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
Join the Omohundro Institute and Mass Humanities for a special two-episode series about the World of the Wampanoag before and after 1620. The Wampanoag’s history has always been spoken. Hear it on Ben Franklin’s World in December 2020.
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This special bonus episode previews the Ben Franklin's World Subscription program and its monthly bonus episode for program subscribers.
In this bonus episode, Historian of the United States House of Representatives Matt Wasniewski and Historical Publications Specialist Terrance Rucker answer your questions about the early history of the United States Congress.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/202
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For four months during the summer of 1787, delegates from the thirteen states met in Philadelphia to craft a revised Constitution that would define the government of the United States. It took them nearly the entire time to settle on the method for selecting the President, the Chief Executive. What they came up with is a system of indirect election where the states would select electors who would then cast votes for President and Vice President. Today we call these electors the Electoral College.
In this final episode of our series on Elections in Early America, we explore the origins and early development of the Electoral College and how it shaped presidential elections in the first decades of the United States with Alexander Keyssar and Frank Cogliano.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/287
Complementary Episodes
🎧 Episode 040: Kathleen Bartoloni-Tuazon, For Fear of an Elective King
🎧 Episode 107: Mary Sarah Bilder, Madison's Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention
🎧 Episode 131: Frank Cogliano, Thomas Jefferson's Empire of Liberty
🎧 Episode 143: Michael Klarman, The Making of the United States Constitution
🎧 Episode 179: George Van Cleve, After the Revolution: Governance During the Critical Period
🎧 Episode 193: Partisans: The Friendship & Rivalry of Adams & Jefferson
🎧 Episode 279: Lindsay Chervinsky, The Cabinet: Creation of an American Institution
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Who is American democracy for and who could participate in early American democracy?
Women and African Americans were often barred from voting in colonial and early republic elections. But what about Native Americans? Could Native Americans participate in early American democracy?
Julie Reed, an Assistant Professor of History at the Pennsylvania State University, and Kathleen DuVal, the Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Professor of History at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, join us to investigate how the sovereignty of native nations fits within the sovereignty of the United States and its democracy.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/286
Complementary Episodes
🎧 Episode 037: Kathleen DuVal, Independence Lost
🎧 Episode 158: The Revolutionaries’ Army
🎧 Episode 162: Dunmore’s New World
🎧 Episode 163: The American Revolution in North America
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Independence from Great Britain provided the former British American colonists the opportunity to create a new, more democratic government than they had lived under before the American Revolution.
What did this new American government look like? Who could participate in this new American democracy? And what was it like to participate in this new democracy?
Scholars Terrance Rucker, a Historical Publications Specialist in the Office of the Historian of the U.S. House of Representatives, and Marcela Miccuci, a curator at the Museum of the American Revolution, join us to investigate the first federal elections in the United States and who could vote in early U.S. elections.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/285
Complementary Episodes
🎧 Episode 107: Mary Sarah Bilder, Madison’s Hand
🎧 Episode 151: Defining the American Revolution
🎧 Episode 179: George Van Cleve, Governance During the Critical Period
🎧 Episode 202: The Early History of the United States Congress
🎧 Episode 203: Joanne Freeman, Alexander Hamilton
🎧 Episode 260: Creating the First Ten Amendments
🎧 Episode 277: Whose Fourth of July
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📫 liz@benfranklinsworld.com
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The British North American colonies formed some of the most democratic governments in the world. But that doesn't mean that all early Americans were treated equally or allowed to participate in representative government.
So who could vote in Early America? Who could participate in representative government?
Historians James Kloppenberg, the Charles Warren Professor of History at Harvard University, and Amy Watson, an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, help us explore who democracy was meant for and how those who lived in colonial British America understood and practiced representative government.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/284
Complementary Episodes
🎧 Episode 038: Carolyn Harris, Magna Carta
🎧 Episode 143: Michael Klarman, The Making of the United States Constitution
🎧 Episode 243: Joseph Adelman, Revolutionary Print Networks
🎧 Episode 255: Martha Jones, Birthright Citizens
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On Friday, September 18, 2020, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, died.
Justice Ginsburg's death has caused a lot of debate about whether the President should appoint a new justice to fill her seat and, if he does appoint someone, whether the Senate should vote on the President’s nomination before the election.
This short bonus episode offers a brief history of the Supreme Court and how it functions within the United States government. Our guest for this episode is Mary Sarah Bilder, the Founders Professor of Law at Boston College.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/259 Join Ben Franklin's World!
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2020 commemorates the 300th anniversary of French presence on Prince Edward Island. Like much of North America, the Canadian Maritime provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island, and Prince Edward Island were highly contested regions. In fact, the way France and Great Britain fought for presence and control of this region places the Canadian Maritimes among the most contested regions in eighteenth-century North America.
Anne Marie Lane Jonah, a historian with the Parks Canada Agency, joins us to explore the history of Prince Edward Island and why Great Britain and France fought over the Canadian Maritime region.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/283
Complementary Episodes
🎧 Episode 064: Brett Rushforth, Native American Slavery in New France
🎧 Episode 104: Andrew Lipman, Europeans & Native Americans on the Northeastern Coast
🎧 Episode 108: Ann Little, The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright
🎧 Episode 167: Eberhard Faber, The Early History of New Orleans
🎧 Episode 189: Sam White, The Little Ice Age
🎧 Episode 232: Christopher Hodson, The Acadian Diaspora
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Between 1760 and 1761, Great Britain witnessed one of the largest slave insurrections in the history of its empire. Although the revolt took place on the island of Jamaica, the reverberations of this revolt stretched across the Atlantic Ocean and into the British North American colonies.
Vincent Brown, the Charles Warren Professor of American History and a Professor of African American Studies at Harvard University, joins us to investigate Tacky’s Revolt and how that revolt served as an eddy within the larger current of Atlantic warfare, with details from his book, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/282
Complementary Episodes
🎧 Episode 052: Ronald A. Johnson, Early United States-Haitian Diplomacy
🎧 Episode 124: James Alexander Dun, Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America
🎧 Episode 133: Patrick Breen, The Nat Turner Revolt
🎧 Episode 164: The American Revolution in the Age of Revolutions
🎧 Episode 236: Daniel Livesay, Mixed-Race Britons & the Atlantic Family
🎧 Episode 281: Caitlin Rosenthal, The Business of Slavery
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We live in an age where big businesses track our shopping habits and in some cases our work habits. But is the age of data new? When did the “age of the spreadsheet” and quantification of habits develop?
Caitlin Rosenthal, an Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management, leads us on an investigation into the origins of how American businesses came to collect and use data to manage their workers and their pursuit of profits.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/281
Complementary Episodes
🎧 Episode 137: Erica Dunbar, The Washingtons’ Runaway Slave, Ona Judge
🎧 Episode 140: Tamara Thornton, Nathaniel Bowditch: 19th-Century Man of Business
🎧 Episode 173: Marisa Fuentes, Colonial Port Cities & Slavery
🎧 Episode 176: Daina Ramey Berry, The Value of the Enslaved from Womb to Grave
🎧 Episode 253: Susan Clair Imbarrato, Life & Revolution in Boston & Grenada
REQUEST A TOPIC
📫 liz@benfranklinsworld.com
WHEN YOU'RE READY
👩💻 Join the BFW Listener Community
LISTEN 🎧
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