The History of the Americans

William Penn returned from Ireland in August 1670, and soon found himself arrested, along with fellow Quaker William Mead, for preaching to a crowd in public in violation of “the common law,” an ambiguity that would play out during their momentous trial. The trial would end in their acquittal, notwithstanding egregious intimidation of the jury by the judge, the Lord Mayor Sir Samuel St...

The purpose of this episode is very simple:  If you find yourself driving in your car with others this weekend (or on some future Fourth of July) and you and your passengers – perhaps they are your children and now they are a captive audience at your mercy – might enjoy hearing the Declaration of Independence and knowing just a little bit about the heroic signers of it, play this episo...

[Announcement: From November 4 through 6, 2026, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) is hosting its inaugural Soapbox free speech conference in Philadelphia, the city where so many of America’s defining debates over liberty began. I and the wife of the pod will be there and would love to hoist one with listeners of the History of the Americans. More compellingly, there will b...

Richard Bell, Rick to his friends and podcast hosts, is Professor of History at the University of Maryland. He is the author of the book Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and their Astonishing Odyssey Home which was a finalist for the George Washington Prize and the Harriet Tubman Prize. He has held major research fellowships at Yale, Cambridge, and the Library of Congress and is the r...

This is the story of the division of the colony of New Jersey into East New Jersey and West New Jersey, and the bizarre legal and financial machinations that resulted ultimately in the settlement of the region by Quakers in the second half of the 1670s. Fundamentally, those machinations were between two somewhat disreputable Quakers, John Fenwick and Edward Byllynge. Their longstanding quarrel wou...

The "glorious revolution" of 1688-89 would change the terms of the English monarchy, and reverberate through American history.

Heading as we are into the 1680s on the timeline of the History of the Americans, it will be useful for all of us to know a few basic things about English politics in the 1680s, including especially the “exclusion crisis” of 1679-1681 and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Both had a big impact on our own history. Along the way we learn more about John Locke, how the acquittal of William Penn transf...

Going down a rabbit hole while learning about the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, I started reading about something I have wondered about – how and when did the Indians of the American West acquire horses and learn to use them rather than eat them? The answer is not what you think, or at least not what I thought before I did this work. The story begins with the discovery of silver in Mexico, which I did no...

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...

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 surpris...

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...

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...

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...

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 f...

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 Christ...

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...

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 t...

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 aga...

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...

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 wi...

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 t...

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 a...

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...

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...

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...