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
The words of the Declaration of Independence are not the only aspect of the American Revolution that carry power. Visual and material objects from during and after the Revolution also carry power and meaning. Objects like monuments, uniforms, muskets, powder horns, and the Horse’s Tail, a remnant of a grand equestrian statue of King George III, which stood in New York City’s Bowling Green park.
Historians Wendy Bellion, Leslie Harris, and Arthur Burns join us to investigate the history of revolutionary New York City and how New Yorkers came to their decisions to both install and tear down a statue to King George III, and what happened to this statue after it came down.
This episode is sponsored in part by Humanities New York. The mission of Humanities New York is to strengthen civil society and the bonds of community, using the humanities to foster engaging inquiry and dialog around social and cultural concerns.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/306
Complementary Episodes
🎧 Episode 058: Andrew Schocket, Fighting over the Founders: How We Remember the American Revolution
🎧 Episode 136: Jennifer Van Horn, Material Culture and the Making of America
🎧 Episode 144: Robert Parkinson, The Common Cause of the American Revolution
🎧 Episode 185: Joyce Goodfriend, Early New York City and Its Culture
🎧 Episode 245: Celebrating the Fourth
🎧 Episode 277: Whose Fourth of July
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Death is one of the few universals in life. Everyone who is born, will die.
How do the living make peace with death?
While different cultures make peace with death in different ways, Erik Seeman joins us to investigate how white, American Protestants made their peace with death during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.
Erik Seeman is a Professor of History at the University at Buffalo. He’s an award-winning historian who has written three books on death practices in early America, including his most recent book, Speaking with the Dead in Early America.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/305
Complementary Episodes
🎧 Episode 125: Terri Snyder, Death, Slavery, & Suicide in British North America
🎧 Episode 182: Douglas Winiarski, The Great Awakening in New England
🎧 Episode 214: Christopher Grasso, Skepticism & American Faith
🎧 Episode 231: Sara Georgini, The Religious Lives of the Adams Family
🎧 Episode 301: From Inoculation to Vaccination, Part 1
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Juneteenth is a state holiday that commemorates June 19, 1865, the day slavery ended in Texas. Over the last decade, a push to make Juneteenth a national holiday to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States has gained momentum.
What do we know about Juneteenth and its origins?
Annette Gordon-Reed, an award-winning historian at Harvard University and Harvard Law School, is a native Texan and she joins us to discuss the early history of Texas and the origins of the Juneteenth holiday with details from her book, On Juneteenth.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/304
Complementary Episodes
🎧 Episode 067, John Ryan Fischer, Cattle Colonialism
🎧 Episode 115: Andrew Torget, The Early History of Texas
🎧 Episode 117: Annette Gordon-Reed, The Life and Ideas of Thomas Jefferson
🎧 Episode 139: Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery
🎧 Episode 209: Considering Biography
🎧 Episode 281: Caitlin Rosenthal, The Business of Slavery
🎧 Episode 282: Vincent Brown, Tacky’s Revolt
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The Mississippi Gulf Coast was the home of many different peoples, cultures, and empires during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. According to some historians, the Gulf Coast region may have been the most diverse region in early North America.
Matthew Powell, a historian of slavery and southern history and the Executive Director of the La Pointe-Krebs House & Museum in Pascagoula, Mississippi, joins us to investigate and explore the Mississippi Gulf Coast and a prominent family who has lived there since about 1718.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/303
Complementary Episodes
🎧 Episode 037: Kathleen DuVal, Independence Lost
🎧 Episode 167: Eberhard Faber, The Early History of New Orleans
🎧 Episode 283: Anne Marie Lane Jonah, Acadie 300
🎧 Episode 295: Ibrahima Seck, Whitney Plantation Museum
🎧 Episode 298: Lindsey Shackenback Regele, Manufacturing Advantage
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Before its eradication in 1980, smallpox was the most feared disease in many parts of the world. Known as the “king of terrors” and the “disease of diseases” the search for a way to lessen and avoid smallpox was on!
How did vaccination come about? What are vaccination’s connections to smallpox inoculation? And how did news and practice of vaccination spread throughout North America? These questions will be our focus in this second, and final, episode in our “From Inoculation to Vaccination” series.
In this episode, we join experts Dr. René Najera, Farren Yero, and Andrew Wehrman for a journey through the history of smallpox, the creation of the world’s first vaccine, and first mass public health initiative.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/302
Complementary Episodes
🎧 Episode 005 Jeanne Abrams, Revolutionary Medicine
🎧 Episode 116 Erica Charters, Disease & the Seven Years’ War
🎧 Episode 174 Thomas Apel, Yellow Fever in the Early American Republic
🎧 Episode 263 Sari Altschuler, The Medical Imagination
🎧 Episode 273 Victoria Johnson, David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Early Republic
🎧 Episode 276: Stephen Fried, Benjamin Rush
🎧 Episode 301 From Inoculation to Vaccination
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Smallpox was the most feared disease in North America and in many parts of the world before its eradication in 1980. So how did early Americans live with smallpox and work to prevent it? How did they help eradicate this terrible disease?
Over the next two episodes, we’ll explore smallpox in North America. We’ll investigate how smallpox came to North America, how North Americans worked to contain, control, and prevent outbreaks of the disease, and how the story of smallpox is also the story of immunization.
In this episode, we join experts Dr. René Najera, Farren Yero, Ben Mutschler, and Andrew Wehrman for a journey through the history of smallpox and the world’s first immunization procedure: inoculation.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/301
Complementary Episodes
🎧 Episode 005: Jeanne Abrams, Revolutionary Medicine
🎧 Episode 116: Erica Charters, Disease & the Seven Years’ War
🎧 Episode 174: Thomas Apel, Yellow Fever in the Early American Republic
🎧 Episode 263 Sari Altschuler, The Medical Imagination
🎧 Episode 273: Victoria Johnson, David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Early Republic
🎧 Episode 276: Stephen Fried, Benjamin Rush
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📫 liz@benfranklinsworld.com
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What do historians wish more people better understood about early American history and why do they wish people had that better understanding?
In celebration of the 300th episode of Ben Franklin’s World, we posed these questions to more than 30 scholars. What do they think?
Join the celebration to discover more about Early America and take a behind-the-scenes tour of your favorite history podcast.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/300
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What can a portrait reveal about the history of colonial British America?
Portraits were both deeply personal and yet collaborative artifacts left behind by people of the past. When historians look at multiple portraits created around the same time and place, their similarities can reveal important social connections, trade relationships, or cultural beliefs about race and gender in early American history.
Janine Yorimoto Boldt, Associate Curator of American Art at the Chazen Museum of Art and the researcher behind the digital project Colonial Virginia Portraits, leads us on an exploration of portraiture and what it can reveal about the early American past.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/299
Complementary Episodes
🎧 Episode 024: Kimberly Alexander, 18th-Century Fashion & Material Culture
🎧 Episode 084: Zara Anishanslin, How Historians Read Historical Sources
🎧 Episode 106: Jane Kamensky, The World of John Singleton Copley
🎧 Episode 136: Jennifer Van Horn, Material Culture and the Making of America
🎧 Episode 292: Glenn Adamson, Craft in Early America
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Have you ever stopped to think about how the United States became a manufacturing nation? Have you ever wondered how the United States developed not just products, but the technologies, knowledge, and machinery necessary to manufacture or produce various products?
Lindsay Schakenbach Regele has.
Lindsay is an Associate Professor of History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and the author of Manufacturing Advantage: War, the State, and the Origins of American Industry, 1776-1848, and she joins us today to lead our exploration into the early American origins of industrialization.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/298
Complementary Episodes
🎧 Episode 098: Gautham Rao, Birth of the American Tax Man
🎧 Episode 113: Brian Murphy, Building the Empire State
🎧 Episode 140: Tamara Thornton, Nathaniel Bowditch
🎧 Episode 281: Caitlin Rosenthal, The Business of Slavery
🎧 Episode 292: Glen Adamson, Craft
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The history of Native American land dispossession is as old as the story of colonization. European colonists came to the Americas, and the Caribbean, wanting land for farms and settlement so they found ways to acquire lands from indigenous peoples by the means of negotiation, bad-faith dealing, war, and violence.
The Indian Removal Act of 1830 is deeply rooted in early American history.
Claudio Saunt, a scholar of Native American history at the University of Georgia, and author of the book Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory, joins us to discuss the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and how Native Americans in the southeastern part of the United States were removed from their homelands and resettled in areas of southeastern Kansas and Oklahoma.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/048
Complementary Episodes
🎧 Episode 034: Mark Cheatham, Andrew Jackson, Southerner
🎧 Episode 158: The Revolutionaries’ Army
🎧 Episode 162: Dunmore’s World
🎧 Episode 163: The American Revolution in North America
🎧 Episode 286: Elections in Early America: Native Sovereignty
REQUEST A TOPIC
📫 liz@benfranklinsworld.com
WHEN YOU'RE READY
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