The History of the Americans

Today we kick off the story of the first real invasion of the American south, Hernando de Soto’s reconnaissance-in-force – the Spanish word is entrada — from 1539-1542. Last week’s episode tied up various loose ends that brought us to this point, including that the correct shorthand for Hernando de Soto is, actually, “Soto,” not “de Soto.”  Measured by money and glory, by the late 1530s...

Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast episode 16.  This episode is called “Sidebar: Bringing it all Together.” In the History of the Americans podcast, a sidebar is an episode outside of the progression of the timeline, which at this writing has reached roughly 1536.  The purpose of this sidebar is to talk a bit about the show to date, and put the first thirty years of European...

The last time the remnants of the ill-fated Narvaez expedition landed on a coastal island somewhere near today’s Galveston, Texas and, thereby, “discovered” Texas.  Of the eighty or so alive at the end of Cabeza de Vaca 2, only three remained with our protagonist, Cabeza de Vaca, and would eventually make it back to New Spain.  It is now 1534, almost six years after the expedition landed...

We will no longer refer to the Narvaez Expedition in the title of the episode because, as you know if you listened to Episode 13, in late November 1528 schizz got seriously real. It could no longer be said that there was a Narvaez Expedition.  Panfilo de Narvaez himself was dead on a raft, adrift with two other corpses in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, and his original landing party at Tam...

This episode continues the shocking story of the doomed Narváez expedition and its almost unbelievable struggle to survive. In this episode, the expedition begins to unravel in Florida, and cooks up a crazy scheme to send 250 men across the Gulf of Mexico on rafts. All of this ends up with the “discovery” of Texas! And, of course, a lot of dead Spanish. Subscribe to The History of the...

This week we are kicking off perhaps the most unbelievable story of individual survival in all the History of the Americans, the disastrous Narváez expedition and the amazing journey of Cabeza de Vaca. In the spring of 1536, a group of Spanish horsemen were ranging north along the Pacific coast of Mexico, looking for Indians to capture for slaves in territory that the Spanish had neither settled n...

In this episode we venture back to Florida, and the first of several almost comically incompetent attempts by the Spanish to settle the area, including Ponce de Leon’s second expedition in 1521, and the very ephemeral settlement of San MIguel de Gualdape under the “leadership” of Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón. We also explore the personal rivalry and indeed hatred among the leading pla...

With the English looking for a northwest passage and the Spanish pressing in to Florida and up the Atlantic Coast, the French get in to the exploration game. French King Francis I gets his own Italian explorer, Giovanni da Verrazzano, and sends him on a mission to explore the Atlantic Coast of North America and search for a shortcut to Asia between Florida and Newfoundland. Along the way, all sort...

We now hasten to the first European exploration of the lands now constituting the United States, and that means the first sanctioned expedition to Florida in 1513 by Juan Ponce de Leon, and the legend of the Fountain of Youth. Florida would turn out to be enormously challenging, so it will still be more than fifty years before the first successful permanent settlement at St. Augustine. As discusse...

[Note: A revised version of this episode dropped on October 12, 2024. Link. ] Introduction to the Columbian Exchange introduces listeners to the extraordinary consequences of the interhemispheric transmission of diseases, food crops, populations, cultures, and technologies in the years after Columbus’s famous First Voyage. That transmission is now known as the “Columbian Exchange,” a term invented...

This is our last episode on Christopher Columbus. This time we discuss the voyage home, which required impressive seamanship in the context of delivering some of the most important news ever to travel by sea, and the spreading of that news once Nina and Pinta got back to Europe. Columbus’s return trip from the western hemisphere was almost unbelievably dangerous, and as much a part of the mi...

This is our fourth episode on Christopher Columbus, this time looking at his first exploration of Cuba and Hispaniola, his “pivot” in the positioning of his mission with his investors, and the preparations for the very difficult voyage home. It was during this part of the journey that Columbus established his best arguments to secure funding for the all-important Second Voyage. And, al...

This is our third episode on Christopher Columbus, which looks at his voyage west from the morning of his departure from Spain, his stop in the Canaries, the crossing of the Atlantic ahead of the fine easterly trade winds that blow at that latitude, ending with the First Contact on an island in the Bahamas. Along the way we learn that but for a flock of birds, the Spanish might not have colonized...

This episode is a rerecorded and slightly revised version of the second of five on Christopher Columbus, the “Admiral of the Ocean Sea.” It covers the ten years it took Columbus, ever the entrepreneur, to attract the lead investors and sponsors for his proposed expedition to the west, to negotiate the deal, and, having done that, to arrange for the three now famous ships, the crews, and supplies h...

This episode is a remastered and slightly revised version of the first of five on Christopher Columbus, the “Admiral of the Ocean Sea.” The episode discusses why Columbus should figure in to The History of the Americans in the first place, the state of Europe in 1491, how it changed after Columbus’s discovery, why it was a European who connected the hemisphere rather than an Asia...

This is the second episode of The History of the Americans podcast, and Part 2 of The Americans Before Columbus. If you have not listened to the first episode, click here . I also recommend that you listen to the short introductory episode , which introduces the podcast series. The podcast has now been accepted on both Apple podcasts and Spotify, among other places. If you enjoy it, please go to y...

On October 20, 2022, I re-recorded this episode, which was first published on January 3, 2021, with a few small tweaks and interjections. This is that version. This is the first substantive episode of The History of the Americans Podcast. For an introduction to this podcast series, please check out “ Introductions and such ,” which includes a short introductory podcast. This episode is...

On October 6, 2022, I re-recorded the original introduction to the podcast, which was first published on January 1, 2021, with a few small tweaks and interjections. This is that version. Welcome to The History of the Americans Podcast.  I am your host, Jack Henneman.   We are telling the history of the lands now encompassed by the United States, from the beginning, without presentis...