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 Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution doesn’t always make headlines, but it’s an amendment that undergirds foundational rights. It’s also an amendment that can show us a lot about the intertwined nature between history and American law.
In this 3rd episode of our 4th Doing History series, we explore the early American origins of the Fourth Amendment with Thomas Clancy, a Professor Emeritus at the University of Mississippi School of Law and an expert on the Fourth Amendment.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/261
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How and why did Congress draft the First Ten Amendments to the Constitution?
In the United States, we use the Constitution and Bill of Rights to understand and define ourselves culturally. Americans are a people with laws and rights that are protected by the Constitution because they are defined in the Constitution. And the place where the Constitution defines and outlines our rights is within its First Ten Amendments, the Bill of Rights.
In this second episode of our 4th Doing History series, we’re investigating how and why Congress drafted the First Ten Amendments to the Constitution. Our guide for this investigation is Kenneth Bowling, a member of the First Federal Congress Project and a co-editor of A Documentary History of the First Federal Congress.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/260
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Production of this episode was made possible by a grant from the Roller-Bottimore Foundation of Richmond, Virginia.
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Law is all around us. And the basis of American Law comes not only from our early American past, but from our founding documents.
This episode begins our 4th Doing History series. Over the next four episodes, we’ll explore the early American origins of the Bill of Rights as well as the history of the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment will serve as our case study so we can see where our rights come from and how they developed from the early American past.
In this episode we go inside the United States National Archives to investigate the Constitution and Bill of Rights. During our visit we’ll speak with Jessie Kratz, First Historian of the National Archives, and Mary Sarah Bilder, the Founders Professor of Law at Boston College, to better understand our founding documents and the laws they established.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/259
About the Series
Law is all around us. The Doing History: Why the 4th? series uses the Bill of Rights and the Fourth Amendment as case studies to examine where our rights come from and how they developed out of early American knowledge and experiences. It also uses the history of the Bill of Rights and the Fourth Amendment to explore the history of law as a field of study and how this field of study differs from other historical subjects and how historians and lawyers use and view the history of the law differently.
The Doing History series explores early American history and how historians work. It is part of Ben Franklin’s World, which is a production of the Omohundro Institute.
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The Second Continental Congress voted for independence on July 2, 1776 with 12 colonies and one abstention. The delegation from New York abstained from the vote. And Pennsylvania voted in favor of independence because two of its delegates were persuaded not to attend the vote given their opposition.
John Dickinson was one of the two delegates who absented himself from the vote. Later, he would refuse to sign the Declaration of Independence. But why?
Jane Calvert, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Kentucky and the Director/Editor of The John Dickinson Writings Project, joins us to explore the life, religion, and political views of John Dickinson.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/258
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What was it like to live as a woman of faith in early republic America? What was it like to live as a Catholic in the early United States?
Catherine O’Donnell, an Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University and author of Elizabeth Seton: American Saint, helps us investigate answers to these questions by taking us through the life of the United States’ first saint: Elizabeth Ann Seton.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/257
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How do empires come to be? How are empires made and who makes them? What role do maps play in making empires?
Christian Koot is a Professor of History at Towson University and the author of A Biography of a Map in Motion: Augustine Herrman’s Chesapeake. Christian has researched and written two books about the seventeenth-century Anglo-Dutch World to better understand empires and how they are made. Today, he joins us to take us through his research and to share what one specific map, Augustine Herrman’s 1673 map Virginia and Maryland, reveals about empire and empire making.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/256
Augustine Herrman’s Map, Virginia and Maryland as it is planted and inhabited Sponsor Links
Production of this episode was made possible by a grant from the Roller-Bottimore Foundation of Richmond, Virginia.
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Who gets to be a citizen of the United States? How does the United States define who belongs to the nation?
Early Americans asked and grappled with these questions during the earliest days of the early republic.
Martha S. Jones is a Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University and a former public interest litigator. Using details from her book, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America, Martha joins us to investigate how early Americans thought about citizenship and how they defined who could and couldn’t belong to the United States.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/255 Sponsor Links
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We read and hear a lot about money. We read and hear about fluctuations in the value of the Dollar, Pound, and Euro, interest rates and who can and can’t get access to credit, and we also read and hear about new virtual currencies like Bitcoin and Facebook’s Libra.
We talk a lot about money. But where did the idea of money come from?
Did early Americans think about money a lot too?
Jeffrey Sklansky is a Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of Sovereign of the Market: The Money Question in Early America. Jeff is an expert in the intellectual and social history of capitalism in early America and he’s agreed to lead us on an investigation of the world of money in early America.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/254 Sponsor Links
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What can a family history tell us about revolutionary and early republic America?
What can the letters of a wife and mother tell us about life in the Caribbean during the Age of Revolutions?
These are questions Susan Clair Imbarrato, a Professor of English at Minnesota State University Moorhead, set out to answer as she explored an amazing trove of letters to and from a woman named Sarah Gray Cary.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/253 Sponsor Links
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Much of early American history comprises stories of empire and how different Native, European, and Euro-American nations vied for control of North American territory, resources, and people. In this episode, Matthew P. Dziennick, an Assistant Professor of History at the United States Naval Academy and author The Fatal Land: War, Empire, and the Highland Soldier, presents us with one of these imperial stories. Specifically, we’re going to investigate the world of the eighteenth-century Scottish Highlands and how the 12,000 soldiers the Highlands sent to North America shaped the course of the British Empire during Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution.
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