The History of the Americans

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 still some great details, including a graphic description of the execution of Charles I, and an elegy of sorts, to Sir Henry Vane! It must be said that British listeners and others who know a lot about this period will no doubt find this overview tediously shallow and rife with rank generalizations and even error.  Guilty as charged. The American analogy would be to cover the years between the run-up to our own Civil War and the Reconstruction of the South in one podcast episode. Absurd! And yet here it is. X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode (Commission received on the Amazon links) Jonathan Healey, The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England 1603-1689 George Bancroft, History of the United States of America (Vol 1) Robert Harris, Act of Oblivion: A Novel Elvis Costello, “Oliver’s Army” (YouTube)

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 theories combined with bad luck and no little neurosis to produce an epic tragedy, preserved for us by many pages of deposition transcripts taken by Pynchon. True crime, Puritan theology, rumor mongering, strange doings, and the inherent justice of the New English courts combine for a fantastic story. And, of course, there is some great trivia: What does “wearing the green gown” mean? Closing disclaimer: This episode is absolutely not in recognition of “Women’s History Month.” X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World David M. Powers, Damnable Heresy: William Pynchon, the Indians, and the First Book Banned (and Burned) in Boston Nachman Ben-Yehuda, “The European Witch Craze of the 14th to 17th Centuries: A Sociologist’s Perspective,” American Journal of Sociology, July 1980. Useful prerequisite: The Life and Times of William Pynchon

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 Brent was a stone-cold businesswoman, executor for the estate of Leonard Calvert, and would become famous for demanding not just one vote, but two, in the Maryland Assembly. Trust me when I say she had her reasons. Finally, there is Mary Kittamaquund Kent, “the Pocahontas of Maryland.” Her similarities to the actual Pocahontas were, it must be said, something of a stretch. X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode David S. Bogen, “Mathias de Sousa: Maryland’s First Colonist of African Descent,” Maryland Historical Magazine Spring 2001. Lois Green Carr, “Margaret Brent – A Brief History”, Maryland State Archives. Kelly L. Watson, “‘The Pocahontas of Maryland’: Sex, Marriage, and Diplomacy in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake,” Early American Studies, Winter 2021.

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 America. He is also author of a study of the Irish novelist James Joyce, censorship, obscenity, and the Cold War (Our Joyce:  From Outcast to Icon). This conversation, which was great fun, covers a whole range of topics familiar to longstanding and attentive listeners, but with a new and provocative perspective.  We talk about John Smith, Sir Francis Drake – who literally takes up a chapter in Joe’s book – the Sea Venture wreck, the role of the commoners in the struggle to survive on Bermuda, and the political philosophy of Stephen Hopkins, the one man to spend years in Virginia and then go on to sail on the Mayflower as a Stranger among the Pilgrim Fathers.  Was Hopkins the moving force for or even the author of the Mayflower Compact, and the true original English-American political theorist?  Finally, we have it out over the fraught question, as between Jamestown and Plymouth, which of our founding mythologies most clearly reflects the American we have become?  Joe brings a new and fascinating perspective to that timeless argument. Buy the book!: Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of America’s Origin X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast

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 lost estate of Sir Francis Drake. Eventually, it would drive him insane, at least as adjudged by the director of the behavioral clinic of the criminal court of Cook County, Illinois. Enjoy! X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode Richard Rayner, “The Admiral and the Con Man,” The New Yorker, April 15, 2002 (pdf, subscription necessary) Richard Rayner, Drake’s Fortune: The Fabulous True Story of the World’s Greatest Confidence Artist John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” 1930 (pdf). Hartzell v. United States, Circuit Court of Appeals, Eighth Circuit, August 16, 1934.

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 main trail between the Dutch trading posts near Albany and Boston, and controlled the fur trade coming down the Connecticut River from the north. He had unusually modern opinions about the Indians and Indian sovereignty, opposed the Pequot War, and was a respected leader in New England, until he ran afoul of the Reverend Thomas Hooker, the founder of the Connecticut River Towns. Their dispute would alter the map of New England forever. Pynchon was an independent thinker, especially in matters of economics and theology. In 1650, he published a book titled The Meritorious Price of our Redemption, and would be prosecuted for heresy. This episode is his story. X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast The Other States of America Podcast (Apple podcast link) Selected references for this episode David M. Powers, Damnable Heresy: William Pynchon, the Indians, and the First Book Banned (and Burned) in Boston Samuel Eliot Morison, Builders of the Bay Colony

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 there would be no shooting, but all sorts of guns would be pointed without pulling the trigger or lighting the match. Eventually, the Dutch would put together the largest European army in North America since Soto and Coronado in the 1540s, and put an end to New Sweden as a political entity, raising the Dutch flag over the forts at today’s New Castle and Wilmington, Delaware. Along the way we hear the horrific story of the Katten, a Swedish ship full of settlers that ran aground just off Puerto Rico. Everybody survived the immediate crisis, only to fall into the hands of the Spanish and then the French on St. Croix. Folks, don’t let that happen to you. X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode New Sweden Part 2: The Tough Guys Arrive C. A. Weslager, New Sweden on the Delaware 1638-1655 Carl K. S. Sprinchorn and G. B. Keen, “The History of the Colony of New Sweden,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 1883.

We are back in New Sweden. In 1638, shortly after establishing Fort Christina at the site of today’s Wilmington, Delaware, Peter Minuit would die in a hurricane on the way back to Sweden. The settlers left behind would go a year and half before another supply ship came, but they would survive with remarkable pluck. They were well-housed, because the Finns among them would introduce the log cabin to these shores, and they would trade effectively with the Lenape and Susquehannock nations. Then in 1643 a new governor would arrive, Johan Printz, a 400-pound giant of a man who would boot out the New English who tried to settle on the Delaware, and keep the pressure on the Dutch who also claimed both sides of that river. Under Printz’s authoritarian and also competent administration, New Sweden would prosper, go on a building boom, and explore the interior of Pennsylvania, all in spite of very little help from home. The Dutch under Willem Kieft – we’ve met him before – wouldn’t challenge New Sweden in this period because they were under pressure from the New English to the east and the Indian groups around Manhattan. Then, in 1647, Pieter Stuyvesant would arrive to govern New Netherland, and everything would change again. X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Selected references for this episode “The Founding of New Sweden” C. A. Weslager, New Sweden on the Delaware 1638-1655 Carl K. S. Sprinchorn and G. B. Keen, “The History of the Colony of New Sweden,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 1883. Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America–The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 “America’s Oldest Log Cabin Is for Sale”

Your podcaster spent the weekend just passed in San Francisco at the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association. I learned a lot, but especially how transparently politicized so many professional historians seem have become. This episode recounts some of what I saw and heard, and concludes with my many thoughts on the greatest benefit of learning history, whether history should be “useable,” and why deploying history for partisan political purposes, as is now happening widely and overtly, corrupts history absolutely. Along the way I suggest both philosophical and utilitarian reasons why overtly partisan historians are not doing their profession, or their students, any favors. On “Weaponizing History” (my Substack) X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast

In podcast time, we’ve been knocking around the northeast of today’s United States for just about two years, starting with the Popham colony episodes back in December 2021.  The recent high water mark, as it were, is 1647 or so, with the recovery of Maryland by the Calverts after the plundering time.  We are not entirely caught up to that date, however.  We need to get back to see what happened to New Sweden since its first year in the late 1630s, and the New Haven colony, which extended its writ to New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, deserves a couple of episodes. In the 70+ timeline episodes since Martin Pring’s expedition of 1603 and Champlain’s St. Croix settlement in Maine, we’ve talked about English, Dutch, and French settlement and exploration in today’s United States as local stories, but we have not looked at the big picture, or at least not very often. Even I’m getting confused!  So in this episode we’ll do our best to bring it all together, which ought to make the next few episodes a bit easier to follow.  X (Twitter): @TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast Map of Settlements on the Delaware Selected references for this episode Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America–The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Hampton L. Carson, “Dutch and Swedish Settlements on the Delaware,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 1909. Pavonia (Wikipedia) Zwaanendael Colony (Wikipedia)