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…

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 Englande…

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 sh…

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 t…

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…

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 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 …

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…

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…

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, depr…

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 Maryla…

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 deta…

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 …

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/tra…

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 we…

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 th…

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…

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, howev…

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 …

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 pu…

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…

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 settleme…

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 Car…

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, Du…

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…

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 "Indigen…

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 as…

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 …

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 E…

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…

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…

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 di…

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 H…

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 c…

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…

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 s…

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 lea…

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 1830…

[Announcement: The Austin/Central Texas meetup will be 5:30-8 (or so) on June 1, 2023 at Better Half Coffee and Cocktails, 406 Walsh St., Austin, Texas. Email or DM if you can make it so I know how many tables to grab!]On May 30 – Memorial Day -- 1895, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., a Harvard man and then a justice on the Supreme Court of Massachusett…

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 Am…

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 …

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…

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 wo…

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 Height…

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 reflec…

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 Footbal…

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, wh…

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 chu…

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 thehistoryoftheamericans@gmail.com, through the website, or by DM on Twitter. If we get a few takers I’ll find some p…

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…