The History of the Americans

David T. Beito’s most recent book, and the subject of this conversation, is The New Deal’s War On the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR’s Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance (buy it through the link!), published by the Independent Institute in 2023. The presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal have now largely passed from living memory.  When I w...

In August 1664, an English fleet acting under the orders of James, Duke of York, the brother of King Charles II, materialized off Manhattan and forced the bloodless surrender of New Amsterdam and New Netherland. It is easy – too easy – to conclude that this was inevitable because New England had roughly 17 times the population of New Netherland. It was in fact a foundational move in th...

While the English were consolidating their territory on most of the eastern seaboard of North America in the 1600s, Spanish Florida plugged along with its sole city at St. Augustine, with little European population growth. That simple fact obscures remarkable changes in the civil society of the future Sunshine State. From the 1570s, after the Jesuits had given up, until the 1720s, a small band of...

We are back to Spanish Florida after a long hiatus, with the story of St. Augustine, La Florida after the founding of the city and the slaughter of the Huguenots at Fort Caroline until the construction of the Castillo de San Marcos in the 1670s. The city would almost fail, and in 1607 the Spanish Crown ordered that it be shut down and that Spain withdraw from Florida all together. That order would...

In March 1663, after 97 years of failed attempts by first the Spanish and then the English to establish settlements in North Carolina, King Charles II granted eight aristocrats a vast territory extending from the coast of today’s North and South Carolina to the Pacific Ocean. These eight Lords Proprietor – George, Duke of Albemarle; Edward, Earl of Clarendon; William, Lord Craven; John...

On July 29, 2024, President Joe Biden visited The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The President referred to LBJ as “master of the Senate,” which reminded me of the opening pages of Robert Caro’s book of the same name. That introduction is itself a masterful description...

In the early 1660s, a motley crew of free-thinkers, republican veterans of Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army, and Quakers would build the freest place in all the English world, the County of Albemarle in northeastern North Carolina. Protected from the north, and incursions by Virginia royalists, by the Great Dismal Swamp, from the east by the treacherous waters of the Outer Banks, and from In...

Early North Carolina, originally part of a territory called Carolana, is all but ignored in most surveys of American history.  After a fast start – both the Spanish and the English had short-lived settlements there in the 16 th century before anywhere north of the future Tar Heel State had been settled by Europeans – a long period of failure followed until the late 1650s, when it hosted a quirky r...

Late in the morning on June 7, 1663, soldiers of the Esopus Indians attacked the fortified Dutch settlements of New Village – now Hurley, New York – and Wildwyck, now Kingston.  New Village was fundamentally destroyed.  Wildwyck, more populous and better defended, fought off the attack but not before suffering grievous casualties.  At New Village, three Dutch men were killed, and 34 women and chil...

Amanda Bellows is a U.S. historian who teaches at The New School, a university in New York City. She is the author of  American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination , and a new book that is the subject of this interview, The Explorers: A New History of America in Ten Expeditions . Amanda received her Ph. D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill...

Just before dawn on September 15, 1655, the same day Pieter Stuyvesant would extract the surrender of New Sweden on the Delaware River, more than 500 Indians of various tribes from along the Hudson paddled more than sixty canoes to New Amsterdam in lower Manhattan. They ran through town shrieking and vandalizing, but neither Dutchman nor Indian was harmed until the Indians were about to leave afte...

For more than twenty years, the Puritan colonies of New England – Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven – would do their utmost to gain control of Rhode Island, Roger Williams’s refuge committed to “soul liberty.” They hated his nest of heretics on their border, and they coveted Rhode Island’s arable land. The Puritan New Englanders would try e...

Kenneth W. Porter, writing in The New England Quarterly in 1934 , said that “Samuell Gorton could probably have boasted that he caused the ruling element of the Massachusetts Bay Colony more trouble over a greater period of time than any other single colonist, not excluding those more famous heresiarchs, Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams.”  As we shall see, he was charismatic, eloquent in speech,...

This episode is about a radically democratic political movement in Maryland in the 1650s. Veterans of the New Model Army, many of whom had been swimming in political movements like the Levellers, came to Maryland and joined with other Protestants chafing under Catholic and aristocratic rule. Blood would be shed at the Battle of the Severn, and in the aftermath Lord Baltimore would install a man na...

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 E...

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 P...

Of the organized Puritan settlements in New England in the first half of the 17 th 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, b...

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.  H...

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 sti...

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 theor...

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 Bren...

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 Ameri...

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 los...

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...

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...