This is a multiple award-winning podcast about early American history. It’s a show for people who love history and who want to know more about the historical people and events that have impacted and shaped our present-day world. Each episode features conversations with professional historians who help shed light on important people and events in early American history.
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In 1723, the College of William & Mary opened the Brafferton building, a permanent home for an Indian School the college had been chartered to run and struggled to fill for its first 30 years. The premise of the Brafferton: take Native boys and strategically teach them in ways that would make them more useful to the British Empire. So what actually happened inside the Brafferton Indian School ? In…
More than half a million Indigenous people were enslaved within the present-day borders of the United States. Historian Linford Fisher spent fifteen years in archives across North America, the Caribbean, and Britain to investigate this forgotten history. What he found was not a second story running alongside African slavery. It was something different in kind. Europeans and early Americans…
The Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all men are endowed with the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But what did liberty and equality mean for the peoples the Declaration never named—the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi nations who had governed the vast Great Lakes homeland they called Anishinaabewake for generations before a single European sailed its…
The engrossed copy of the Declaration of Independence is on display at the National Archives building in Washington, DC. Millions of visitors flock to see it and the other Charters of Freedom. But how did it end up there and why do people approach it with religious reverence? In this episode, we explore how the Declaration took on its symbolic role as the founding text of the United States.…
For the Haudenosaunee, the Six Nations People, the American Revolution brought not liberty, but land loss, displacement, and the dismantling of their world. The new United States seized land from Haudenosaunee nations regardless of which side they supported during the Revolution. And yet the Haudenosaunee survived, and Haudenosaunee women are central to this story. In this revisited episode, Maeve…
Five men served on the Continental Congress’s Declaration Committee. We know three of them well: Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin. But who were the other two? In this episode, we explore the lives and contributions of Robert R. Livingston of New York and Roger Sherman of Connecticut. Historians Geoff Benton and Michael Morand join us as we uncover the stories of the other…
Every American knows Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, but was he really its sole architect? In this revisited episode, we sit down with three scholars to pull back the curtain on how the Declaration came to be written. Danielle Allen of Harvard University, Patrick Spero of the American Philosophical Society, and Peter Onuf of the University of Virginia reveal that the…
250 years after its signing, the Declaration of Independence remains an unfinished document. Its famous assertion "that all men are created equal" and endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness stands not as a settled truth, but as a call every generation of Americans must answer on its own terms. What did the founders mean by "all men are created equal?" Who…
The man Congress chose to draft the United States’ first constitution refused to vote for independence. John Dickinson wrote a bold plan, one with a strong central government, religious liberty protections that included women, and a question in the margins about whether Congress should abolish slavery. Congress stripped out nearly all of these ideas and provisions. What replaced it sparked a…
Declaring independence on July 2, 1776 was only the beginning. To actually become a nation, the United States needed something else: foreign allies, international recognition, and the credibility to negotiate as an equal among the world's great powers. Five days after Richard Henry Lee introduced his famous Virginia Resolution, the Continental Congress appointed a committee of five — John Adams,…
Declaring independence on July 2, 1776, was only the beginning. To actually become a nation, the United States needed something else: foreign allies, international recognition, and the credibility to negotiate as an equal among the world's great powers. Five days after Richard Henry Lee introduced his famous Virginia Resolution, the Continental Congress appointed a committee of five — John Adams,…
