Stay ConnectedThis 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.
Copyright: © Liz Covart 2024
In a town as old as Williamsburg, Virginia, which was established in 1638, it’s often the case that historic buildings with interesting pasts stand unnoticed and in plain sight.
Such was the case for the building that once housed Williamsburg’s Bray School. A school founded by a group of Anglican clergymen with the express purpose of educating Black children in the ways of the Anglican faith. It was an education that included reading, possibly writing, and the Book of Common Prayer.
In honor of Juneteenth, we explore the exciting rediscovery of Williamsburg’s Bray School with three scholars: Maureen Elgersman Lee, Director of the Bray School Lab at William & Mary; Ronald Hurst, Vice President of Museums, Preservation, and Historic Resources at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, and Nicole Brown, a historic interpreter, American Studies graduate student, and the graduate student assistant at William & Mary’s Bray School Lab.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/331
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🎧 Episode 025: Jessica Parr, Inventing George Whitefield
🎧 Episode 073: Mark Noll, The Bible in Early America
🎧 Episode 133: Patrick Breen, The Nat Turner Revolt
🎧 Episode 311: Katherine Carté, Religion and the American Revolution
🎧 Episode 320: Ben Franklin’s London House
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We’ll never know for certain how many Americans supported the American Revolution, remained loyal to the British Crown and Parliament, or tried to find a middle way as someone who was disaffected from either loyalty. But we can know about the different ideologies that drove people to support the Revolution, to remain loyal to crown and parliament, or to become disaffected from both sides.
Brad Jones, Professor of History at California State University, Fresno and author of the book, Resisting Independence: Popular Loyalism in the Revolutionary British Atlantic, joins us to investigate what loyalists believed and how loyalism was not just a loyalty or ideology adopted by British Americans living in the 13 rebellious colonies, but by Britons across the British Atlantic World.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/330
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🎧 Episode 119: Steve Pincus, The Heart of the Declaration
🎧 Episode 122: Andrew O’Shaugnessy, The Men Who Lost America
🎧 Episode 151: Defining the American Revolution
🎧 Episode 232: Christopher Hodson, The Acadian Diaspora
🎧 Episode 238: Stephen Brumwell, Benedict Arnold
🎧 Episode 283: Anne Marie Lane Jonah, Acadie 300
🎧 Episode 306: The Horse’s Tail
🎧 Episode 311: Katherine Carté, Religion and the American Revolution
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This is an episode you’ve been waiting for!
Mark Tabbert, the Director of Archives and Exhibits at the George Washington Masonic National Memorial Association and the author of Almanac of American Freemasonry and A Deserving Brother: George Washington and Freemasonry, joins us so we can investigate and better understand Freemasonry and its role in Early America.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/329
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🎧 Episode 026: Robert Middlekauff, George Washington’s Revolution
🎧 Episode 033: Douglas Bradburn, George Washington & His Library
🎧 Episode 127: Caroline Winterer, American Enlightenments
🎧 Episode 130: Paul Revere’s Ride Through History
🎧 Episode 149: George Goodwin, Benjamin Franklin in London
🎧 Episode 207: Nick Bunker, Young Benjamin Franklin
🎧 Episode 317: Jews in Early America
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We know from our explorations of early America that not all Americans were treated equally or enjoyed the freedoms and liberties other Americans enjoyed.
Warren Milteer Jr., an Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the author of North Carolina’s Free People of Color and Beyond Slavery’s Shadow, joins us to explore the lives and experiences of free people of color, men and women who ranked somewhere in the middle or middle bottom of early American society.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/328
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🎧 Episode 118: Christy Clark Pujara: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island
🎧 Episode 142: Manisha Sinha, A History of Abolition
🎧 Episode 176: Daina Ramey Berry, The Value of the Enslaved from Womb to Grave
🎧 Episode 289: Marcus Nevius, Maroonage and the Great Dismal Swamp
🎧 Episode 312: Joshua Rothman, The Domestic Slave Trade
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How do we know what we know about Benjamin Franklin? We know historians, museum curators, and archivists rely on historical documents and objects to find and learn information about the past. But how does a documentary filmmaker present what they know about history through video?
David Schmidt works as a senior producer at Florentine Films where he worked alongside Ken Burns to produce a 2-episode documentary about the life of Benjamin Franklin. The documentary is called Benjamin Franklin and Schmidt joins us for a behind-the-scenes tour of documentary filmmaking and to investigate some of the lesser-known details of Ben Franklin’s life.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/327
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🎧 Episode 022: Vivian Bruce Conger, Deborah Read Franklin & Sally Franklin Bache
🎧 Episode 149: George Goodwin, Benjamin Franklin in London
🎧 Episode 169: Thomas Kid, The Religious Life of Benjamin Franklin
🎧 Episode 175: Daniel Epstein, The Revolution in Ben Franklin’s House
🎧 Episode 207: Nick Bunker, Young Benjamin Franklin
🎧 Episode 320: Ben Franklin’s London House
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With Ukrainian sovereignty and democracy under attack, Americans have been wondering: Should our government be doing more than placing economic sanctions on Russia? Should I, as U.S. military veteran, travel to Ukraine and offer to fight in their army? What would official U.S. military involvement mean for the politics of Europe and in our age of nuclear weapons?
While the situation in Ukraine is new and novel, Americans’ desire to assist other nations seeking to create or preserve their democracies and republics is not new.
Maureen Connors Santelli, an Associate Professor of History at Northern Virginia Community College and author of The Greek Fire: American-Ottoman Fervor in the Age of Revolutions, joins us to investigate the Greek Revolution and early Americans’ reactions to it.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/327
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🎧 Episode 017: François Furstenburg, When the United States Spoke French
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🎧 Episode 124: James Alexander Dun, Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America
🎧 Episode 314: Colin Calloway, Native Americans in Early American Cities
🎧 Episode 323: Michael Witgen, American Expansion and the Political Economy of Plunder
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What do we know about the American Revolution? Why is it important that we see the Revolution as a political event, a war, a time of social and economic reform, and as a time of violence and upheaval?
Woody Holton, a Professor of History at the University of South Carolina and the author of Liberty is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution, joins us to explore and discuss answers to these questions so that we can better see and understand the American Revolution as a whole event.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/325
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🎧 Episode 150: Woody Holton, Abigail Adams: Revolutionary Speculator
🎧 Episode 152: Bernard Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
🎧 Episode 181: Max Edelson, The New Map of the British Empire
🎧 Episode 294: Mary Beth Norton, 1774: The Long Year of Revolution
🎧 Episode 296: Serena Zabin, The Boston Massacre
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After Henry Hudson’s 1609-voyage along the river that now bears his name, Dutch traders began to visit and trade at the area they called New Netherland. In 1614, the Dutch established a trading post near present-day Albany, New York. In 1624, the Dutch West India Company built the settlement of New Amsterdam.
How did the colony of New Netherland take shape? In what ways did the Dutch West India Company and private individuals use enslaved labor to develop the colony?
Andrea Mosterman, an Associate Professor of History at the University of New Orleans and author of Spaces of Enslavement: A History of Slavery and Resistance in Dutch New York, joins us to explore what life was like in New Netherland and early New York, especially for the enslaved people who did much of the work to build this Dutch, and later English, colony.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/324
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🎧 Episode 256: Christian Koot, Mapping Empire in the Chesapeake
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In the Treaty of Paris, 1783, Great Britain ceded to the United States all lands east of the Mississippi River and between the southern borders of Canada and Georgia. How would the United States take advantage of its new boundaries and incorporate these lands within its governance?
Answering this question presented a quandary for the young United States. The lands it sought to claim by right of treaty belonged to Indigenous peoples.
Michael Witgen, a Professor of History at Columbia University and a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe, joins us to investigate the story of the Anishinaabeg and Anishinaabewaki, the homelands of the Anishinaabeg people, with details from his book, Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/323
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🎧 Episode 051: Catherine Cangany, A History of Early Detroit
🎧 Episode 064: Brett Rushforth, Native American Slavery in New France
🎧 Episode 163: The American Revolution in North America
🎧 Episode 264: Michael Oberg, The Treaty of Canandaigua, 1794
🎧 Episode 286: Native Sovereignty
🎧 Episode 310: Rosalyn LaPier, History of the Blackfeet
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During the War for American Independence, the British Army attempted to create chaos and inflict economic damage to the revolutionaries’ war effort by issuing two proclamations that promised freedom to any enslaved person who ran away from their revolutionary owners.
How did enslaved people make their escape to British lines? What do we know about their lives and escape experiences?
Karen Cook-Bell, an Associate Professor of History at Bowie State University and author of Running From Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America, joins us to investigate the experiences of enslaved women who feld their bondage for the British Army’s promise of freedom.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/322
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🎧 Episode 162: Dunmore’s New World
🎧 Episode 212: Researching Biography
🎧 Episode 277: Whose Fourth of July?
🎧 Episode 312: Joshua D. Rothman, The Domestic Slave Trade
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