The History of the Americans

This is our special Columbus Day episode, dropped on “old school” Columbus Day, instead of the “Canadian Thanksgiving” Columbus Day long-weekend holiday. This episode is not actually about the Columbus Day social war, except in passing. Instead, we consider the larger consequences of Columbus’s “Great Enterprise,” and various counterfactuals — &#8220...

It is July 1585. Sir Richard Grenville, in command of the first English expedition of colonization to reach the territory that is now the United States, has arrived at the Outer Banks of North Carolina with five ships, only two of which were part of his original fleet.  The flagship Tiger has run aground, and in the course of refloating her a large part of the expedition’s supplies had been l...

Sir Walter Ralegh’s first attempt to settle the Outer Banks of North Carolina — the first Roanoke colony, under the command of Sir Richard Grenville — got off to a rough start. A storm off Portugal had scattered the fleet, and only Grenville’s Tiger and Thomas Cavendish’s Elizabeth made it to the agreed interim rendezvous on the southwestern coast of Puerto Rico. Gren...

In the spring of 1584, Sir Walter Ralegh (the spelling he used), now the chief organizer and promoter of English settlement in North America, dispatched two ships to the Outer Banks of North Carolina on a mission of reconnaissance. They explored Hattaras Island and Roanoke Island, and the area between Pamlico Sound in the south and the mouth of the Chesapeake in the north. They brought home to Eng...

In this episode we discuss the planning for the first English colonization of North America in the context of England’s strategy to resist Spanish hegemony and Protestantism’s defense against Catholicism. We look at the key figures who advocated for, invested in, and led the first English settlement efforts, which include the two failed expeditions and tragic ending of Sir Humphrey Gil...

In this episode we chase Francis Drake and the Golden Hind from the equator, just off the west coast of South America, all the way around the world and back to England. Along the way Drake claims the northwest coast of North America for England, naming it “Novo Albion,” cuts a trade deal with Babu, the Sultan of the Moluccas, and makes it back to England in the most remarkable feat of...

When last we left Drake and company, it was August 1578, and the fleet had spent a good part of the southern winter in the protected harbor at Port Saint Julian, in today’s Argentina, about a hundred miles north of the entrance to the Strait of Magellan.  That was where Drake was headed, because that was the only way that any European knew of to get into the Pacific Ocean by heading west. In...

On September 26, 1580, some fisherman not far from shore in the English Channel saw a small ship, riding low in the water, moving cautiously toward Plymouth Sound.  A man aboard the ship hailed the fisherman and asked whether the Queen was alive?  The fisherman replied to Sir Francis Drake that she was, but that a plague – influenza, apparently — was raging in Plymouth itself.&#160...

This episode is the second of our series on Sir Francis Drake.  Last week, we revisited the catastrophic battle of San Juan d’Ulua in the harbor near Vera Cruz, Mexico between the English trader, smuggler, and slaver John Hawkins and arriving ships of the Spanish treasure fleet. Francis Drake, still with no “sir” at the front of his name, had limped back to England in one of the two surviving...

This episode introduces Sir Francis Drake, and describes the moment when he declared a personal war on Philip II of Spain, a war that would change everything. Sir Francis Drake was essential to the history of the Americans. The father of English sea power, Drake and a small group of English West Country seamen cleared the way for the English settlement of North America. Drake almost single-handedl...

Queen Elizabeth I, who came to power at the impossibly young age of 25 in 1558, was of critical importance to the English project in North America, and therefore to the history of the Americans. She would prove to be an extraordinarily adept leader who would fend off enemies to English sovereignty and Protestantism, both at home and abroad, for the next 44 years. In this episode we talk about Eliz...

England was quite late to the North American party, yet ultimately established the most enduring and therefore consequential settlements.  An overview of England of the 1500s, economically, politically, and geopolitically, is useful, even essential, to understanding how English North America unfolded. By 1572, England was firmly in Protestant hands, had its own ambitions for overseas expansio...

The year is 1566. Pedro Menéndez de Avilés has founded St. Augustine and ejected the French from Florida. In this episode, we are going to look at the next Spanish moves in the region, all of which were designed to secure Spain’s treasure fleets and interdict French and English incursions into North America. These include Pedro Menendez’s exploration of Florida proper, which we will only touch upo...

This episode is a “sidebar,” in this case way, way, way, off the timeline. The title of the episode is also the title of a speech given by Woodrow Wilson on July 4, 1907.  The occasion was the Jamestown Exposition in Norfolk, Virginia that year, staged to recognize the 300 th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown Colony. Wilson’s text in fact travels a long way from its title. The sp...

The title of today’s episode is Pedro Menendez, the Founding of St. Augustine and the Slaughter of the Huguenots:  The Other Side of the Story.  If you listened to last week’s episode, which involved the slaughter of hundreds of unarmed French people at the hands of the Spanish, you are probably thinking “wait, how could there be another side to that story?”  That would be a fair qu...

This episode looks at the first Protestant attempt to settle the lands now encompassed by the United States, the French expeditions to Parris Island, South Carolina, and the coast near Jacksonville, Florida. Philip II of Spain was determined to secure the Atlantic coast of La Florida to prevent privateers lurking there from attacking his treasure fleets, and to stop the Protestants from spreading...

In this eclectic episode we round up various minor Spanish incursions into today’s United States, including the “discovery” of San Diego, the origin of the name “California,” the murder of some friars at — this is no surprise — Tampa Bay, and Tristan de Luna’s failed expedition to establish a colony at Pensacola. We also wonder why the Spanish were a...

Our 25th episode is a Sidebar, “Taking Stock.” I talk about the origins of the podcast, and how its approach to history fits in with today’s trends in scholarship, including the “Atlantic World” and #VastEarlyAmerica. Oh, and I rant about the weaponization of history for partisan political purposes, and the many reasons why we should all avoid doing that. I hope you f...

In this episode we conclude the story of the Coronado Entrada into the American Southwest. By the spring of 1540, a few hundred Spaniards, a few free and enslaved Blacks, perhaps a thousand Indios Amigos – literally, friendly and free Indians – hundreds of horses, and herds of cattle, sheep, and pigs, were making their way up the west coast of Mexico aiming for supposed riches of Arizona and New M...

We are now in late May 1539, almost exactly 482 years ago as I write this. Friar Marcos is alone with a bunch of Indios Amigos – literally, friendly Indians who had not been enslaved — somewhere in Arizona, possibly in the Salt River Valley east of modern Phoenix.   He has just learned that his guide and advance man Esteban, has died rather gruesomely along with a bunch of his Indi...

This episode welcomes back our old friend from the Cabeza de Vaca saga, Esteban, and the advance scouting work he led, with a drunken friar, for the Coronado expedition into the American southwest. #VastEarlyAmerica Selected references for this episode Robert Goodwin, Crossing the Continent 1527-1540: The Story of the First African-American Explorer of the American South Stan Hoig, Came Men o...

Back in April 2021, as we traveled the Florida Keys for a vacation much-deserved by my wife, who has been working very hard, and not-at-all deserved by me, I read a good part of Samuel Bawlf’s book “The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake 1577-1580.”  This was part of my advance reading for Drake’s exploration of the west coast of the United States on, well, a secret mission for Queen Elizabet...

In this episode, we follow the Soto expedition in the American south from the aftermath of the battle of Mabila to the “discovery” of the Mississippi River with more than the usual number of qualifiers, Soto’s anticlimactic death, the first true exploration of northeastern Texas, a journey past the site of New Orleans, the ultimate escape of almost half the expeditionaries and, as promised,...

This episode is the third to explore Hernando de Soto’s invasion of the American southeast from 1539-1542.  Our goal, as always, is to make history fun and interesting, even when it is also brutal and ugly! Hernando de Soto and his army spent the winter of 1539-40 in the center of Apalachee territory, now downtown Tallahassee. During 1540, the entrada explored Georgia, South Carolina, North C...

Last time we introduced the story of Hernando de Soto’s three year invasion of the American south, from 1539 to his death in 1542, ending the episode just as his 600 man expedition arrived on the gulf coast of Florida, probably Tampa Bay.  Ponce de Leon had gone ashore in roughly the same place in 1521, and Panfilo de Narvaez had disembarked his doomed expedition there in 1528.  Soto, like Ponce a...