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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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. ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...