The History of the Americans

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....

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 re...

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 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 lette...

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...

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...

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. Twitter:  @TheHistory...

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 vi...

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 fraug...

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 o...

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...

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 fir...

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 fruitles...

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...

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...

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...

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 w...

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 w...

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 governm...

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 studen...

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, F...

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 creature...

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 rou...

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) S...

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 mor...