400 years ago as I write this. Big picture, etc. That will set us up to hit the highlights during that stretch over the next few episodes. Oh, and we touch upon the signal events of 1619. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode James Horn, A Brave and Cunning Prince: The Great Chief Opechancanough and the War for America David Price, Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Start of a New Nation Jamestown Timeline

Here come the Dutch! In the busy summer of 1609, English captain Henry Hudson, sailing the Half Moon for the Dutch East India Company, explores the Hudson River from New York Bay to the north of Albany, having numerous encounters, fraught and otherwise, with the local indigenous people along the way. Before he’s done Hudson learns the name of that long skinny island that has forever been the economic capital of the United States. The episode concludes with Hudson’s gruesome demise, for which he mostly had himself to blame. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America Daniel K. Richter, “From ‘The Third Voyage of Master Henry Hudson’ by Robert Juet” Emanuel Van Meteren, on Hudson’s Voyage, 1610 Dutch East India Company (Wikipedia) Palisades Amusement Park commercial “Happy Days”

It is the summer of 1609. Samuel de Champlain has founded Quebec and spent the winter there. During that very difficult time, with its Jamestown-like death rate, he had built strong alliances with the Montaignais, Huron, and other local tribes. The Mohawks, coming up from today’s New York State, have been attacking Champlain’s allies for many years, long before the French arrived, but those attacks have intensified. The European fur trade has gotten more lucrative, and that makes the tribes along the St. Lawrence a more attractive target for Mohawk attacks. Champlain develops a plan to launch a preemptive raid on the Mohawk, deep in their own territory, to make them think twice about attacking to their north. Along the way, he and two companions become the first Europeans to see Lake Champlain or set foot in today’s Vermont. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode David Hackett Fischer, Champlain’s Dream The Devil Wears Prada (clip) The Bridge on the River Kwai (clip)

After a brief digression into current events and a visit to a Ukrainian speakeasy, we accompany Samuel de Champlain to the first settlement of New France, which was in today’s Maine, just 1700 feet from Nova Scotia. We also recount his three trips along the coast of New England in 1604, 1605, and 1606, barely missing George Weymouth and the Archangel along the way. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode David Hackett Fischer, Champlain’s Dream Eric Yanis, The Other States of America History Podcast Machias-Seal Island

In this episode we learn the political and geopolitical foundations of New France and the importance of the beloved King Henri IV to French expansion in North America. We follow Champlain in his youth, including his first adventure in the New World on a Spanish ship, and the circumstances under which he inherited a lot of money. We also meet the remarkable characters who recruited Champlain, or vice versa, to sail on an expedition to the St. Lawrence in 1603, where Champlain first heard tell of the big lakes in upstate New York, one of which bears his name, the Great Lakes, and the Hudson and Detroit rivers. Oh, and we learn the origin of the expression “a chicken in every pot.” Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode David Hackett Fischer, Champlain’s Dream Eric Yanis, The Other States of America History Podcast Geaux Tigers Heartwarming Ted Lasso Moments (YouTube)

In this episode we introduce Samuel de Champlain, without whom there might never have been a meaningful French presence in northern North America, largely through the work of the great historian David Hackett Fischer. We also consider Fischer’s views on whether history should be useable. Finally, but first, we address listener concerns over my pronunciation of “Powhatan,” a fraught topic indeed. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode David Hackett Fischer, Champlain’s Dream Expulsion of the Acadians (Wikipedia)

In this episode we conclude John Smith’s run at Jamestown — he will depart on October 4, 1609 after a severe injury and, more relevantly, having been demoted after having lost corporate political battles inside the Virginia Company. Along the way we meet the first English women at Jamestown, consider the “coronation” of Powhatan, witness exciting exotic dancing, see Smith outwit both Powhatan and Opechancanough on the same trip for food, and be there when Pocahontas rescued Smith for the second time, or maybe only the first. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Selected references for this episode James Horn, A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America James Horn, A Brave and Cunning Prince: The Great Chief Opechancanough and the War for America David Price, Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Start of a New Nation Star Trek, the “balance of power” exchange from “A Private Little War”

This is the 57th episode of the podcast, so we take a very brief digression to discuss that milestone. Mostly, this episode looks at the first nine months of 1608, which saw the rise of John Smith to the colony’s presidency amid rising tension with the Powhatan Confederacy. To lower that tension, the English and the Powhatans exchange young men in a gesture of goodwill, and so will begin the stories of Thomas Savage and Namontack. Smith leads two separate explorations of the Chesapeake, in search of the Virginia Company’s three priorities: Precious metals, a “middle passage” to the Pacific, and “lost colonists” from the Roanoke Colony, in addition to an objective of his own — to make contact with tribes who are antagonists of the Powhatans, and potential allies of the English. Oh, and Ratcliffe ends up in the brig. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Selected references for this episode James Horn, A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America David Price, Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Start of a New Nation Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Apathy and Death in Early Jamestown,” The Journal of American History, June 1979.

It is late May, 1607, and Jamestown has survived the first organized attack against the settlement, this time from an alliance of five tribes from the Powhatan Confederacy. Captain Christopher Newport and John Smith don’t know this yet, because they have taken twenty-two men in their boat and were exploring up the James River. There they hear about a “paramount chief” for the first time, and the large tribal confederacy that confronts them. As the summer and fall of 1607 grinds on, disease, starvation, and Indian attacks afflict the colonists, and more than half will die before the end of the year. John Ratcliffe replaces Edward-Maria Wingfield as president of the colony, but John Smith is its chief operating officer, rallying the men to build houses an clear fields, and trading with the local tribes for food. While exploring upriver, he is captured by the military leader of the Powhatans, Opechancanough. Smith eventually meets the paramount chief Powhatan. The episode closes with a first look at the famous scene in which Pocahontas either saved John Smith’s life, or didn’t! Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Selected resources for this episode James Horn, A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America James Horn, A Brave and Cunning Prince: The Great Chief Opechancanough and the War for America David Price, Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Start of a New Nation

This episode looks at the prophecy that animated Powhatan’s consolidation of power in the region, the violent first encounters between the Virginia Company expedition and the indigenous peoples at the mouth of the Chesapeake, internal squabbles within the English leadership, and the bizarre decision by Jamestown’s president Edward-Maria Wingfield to disarm unilaterally, in the fruitless hope of winning the favor of the locals. We also take a first look at the staggering body count that would pile up over the first eighteen years of the Jamestown settlement. Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Selected resources for this episode Carl Bridenbaugh, Jamestown, 1544-1699 James Horn, A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America David Price, Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Start of a New Nation Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Apathy and Death in Early Jamestown,” The Journal of American History, June 1979.

In late December, 1606, in London’s River Thames, three small ships were anchored awaiting a voyage across the Atlantic. Those three ships were the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery, and they would take 105 men and boys to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay to establish the Virginia Company’s southern colony. They would plunge into a complex geopolitical morass that would very nearly destroy the venture. This episode looks at the context for the expedition that would become Jamestown, including especially the rise of the powerful Powhatan confederacy that would be waiting there when the English arrived, and prepared by a long-ago confrontation with the Spanish to confront the newcomers . Selected resources for this episode Carl Bridenbaugh, Jamestown, 1544-1699 Charlotte M. Gradie, “Spanish Jesuits in Virginia: The Mission That Failed” James Horn, A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America James Horn, A Brave and Cunning Prince: The Great Chief Opechancanough and the War for America David Price, Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Start of a New Nation John Smith (Wikipedia)

This week we continue and complete our story of the English adventures along the coast of New England in the first decade of the 17th century, including the fate, and the historical debate over the fate, of the Popham Colony, the Virginia Company’s sister colony to Jamestown. Along the way we learn about the astonishing origin of the word “Iroquois,” the first dog names in North America that come down to us, and the medicinal value, or not, of sassafras! Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Selected references for this episode Henry Otis Thayer, The Sagadahoc Colony: Comprising the Relation of a Voyage Into New England Christopher J. Bilodeau, “The Paradox of Sagadahoc: The Popham Colony, 1607–1608,” Early American Studies, Winter 2014. Alfred A. Cave, “Why Was the Sagadahoc Colony Abandoned? An Evaluation of the Evidence,” The New England Quarterly, December 1995. “The Voyage of Martin Pring 1603,” American Journeys Collection First Charter of Virginia

The English established a colony on the coast near today’s Phippsburg, Maine in 1607, only a couple of months after the founding of Jamestown. It would survive just over a year.  The Popham or Sagadahoc Colony was the culmination of several exploratory missions along the New England coast from approximately Cape Cod to Maine between 1602 and 1605.  In 1602, Bartholomew Gosnold, who would eventually die at Jamestown, led the first of those missions to the New England coast and gave several famous places names that we use today, including Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard.  His expedition would stay in the Elizabeth Islands, which shelter Buzzard’s Bay in Massachusetts, for more than three weeks, and have extensive encounters with local indigenous peoples. The Gosnold narrative of those encounters has all sorts of interesting stuff! Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 Selected references for this episode Henry Otis Thayer, The Sagadahoc Colony: Comprising the Relation of a Voyage Into New England Warner F. Gookin, “Who was Bartholomew Gosnold?”, The William and Mary Quarterly, July 1949. A briefe and true relation of the discouerie of the north part of Virginia being a most pleasant, fruitfull and commodious soile: made this present yeere 1602, by Captaine Bartholomew Gosnold, Captaine Bartholowmew [sic] Gilbert, and diuers other gentlemen their associats, by the permission of the honourable knight, Sir Walter Ralegh, &c. Written by M. Iohn Brereton one of the voyage. 

It is 1580. Virtually no Spaniards have returned to New Mexico or the American southwest since the return of the remnants of the Coronado and Soto expeditions in 1542.  Neither had found a third great indigenous civilization to conquer, or even more than scant evidence of precious metals.  By 1580 most of the survivors of those expeditions had died, and the narratives produced in their aftermath would have been known to very few people. The most durable legacy of those expeditions would have been the rumors of gold, which always persist long after the actual facts are gone from living memory.  So it was that circa 1580 various aspirational conquistadors set to scheming for a return to the region that some were now dreaming of as “New Mexico.”  These new Spanish probes into the American southwest were minor affairs and of relatively little consequence, except insofar as they stirred up the Indians living in the Pueblos of the region and generated a new round of propaganda that would lead to the colonization project of Juan de Oñate y Salazar in 1598.  That would be of surpassing significance, for Oñate would stay for twelve years, kill a lot of Indians, found Santa Fe just before he departed, and establish the foundation of Spanish society in the southwestern United States. Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Selected references for this episode George P. Hammond and Agapito Rey, The Rediscovery of New Mexico, 1580-1594 (Coronado cuarto centennial publications, 1540-1940) Stan Hoig, Came Men on Horses: The Conquistador Expeditions of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and Don Juan de Oñate John L. Kessell, Pueblos, Spaniards, and the Kingdom of New Mexico J. Lloyd Mecham, “Antonio de Espejo and His Journey to New Mexico”, The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, October 1926

In this episode we look at the tangled debate over the location of Drake’s “fair and good bay.” Was it in California? Or do we only believe that because of unbelievably unscrupulous behavior by famous California academics? We recount the story of Drake’s “plate of brass,” and discuss the connection between that fraud and the “Dare stone.” Along the way we take a close look at academic conspiracy, California’s “national myth,” and the brilliant woman who revolutionized the history of Drake’s circumnavigation only to be denounced by some of the leading lights in the profession of history. Finally, we consider the legacy of Sir Francis Drake, and the matter of changing the names of high schools. Oh, and the recording sounds a bit weird in places — I recorded it in a hotel room in Boston, and had to edit out a rather noisy air handler in the background. There is nothing we won’t do to bring you the podcast! Selected references for this episode Melissa Darby, Thunder Go North: The Hunt for Sir Francis Drake’s Fair & Good Bay Samuel Bawlf, The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake: 1577-1580 Miranda Kaufmann, Black Tudors: The Untold Story Drake’s Plate of Brass (Wikipedia) Dare Stones (Wikipedia)

This November, it has been 400 years since the traditional First Thanksgiving at Plymouth Colony – Patuxet in 1621. But the history of that collaborative feast of the English and the Wampanoag Indians was lost for more than 200 years. For most of that time, Americans celebrated “thanksgiving” all over the country at different days in the autumn, decreed by local and state governments, without knowing its origin story. This episode explores the conversion of thanksgiving from a local custom to a revered national holiday. Along the way, we learn about Sarah Josepha Hale, the remarkable woman to whom Americans owe the greatest debt for the holiday they will celebrate today. There were political objections to Thanksgiving, too, rooted in exactly the debates we have today after the proper role of the federal government, and how precisely to separate church and state. Finally, we learn about the central role of football on Thanksgiving, dating from Thanksgiving of 1873, only four years after the first college football game. By 1893, Americans were playing thousands of games of football across the country on Thanksgiving Day. Oh, and we should all be grateful that President Franklin Roosevelt didn’t screw it all up, which he very nearly did. Selected references for this episode Melanie Kirkpatrick, Thanksgiving: The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience Melanie Kirkpatrick, “Don’t Let Ideologues Steal Thanksgiving” “How the Great Colchester Molasses Shortage Nearly Ruined Thanksgiving” All the Presidential Thanksgiving Proclamations 1789-2018 (pdf) The West Wing, “I get to proclaim a national day of Thanksgiving” The American Story Podcast: Sarah Josepha Hale EayJ2pIk9BVexKtZCSmd

This episode is off the timeline. We look at the various crimes against humanity to be found on “History Twitter,” the idea of pursuing a “useable” history and the perils therein, whether we should reduce the Constitution to Twitter-friendly labels such as “pro-slavery” or “anti-slavery,” and the disrespect many younger professors and graduate students show for the greatest historian of the American Revolution and the founding period, Brown University’s Gordon Wood, who is still pumping out sharply written books in his late eighties and standing up for history as a discipline. I also talk about some other podcasts that I like. Oh, and it sounds slightly different because I have a new microphone in Austin and forgot to buy a foam cover for it. That will be fixed next time. Enjoy! References for this episode Gordon Wood, Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution Good Will Hunting (Bar Scene) The University of Austin Podcasts mentioned History of England Podcast Ben Franklin’s World American Revolution Podcast The American Story [Abridged] Presidential Histories Civics and Coffee The History of North America Age of Jackson Podcast A New History of Old Texas Nudie Reads The Reason Roundtable The Fifth Column Podcast Making Sense by Sam Harris The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan Walk-Ins Welcome with Bridget Phetasy The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway Honestly with Bari Weiss

In this episode we wrap up loose ends before moving on down the timeline: What happened after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and what happened after John White left the Roanoke Colony in August 1587? We also see what happened to all those Elizabethan characters we’ve been talking about for the last three months, including Francis Drake, Elizabeth herself, John Hawkins, Martin Frobisher, Francis Walsingham, and Philip II. Finally, we explore the long-term consequences of both the Armada and the Roanoke Colony for the History of the Americans. Oh, and we read a poem in the spirit of the day. Selected references for this episode Garrett Mattingly, The Armada Robert Hutchinson, The Spanish Armada: A History James Horn, A Kingdom Strange: The Brief and Tragic History of the Lost Colony of Roanoke David Beers Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584-1606 Paul E. Hoffman, “New Light on Vicente Gonzalez’s 1588 Voyage in Search of Raleigh’s English Colonies” Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604) (Wikipedia) In Flanders Fields (Wikipedia) Neal Casal, “Virginia Dare” (Youtube, song)

At some point in the second week of August, 1588, a merchant ship from one of the cities of the Hanseatic League, sailing through the North Sea off the east coast of England, found itself surrounded, in the middle of nowhere, by a herd of horses and mules, swimming, with no land in sight anywhere. This is, among other matters of greater historical significance, the story of how those poor creatures ended up paddling frantically, and unsuccessfully, for their lives. We look again at the geopolitics of 1588, considered a “year of dire portent” in Europe for at least a hundred years, the struggle of the Armada to sail free of Iberia in some of the strangest summer weather old sailors had ever seen, the famous game of bowls, and the long fight up the English Channel as the Duke Medina Sidonia sailed to protect the Duke of Parma’s invasion force which was to cross the Channel on barges. Oh, and we learn where Tolkien got the idea for the Beacons of Gondor. Selected references for this episode Garrett Mattingly, The Armada Robert Hutchinson, The Spanish Armada: A History

On August 28, 1587, John White, the leader of the last Roanoke Colony, climbed on board Edward Spicer’s flyboat and returned to England. His mandate was to secure supplies and more settlers to reinforce the people he had left behind, who included his own daughter and granddaughter, Eleanor and Virginia Dare.  He would not in fact be able to return for almost three years, by which time the roughly 116 colonists back in North Carolina had vanished completely, leaving behind only scant clues. White would take three years to return because an undeclared but existential war had broken out between England and Spain, known to history as the Anglo-Spanish War of 1585-1604. The war was existential not for England the country – had Philip II and Spain won the war, England would have continued to exist as a country, and in their daily lives most English people would have seen very little change. Philip II would have become King of England, as he had already been years before during his marriage to Mary Tudor, and the liturgy at church on Sunday would have changed in ways that we moderns would have regarded as hilariously trivial.  However, the war was existential for Elizabeth I and her Protestant elite who, among other things, sustained English naval power and supported North American colonization. It is very hard to imagine that an England ruled by Philip II and an entirely different batch of nobles, Catholic “recusants” emerged from the political shadows, would have settled North America.  Nor would there have been successful Protestant Dutch settlement, because the defeat of Elizabeth would also have meant the end of Dutch Protestantism as a political force. The city in that harbor discovered by Verrazzano more than sixty years before would more likely have been New Seville or New Lisbon than New Amsterdam or New York. Fortunately, the English had Sir Francis Drake, who in the spring of 1587 would raid the Spanish port of Cadiz and occupy Sagres roadstead off Cape St. Vincent, destroying more than 100 Spanish and Portuguese ships and boats and much of the supplies for the Spanish Armada. And then he would go on to grab a Portuguese treasure ship that would substantially bolster Elizabeth’s finances just when she needed it most. Selected references for this episode Garrett Mattingly, The Armada Robert Hutchinson, The Spanish Armada: A History John Sugden, Sir Francis Drake Andrew Shepherd, “The Spanish Armada in Lisbon: preparing to invade England”

This episode looks at the fate of the 15 settlers Sir Richard Grenville had left on Roanoke Island in 1586, and the expedition of 1587, which Sir Walter Ralegh, John White, and more or less everybody else intended to land at Chesapeake Bay. They never got there, and after August 26, 1587, no English person would ever see them again. Oh, and we meet Virginia Dare! Link to the Merch! (Scroll down) Selected references for this episode James Horn, A Kingdom Strange: The Brief and Tragic History of the Lost Colony of Roanoke David Beers Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584-1606 Mary Queen of Scots (2018) execution scene

We are back in the summer of 1585, and careful listeners could hear the ever louder drums of war between Spain and England. In this episode we tell the story of Drake’s voyage to the West Indies in 1585-86, which fundamentally ended with the rescue at Roanoke Colony.  There are three reasons why we are devoting an episode to Drake’s West Indies expedition. First, it was this mission more than any other affront to Philip that made direct war between Spain and England inevitable. Without that war, and without the defeat of the Spanish Armada in the course of that war, it is far from clear that English settlement in North America would have unfolded as it did, or that it ever would have happened.  Second, Drake burned down St. Augustine and affected the course of the Roanoke Colony, both of which are decisively within the mandate of the podcast. Finally, Drake’s West Indies voyage was a great moment in military history, an extraordinary example of amphibious warfare long before we used that term. Oh. And please listen to the end — I tackle a historical mystery and wonder if some of the academic historians who have written about it have done so … carefully. Selected references for this episode John Sugden, Sir Francis Drake Angus Konstam, The Great Expedition: Sir Francis Drake on the Spanish Main 1585–86 Mary Frear Keeler (Editor), Sir Francis Drake’s West Indian Voyage, 1585-86 (Hakluyt Society, Second Series) Michael Guasco, Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World 3:10 to Yuma

It is July 1585. Sir Richard Grenville, in command of the first English expedition of colonization to reach the territory that is now the United States, has arrived at the Outer Banks of North Carolina with five ships, only two of which were part of his original fleet.  The flagship Tiger has run aground, and in the course of refloating her a large part of the expedition’s supplies had been lost. Thomas Cavendish commands the Elizabeth, which made it to a pre-planned rendezvous on the southwestern coast of Puerto Rico.  They have two small Spanish ships captured in the Mona Passage between Puerto Rico and Hispaniola, and a new pinnace for shallow water exploration, built from scratch. Unbeknownst to Grenville and Cavendish, there are thirty Englishmen wandering around the barrier islands not far to the north, unceremoniously dumped there by George Raymond, captain of the Red Lion, who had blown off the colony to privateer between Newfoundland and the Azores. They also didn’t know, yet, that the Roebuck and the Dorothy, thought lost since a storm off the coast of Portugal, had found their own way and were anchored offshore not far to the north waiting for Grenville and Cavendish to show up.  And, finally, the most important thing they didn’t know was that the re-supply ships, under the command of Amias Preston and Bernard Drake — no relation to Francis — had been ordered by Elizabeth I to sail for Newfoundland instead of North Carolina, so that they could harass the economically important Spanish cod-fishing operation. Now it was time to pay a visit to the chief of the Secotans, Wingina, whose portrait by John White is the featured image for this episode. Selected references for this episode James Horn, A Kingdom Strange: The Brief and Tragic History of the Lost Colony of Roanoke David Beers Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584-1606

Sir Walter Ralegh’s first attempt to settle the Outer Banks of North Carolina — the first Roanoke colony, under the command of Sir Richard Grenville — got off to a rough start. A storm off Portugal had scattered the fleet, and only Grenville’s Tiger and Thomas Cavendish’s Elizabeth made it to the agreed interim rendezvous on the southwestern coast of Puerto Rico. Grenville and Cavendish replenished the fleet with Spanish prizes, and eventually got to Cape Hatteras only to lose most of the colony’s supplies when the Tiger ran aground trying to enter Pamlico Sound. We also discuss the “Black Legend” debate, the revisionist view that anti-Spanish propaganda by English and Dutch Protestants unfairly influenced much of the image of the Spanish empire, and how two things can be true at once. The featured image for this episode is Sir Richard Grenville at age 29. Selected references for this episode James Horn, A Kingdom Strange: The Brief and Tragic History of the Lost Colony of Roanoke David Beers Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584-1606 Black Legend (Spain) Alan Sherman, “Good Advice”

In the spring of 1584, Sir Walter Ralegh (the spelling he used), now the chief organizer and promoter of English settlement in North America, dispatched two ships to the Outer Banks of North Carolina on a mission of reconnaissance. They explored Hattaras Island and Roanoke Island, and the area between Pamlico Sound in the south and the mouth of the Chesapeake in the north. They brought home to England two Indians, Manteo and Wanchese, who would go on to speak English and would have a huge impact on the two subsequent attempts to settle English people in the area. #VastEarlyAmerica Website: The History of the Americans https://subscribebyemail.com/thehistoryoftheamericans.com/?feed=podcast Selected references for this episode James Horn, A Kingdom Strange: The Brief and Tragic History of the Lost Colony of Roanoke David Beers Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584-1606

In this episode we discuss the planning for the first English colonization of North America in the context of England’s strategy to resist Spanish hegemony and Protestantism’s defense against Catholicism. We look at the key figures who advocated for, invested in, and led the first English settlement efforts, which include the two failed expeditions and tragic ending of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, which set up his younger half-brother, Sir Walter Ralegh, to take over the project. #VastEarlyAmerica Website: The History of the Americans https://subscribebyemail.com/thehistoryoftheamericans.com/?feed=podcast Selected references for this episode James Horn, A Kingdom Strange: The Brief and Tragic History of the Lost Colony of Roanoke John Butman and Simon Targett, New World, Inc.: The Story of the British Empire’s Most Successful Start-Up David Beers Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584-1606

In this episode we chase Francis Drake and the Golden Hind from the equator, just off the west coast of South America, all the way around the world and back to England. Along the way Drake claims the northwest coast of North America for England, naming it “Novo Albion,” cuts a trade deal with Babu, the Sultan of the Moluccas, and makes it back to England in the most remarkable feat of sailing in the sixteenth century. Drake becomes one of England’s richest men, is knighted by Elizabeth and becomes one of her closest advisors, and finds himself in the middle of a changed geopolitical landscape. Tensions with Spain have risen considerably, and Drake is in the middle of it. #VastEarlyAmerica Website: The History of the Americans https://subscribebyemail.com/thehistoryoftheamericans.com/?feed=podcast References for this episode Samuel Bawlf, The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake: 1577-1580 Melissa Darby, Thunder Go North: The Hunt for Sir Francis Drake’s Fair & Good Bay Miranda Kaufmann, Black Tudors: The Untold Story John Sugden, Sir Francis Drake

When last we left Drake and company, it was August 1578, and the fleet had spent a good part of the southern winter in the protected harbor at Port Saint Julian, in today’s Argentina, about a hundred miles north of the entrance to the Strait of Magellan.  That was where Drake was headed, because that was the only way that any European knew of to get into the Pacific Ocean by heading west. In the next seven months, Drake and his crew would make the fastest crossing of the Strait during the fifteenth century, discover Drake’s Passage and thereby overturn the received wisdom of Europe’s geographers (who believed South America was connected to a southern continent at the South Pole), and by some measures have the most spectacular run of any English pirate or privateer in history. We also learn the origin of the name “penguin,” which makes great dinner party conversation. #VastEarlyAmerica Website: The History of the Americans https://subscribebyemail.com/thehistoryoftheamericans.com/?feed=podcast References for this episode Samuel Bawlf, The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake: 1577-1580 John Sugden, Sir Francis Drake NASA Lunar Eclipse Database

On September 26, 1580, some fisherman not far from shore in the English Channel saw a small ship, riding low in the water, moving cautiously toward Plymouth Sound.  A man aboard the ship hailed the fisherman and asked whether the Queen was alive?  The fisherman replied to Sir Francis Drake that she was, but that a plague – influenza, apparently — was raging in Plymouth itself.                1018 days after he had set sail from England, Drake had returned with a hold full of treasure and a trove of important information about the world.  Before he could approach Plymouth, however, he had to know whether Elizabeth, who had sent him on a secret mission through the Strait of Magellan to the west coast of North America, was still queen, or whether a successor, who might well have been Catholic and an ally of Spain, now reigned. This is part 1 of the story of the second circumnavigation of the globe, and the extraordinary things that happened along the way. In today’s episode, Drake discovers a cure for scurvy 180 years before a Scottish doctor in the Royal Navy learned that citrus fruits did the job, and his sailors make the coolest souvenirs in history, at least that we know of. And that’s the very least of it, for Drake sets the stage for the English settlement of North America. #VastEarlyAmerica https://subscribebyemail.com/thehistoryoftheamericans.com/?feed=podcast References for this episode Samuel Bawlf, The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake: 1577-1580 John Sugden, Sir Francis Drake Scurvy Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Email: [email protected]

This episode is the second of our series on Sir Francis Drake.  Last week, we revisited the catastrophic battle of San Juan d’Ulua in the harbor near Vera Cruz, Mexico between the English trader, smuggler, and slaver John Hawkins and arriving ships of the Spanish treasure fleet. Francis Drake, still with no “sir” at the front of his name, had limped back to England in one of the two surviving ships, arriving in January 1569.  He fumed at the duplicity of the Viceroy of Mexico, who had breached a guarantee of safe conduct he had given the English. Drake vowed to wage war against the Spanish and vex Philip of Spain from one end of his realm to another. This episode looks at Drake’s voyages to the Caribbean in 1570, 1571, and again in 1572-73. These expeditions, which kicked off the era of English piracy in the Caribbean, made Drake a rich man, sorely vexed Philip, and made Drake famous at home and infamous among the Spanish. They would also earn Drake the wealth, credibility, and social status necessary to get the backing and authorization he would need to explore the west coast of the Americas and circumnavigate the globe from 1577-80. #VastEarlyAmerica https://subscribebyemail.com/thehistoryoftheamericans.com/?feed=podcast References for this episode Samuel Bawlf, The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake: 1577-1580 John Sugden, Sir Francis Drake

This episode introduces Sir Francis Drake, and describes the moment when he declared a personal war on Philip II of Spain, a war that would change everything. Sir Francis Drake was essential to the history of the Americans. The father of English sea power, Drake and a small group of English West Country seamen cleared the way for the English settlement of North America. Drake almost single-handedly provoked the Spanish into war with England and then twice beat the Spanish navy, once by ambushing a good part of it in port in 1587 and then doing more than any other English commander to beat the famous Spanish Armada the next year.  Had that war gone the other way, England might never have become a global naval power and thereby an empire, the English language might never have become the lingua franca of commerce around the world, and English settlement in North America would have unfolded very differently, if it had happened at all. #VastEarlyAmerica https://subscribebyemail.com/thehistoryoftheamericans.com/?feed=podcast References for this episode Samuel Bawlf, The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake: 1577-1580 John Sugden, Sir Francis Drake

Queen Elizabeth I, who came to power at the impossibly young age of 25 in 1558, was of critical importance to the English project in North America, and therefore to the history of the Americans. She would prove to be an extraordinarily adept leader who would fend off enemies to English sovereignty and Protestantism, both at home and abroad, for the next 44 years. In this episode we talk about Elizabeth the person, and William Cecil, her most important advisor for most of her long reign. The two of them, along with John Dee, other intellectuals and courtiers, English merchant adventurers, and the more successful pirates and privateers, invented imperial England, and defended her against enormous geopolitical and religious threats from Europe, particularly Philip II’s Spanish empire. Eventually, they underwrote the first English settlements in the lands now making up the United States. #VastEarlyAmerica https://subscribebyemail.com/thehistoryoftheamericans.com/?feed=podcast Reference for this episode Alison Weir, The Life of Elizabeth I

England was quite late to the North American party, yet ultimately established the most enduring and therefore consequential settlements.  An overview of England of the 1500s, economically, politically, and geopolitically, is useful, even essential, to understanding how English North America unfolded. By 1572, England was firmly in Protestant hands, had its own ambitions for overseas expansion, and was increasingly working to constrain Spanish power without starting a war it would probably lose. Elizabeth I was on the throne and had been for 13 years, and she had surrounded herself with a group of advisors who were very much concerned with extending English power into the world at large.  The question is, how did England get to that point?  This week’s episode, titled “England in the 1500s and the Rise of the Merchant Adventurers,” rolls us back in time to get to that very question.  #VastEarlyAmerica https://subscribebyemail.com/thehistoryoftheamericans.com/?feed=podcast References for this episode John Butman and Simon Targett, New World, Inc.: The Story of the British Empire’s Most Successful Start-Up Samuel Bawlf, The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake: 1577-1580

The year is 1566. Pedro Menéndez de Avilés has founded St. Augustine and ejected the French from Florida. In this episode, we are going to look at the next Spanish moves in the region, all of which were designed to secure Spain’s treasure fleets and interdict French and English incursions into North America. These include Pedro Menendez’s exploration of Florida proper, which we will only touch upon, the expeditions of Juan Pardo into the Carolinas and Tennessee from 1566 to 1568, and the catastrophic failure of a Jesuit mission to the entrance of the Chesapeake Bay, not far from the future site of Jamestown.  None of these succeeded, but they provoked England’s anxiety and fueled her ambitions, which in turn catalyzed Francis Drake’s almost unbelievable mission of 1577 to 1580, Walter Raleigh’s failed colony at Roanoke Island on the Outer Banks in 1587, and even the settlement at Jamestown in 1607.  It all ties together! #VastEarlyAmerica https://subscribebyemail.com/thehistoryoftheamericans.com/?feed=podcast References for this episode Gonzalo Solís de Merás (Author), David Arbesú (Translator), Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and the Conquest of Florida: A New Manuscript Anna Brickhouse, The Unsettlement of America: Translation, Interpretation, and the Story of Don Luis de Velasco Chester B. DePratter, Charles M. Hudson and Marvin T. Smith, “The Route of Juan Pardo’s Explorations in the Interior Southeast, 1566-1568” Charlotte M. Gradie, “Spanish Jesuits in Virginia: The Mission That Failed”

This episode is a “sidebar,” in this case way, way, way, off the timeline. The title of the episode is also the title of a speech given by Woodrow Wilson on July 4, 1907.  The occasion was the Jamestown Exposition in Norfolk, Virginia that year, staged to recognize the 300th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown Colony. Wilson’s text in fact travels a long way from its title. The speech is actually about adopting the principles of the Declaration, as Wilson defines them, to regulating a new development, the multinational corporation. The speech is also a window into American politics just over half way between the signing of the Declaration and the present day, when we were fundamentally reconsidering the role of the federal government in our economic and civil lives. You will also see that more than a decade before the Russian Revolution even progressive American politicians were worried about socialism. https://subscribebyemail.com/thehistoryoftheamericans.com/?feed=podcast References and other resources for this episode Woodrow Wilson, “The Author and Signers of the Declaration of Independence” Woodrow Wilson (Wikipedia) Progressive Era (Wikipedia)

The title of today’s episode is Pedro Menendez, the Founding of St. Augustine and the Slaughter of the Huguenots:  The Other Side of the Story.  If you listened to last week’s episode, which involved the slaughter of hundreds of unarmed French people at the hands of the Spanish, you are probably thinking “wait, how could there be another side to that story?”  That would be a fair question.  In this episode, we take a look at a recently unearthed Spanish account of those ugly days in September 1565, layered like a fine lasagna with commentary and perhaps a little snark! #VastEarlyAmerica https://subscribebyemail.com/thehistoryoftheamericans.com/?feed=podcast Reference for this episode Gonzalo Solís de Merás (Author), David Arbesú (Translator), Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and the Conquest of Florida: A New Manuscript

This episode looks at the first Protestant attempt to settle the lands now encompassed by the United States, the French expeditions to Parris Island, South Carolina, and the coast near Jacksonville, Florida. Philip II of Spain was determined to secure the Atlantic coast of La Florida to prevent privateers lurking there from attacking his treasure fleets, and to stop the Protestants from spreading their apostasy in the New World, so he sent an expedition to massacre them. Along the way we consider the very earliest glimmer of republican government, at least in the European intellectual tradition, in the New World. #VastEarlyAmerica https://subscribebyemail.com/thehistoryoftheamericans.com/?feed=podcast Selected references for this episode Lucy L. Wenhold, “Translation of Manrique de Rojas’ Report on French Settlement in Florida, 1564” Charles E. Bennett, “Fort Caroline, Cradle of American Freedom,” The Florida Historical Quarterly, July 1956. T. Frederick Davis, “Fort Caroline,” The Florida Historical Society Quarterly, October 1933. Theodor de Bry, Images of North America Charlesfort-Santa Elena Site (Wikipedia)

In this eclectic episode we round up various minor Spanish incursions into today’s United States, including the “discovery” of San Diego, the origin of the name “California,” the murder of some friars at — this is no surprise — Tampa Bay, and Tristan de Luna’s failed expedition to establish a colony at Pensacola. We also wonder why the Spanish were always launching these big expeditions in the Gulf of Mexico during hurricane season, and get a taste of marine archeology. Enjoy! https://subscribebyemail.com/thehistoryoftheamericans.com/?feed=podcast Selected references for this episode Caleb Curren, “Archeological Data Indicates that the University of West Florida’s “Luna Colony” is Actually a Native Village” Pensacola New Journal, “Luna’s colony unearthed in Pensacola” Roger C. Smith, “The Emanuel Point Ship: a 16th-century Vessel of Spanish Colonization” Della A. Scott-Ireton, “An Examination of the Luna Colonization Fleet” Charles W. Arnade, “Tristan de Luna and Ochuse (Pensacola Bay) 1559” Luis Cáncer (Wikipedia) Harry Kelsey, Discovering Cabrillo

Our 25th episode is a Sidebar, “Taking Stock.” I talk about the origins of the podcast, and how its approach to history fits in with today’s trends in scholarship, including the “Atlantic World” and #VastEarlyAmerica. Oh, and I rant about the weaponization of history for partisan political purposes, and the many reasons why we should all avoid doing that. I hope you find it interesting! Selected references for this episode Karin Wulff, “Vast Early America” Thomas Benjamin, The Atlantic World: Europeans, Africans, Indians and their Shared History, 1400–1900 

In this episode we conclude the story of the Coronado Entrada into the American Southwest. By the spring of 1540, a few hundred Spaniards, a few free and enslaved Blacks, perhaps a thousand Indios Amigos – literally, friendly and free Indians – hundreds of horses, and herds of cattle, sheep, and pigs, were making their way up the west coast of Mexico aiming for supposed riches of Arizona and New Mexico, all on the basis of a massive intelligence failure. There were no Seven Cities of Gold, but Coronado and his men would be the first Europeans to see the Grand Canyon and they would name Texas, which ain’t nothing.  Selected references for this episode Stan Hoig, Came Men on Horses: The Conquistador Expeditions of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and Don Juan de Oñate George Parker Winship, The Journey of Coronado, 1540-1542 F. S. Dellenbaugh, “The True Route of Coronado’s March” Tiguex War Coronado’s Expedition, Legends of America Hawikuh and the Zuni-Cibola Complex New Mexico

We are now in late May 1539, almost exactly 482 years ago as I write this. Friar Marcos is alone with a bunch of Indios Amigos – literally, friendly Indians who had not been enslaved — somewhere in Arizona, possibly in the Salt River Valley east of modern Phoenix.   He has just learned that his guide and advance man Esteban, has died rather gruesomely along with a bunch of his Indian escorts at the hands of the angry chief of Cibola, the “city” purported to be the gateway to the Seven Cities of Gold.  By his own somewhat suspect account, Fray Marcos has a decision to make – does he soldier on to lay eyes on Cibola himself, knowing that if he dies his mission will have been a complete failure, insofar as there will be no European to report on the territory?  Or does he head back to Culiacan, on the west coast of Mexico, where Coronado is waiting for him, and base his report on the tales told by Indians, either at Esteban’s direction or otherwise?  Selected references for this episode Robert Goodwin, Crossing the Continent 1527-1540: The Story of the First African-American Explorer of the American South Stan Hoig, Came Men on Horses: The Conquistador Expeditions of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and Don Juan de Oñate George Parker Winship, The Journey of Coronado, 1540-1542 F. S. Dellenbaugh, “The True Route of Coronado’s March” George J. Undreiner, “Fray Marcos de Niza and His Journey to Cibola”

This episode welcomes back our old friend from the Cabeza de Vaca saga, Esteban, and the advance scouting work he led, with a drunken friar, for the Coronado expedition into the American southwest. #VastEarlyAmerica Selected references for this episode Robert Goodwin, Crossing the Continent 1527-1540: The Story of the First African-American Explorer of the American South Stan Hoig, Came Men on Horses: The Conquistador Expeditions of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and Don Juan de Oñate Andrés Reséndez, A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca George Parker Winship, The Journey of Coronado, 1540-1542 Bartolomé de las Casas

Back in April 2021, as we traveled the Florida Keys for a vacation much-deserved by my wife, who has been working very hard, and not-at-all deserved by me, I read a good part of Samuel Bawlf’s book “The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake 1577-1580.”  This was part of my advance reading for Drake’s exploration of the west coast of the United States on, well, a secret mission for Queen Elizabeth I of England.  The book includes a prelude chapter that I thought so good, and so evocative of the tradition of privateering in exactly the part of the country in which I was vacationing, that I am going to read it aloud. Herewith, a pirate’s story, with another remarkable story of survival in the New World toward the end. Selected references for this episode Samuel Bawlf, The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake: 1577-1580 John Toohey, “The Long, Forgotten Walk of David Ingram” Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation

In this episode, we follow the Soto expedition in the American south from the aftermath of the battle of Mabila to the “discovery” of the Mississippi River with more than the usual number of qualifiers, Soto’s anticlimactic death, the first true exploration of northeastern Texas, a journey past the site of New Orleans, the ultimate escape of almost half the expeditionaries and, as promised, a short review of the weird recommendations of the Federal government’s De Soto Expedition Commission. Enjoy! Selected references for this episode David Ewing Duncan, Hernando De Soto: A Savage Quest in the Americas Final Report of the United States: De Soto Expedition Commission Quigualtam (Wikipedia) Luis de Moscoso Alvarado (Wikipedia) Rex W. Strickland, “Moscoso’s Journey through Texas,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, October 1942.

This episode is the third to explore Hernando de Soto’s invasion of the American southeast from 1539-1542.  Our goal, as always, is to make history fun and interesting, even when it is also brutal and ugly! Hernando de Soto and his army spent the winter of 1539-40 in the center of Apalachee territory, now downtown Tallahassee. During 1540, the entrada explored Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, east Tennessee in the Knoxville area, and Alabama, finally coming to blows with the great chief Tascalusa in an epic and very bloody battle somewhere between Mobile and Selma. At the end of this episode, Soto is nominally victorious, but he is on the brink of losing everything. Selected references for this episode David Ewing Duncan, Hernando De Soto: A Savage Quest in the Americas Final Report of the United States: De Soto Expedition Commission

Last time we introduced the story of Hernando de Soto’s three year invasion of the American south, from 1539 to his death in 1542, ending the episode just as his 600 man expedition arrived on the gulf coast of Florida, probably Tampa Bay.  Ponce de Leon had gone ashore in roughly the same place in 1521, and Panfilo de Narvaez had disembarked his doomed expedition there in 1528.  Soto, like Ponce and Narvaez before him, would claim all of North America for Spain from roughly the same spot. He would survive longer than either Ponce or Narvaez, but not by much. Claiming North America for Spain was a dangerous business! Credit: David Ewing Duncan Selected references for this episode David Ewing Duncan, Hernando De Soto: A Savage Quest in the Americas Final Report of the United States: De Soto Expedition Commission

Today we kick off the story of the first real invasion of the American south, Hernando de Soto’s reconnaissance-in-force – the Spanish word is entrada — from 1539-1542. Last week’s episode tied up various loose ends that brought us to this point, including that the correct shorthand for Hernando de Soto is, actually, “Soto,” not “de Soto.”  Measured by money and glory, by the late 1530s Hernando de Soto was at the very top of the second rank of Spanish conquistadors.  Hernan Cortes had conquered the Aztecs in Tenochtitlan, uncovered staggering wealth, and pushed his territory north and south from there.  Francisco Pizzaro had conquered the Incas of Cusco, and Soto enabled that conquest as Pizzaro’s most courageous and brilliant battlefield commander. Soto returned to Spain in the spring of 1536 after 22 years seeking and finding his fortune in the New World.  He was now 36 years old.  Soto had by that age gathered a significant pile of loot from his adventures in South America, and no small amount of glory.  People who weren’t Soto and could not have achieved his astonishing victories in Central and South America would have called it quits and retired as one of the richest men in Europe’s richest country.  Soto was not that kind of man.  He knew there was another Cusco or Tenochtitlan to be found and conquered, this time with Soto in command. Selected references for this episode David Ewing Duncan, Hernando De Soto: A Savage Quest in the Americas Final Report of the United States: De Soto Expedition Commission

Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast episode 16.  This episode is called “Sidebar: Bringing it all Together.” In the History of the Americans podcast, a sidebar is an episode outside of the progression of the timeline, which at this writing has reached roughly 1536.  The purpose of this sidebar is to talk a bit about the show to date, and put the first thirty years of European exploration and conquest of the territory that is now the United States in context.  In other words, bringing it all together! Reference for this episode Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America

The last time the remnants of the ill-fated Narvaez expedition landed on a coastal island somewhere near today’s Galveston, Texas and, thereby, “discovered” Texas.  Of the eighty or so alive at the end of Cabeza de Vaca 2, only three remained with our protagonist, Cabeza de Vaca, and would eventually make it back to New Spain.  It is now 1534, almost six years after the expedition landed in Tampa Bay, and the final four are heading south in search of Panuco, the northernmost outpost of New Spain under the authority of one of that era’s nastiest conquistadors, Nuno de Guzman. Selected references for this episode Andrés Reséndez, A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, The Account: Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Relacion, An Annotated Translation by Martin A. Favata and Jose B. Fernandez A New History of Old Texas Podcast by Brandon Seale Cabeza de Vaca resources online at Texas State University

We will no longer refer to the Narvaez Expedition in the title of the episode because, as you know if you listened to Episode 13, in late November 1528 schizz got seriously real. It could no longer be said that there was a Narvaez Expedition.  Panfilo de Narvaez himself was dead on a raft, adrift with two other corpses in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, and his original landing party at Tampa Bay in April of that year had dwindled from 300 men and 42 horses to two rafts of 40 or so starving men, each crew unaware of the other, castaway on opposite sides of a barrier island near Galveston on the Texas Gulf coast.  Almost eight years would elapse before the final four of these roughly 80 wretches would reconnect with the bleeding edge of Spanish civil authority on the Pacific coast of Mexico. We recorded this episode on March 25, 2021, in New Orleans, Louisiana, and if you listen carefully you can hear the birdies of spring and a couple of trains whistling in the distance. Subscribe by email! Selected references for this episode Andrés Reséndez, A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, The Account: Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Relacion, An Annotated Translation by Martin A. Favata and Jose B. Fernandez A New History of Old Texas Podcast by Brandon Seale

This episode continues the shocking story of the doomed Narváez expedition and its almost unbelievable struggle to survive. In this episode, the expedition begins to unravel in Florida, and cooks up a crazy scheme to send 250 men across the Gulf of Mexico on rafts. All of this ends up with the “discovery” of Texas! And, of course, a lot of dead Spanish. Subscribe to The History of the Americans by email! Selected references for this episode Andrés Reséndez, A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, The Account: Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Relacion, An Annotated Translation by Martin A. Favata and Jose B. Fernandez Alex D. Krieger, We came Naked and Barefoot: The Journey of Cabeza de Vaca Across North America Gonzalo Fernandez Oviedo y Valdez and Harbert Davenport, “The Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly David Ewing Duncan, Hernando De Soto: A Savage Quest in the Americas The route of the rafts across the Gulf (map on thehistoryoftheamericans.com): The route of the rafts across the Gulf of Mexico (credit Andrés Reséndez)

This week we are kicking off perhaps the most unbelievable story of individual survival in all the History of the Americans, the disastrous Narváez expedition and the amazing journey of Cabeza de Vaca. In the spring of 1536, a group of Spanish horsemen were ranging north along the Pacific coast of Mexico, looking for Indians to capture for slaves in territory that the Spanish had neither settled nor explored. The horsemen encountered a group of Indians, but among them were three Spanish nobles and a black slave. The four were the last survivors of a disastrous expedition that had landed in Florida eight years before, and they had traveled across North America and now found themselves as the spiritual leaders of the first known mass religious movement in North America. In between they endured unbelievable suffering, and their survival is its own monument to human resilience. Over the next several episodes, we will recount this story, and look forward to its consequences. Selected references for this episode Andrés Reséndez, A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, The Account: Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Relacion, An Annotated Translation by Martin A. Favata and Jose B. Fernandez Alex D. Krieger, We came Naked and Barefoot: The Journey of Cabeza de Vaca Across North America Gonzalo Fernandez Oviedo y Valdez and Harbert Davenport, “The Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly

In this episode we venture back to Florida, and the first of several almost comically incompetent attempts by the Spanish to settle the area, including Ponce de Leon’s second expedition in 1521, and the very ephemeral settlement of San MIguel de Gualdape under the “leadership” of Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón. We also explore the personal rivalry and indeed hatred among the leading players in the Spanish Caribbean of the early 1500s, and the implications for the Spanish exploration of the future United States. Selected references for this episode Andrés Reséndez, A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca Douglas T. Peck, “Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón’s Doomed Colony of San Miguel de Gualdape,” The George Historical Quarterly Samuel Turner, “Juan Ponce de León and the Discovery of Florida Reconsidered,” The Florida Historical Quarterly Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón

With the English looking for a northwest passage and the Spanish pressing in to Florida and up the Atlantic Coast, the French get in to the exploration game. French King Francis I gets his own Italian explorer, Giovanni da Verrazzano, and sends him on a mission to explore the Atlantic Coast of North America and search for a shortcut to Asia between Florida and Newfoundland. Along the way, all sorts of interesting things happen, and we learn the accidental origin of the name of the American State of Rhode Island. Selected references for this episode Cuomo finally fixes a 50-year-old typo The History of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, 50 Years After Its Construction Samuel Eliot Morison, The Great Explorers: The European Discovery of America Wikipedia

We now hasten to the first European exploration of the lands now constituting the United States, and that means the first sanctioned expedition to Florida in 1513 by Juan Ponce de Leon, and the legend of the Fountain of Youth. Florida would turn out to be enormously challenging, so it will still be more than fifty years before the first successful permanent settlement at St. Augustine. As discussed in the episode, there is some debate over Ponce’s route, so the various maps available online differ in important respects. Here’s one from 1913, which is as professional and on target as any that I found. CWCID Selected references for this episode Samuel Turner, “Juan Ponce de Leon and the Discovery of Florida Reconsidered” John McGrath, “Sixteenth-Century Florida in the European Imagination” T. Frederick Davis, “Ponce de Leon’s First Voyage and Discovery of Florida”