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

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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.]

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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

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.

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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)

“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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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:

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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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

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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)

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.

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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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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”

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)

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

This is our special Columbus Day episode, dropped on “old school” Columbus Day, instead of the “Canadian Thanksgiving” Columbus Day long-weekend holiday. This episode is not actually about the Columbus Day social war, 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. 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!

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

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