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
On September 17, 1787, a majority of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention approved the new form of government they had spent months drafting and submitted it to the 13 states for their ratification and approval.
On June 21, 1788, New Hampshire became the 9th state to ratify the Constitution, which prompted the transition to the government of the United States Constitution.
Matt Wasniewski, the Historian of the United States House of Representatives and Terrance Rucker, a Historical Publications Specialist in the Office of the Historian at the United States House of Representatives, lead us on an exploration of why and how the United States Constitution established a bicameral Congress and how and why the House of Representatives took the shape and form that it did during its early meetings.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/202
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What kind of character should Americans have? Is it possible to create a shared sense of national character and identity that all Americans can subscribe to?
Americans grappled with many questions about what it meant to be an American and a citizen of the new republic after the American Revolution. They grappled with these questions because the people who made up the new United States hailed from many different cultural and ethnic backgrounds. So they wondered: How do you unite the disparate peoples of the United States into one national people?
Catherine Kelly, author of Republic of Taste: Art, Politics, and Everyday Life in Early America, joins us to explore the world of art, politics, and taste in the early American republic and how that world contributed to the formation of American character and virtue.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/201
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What would you like to know about Early American History?
It turns out, you wanted to know about the establishment of schools, how the colonial postal service worked, and about aspects of health and hygiene in early America.
In this listener-inspired Q&A episode, we speak with Johann Neem, Joseph Adelman, and Ann Little to explore these aspects of early American history and to get answers to your questions about them.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/200
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When we explore the history of early America, we often look at people who lived in North America. But what about the people who lived and worked in European metropoles?
What about Native Americans?
We explore early American history through a slightly different lens, a lens that allows us to see interactions that occurred between Native American peoples and English men and women who lived in London.
Our guide for this exploration is Coll Thrush, an Associate Professor of History at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver and author of Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of the Empire.
This episode originally posted as Episode 132.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/199
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When we think of Native Americans, many of us think of inland dwellers. People adept at navigating forests and rivers and the skilled hunters and horsemen who lived and hunted on the American Plains.
But did you know that Native Americans were seafaring mariners too?
Andrew Lipman, an Assistant Professor of History at Barnard College, Columbia University and author of The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast, leads us on an exploration of the northeastern coastline and of the Native American and European peoples who lived there during the seventeenth century.
This episode originally posted as Episode 104.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/198
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When we think about early American slavery, our minds evoke images of plantations where enslaved men and women were forced to labor in agricultural fields and inside the homes of wealthy Americans.
These images depict the practice of chattel slavery; a practice where early Americans treated slaves as property that they could buy, sell, trade, and use as they would real estate and draught animals.
But, did you know that some early Americans practiced a different type of slavery?
We investigate the practice of Native American or indigenous slavery, a little-known aspect of early American history, with Brett Rushforth, author of Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France.
This episode originally published as Episode 064.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/197
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We live in an age of information. The internet provides us with 24/7 access to all types of information—news, how-to articles, sports scores, entertainment news, and congressional votes.
But what do we do with all of this knowledge? How do we sift through and interpret it all?
We are not the first people to ponder these questions.
Today, Alejandra Dubcovsky, an Associate Professor at University of California Riverside and author of Informed Power: Communication in the Early South, takes us through the early American south and how the Native Americans, Europeans, and enslaved Africans who lived there acquired, used, and traded information.
This episode originally published as Episode 082.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/196
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In 1705 a group of colonists in Simsbury, Connecticut founded a copper mine, which the Connecticut General Assembly purchased and turned into a prison in 1773.
How did an old copper mine function as a prison?
Morgan Bengel, a Museum Assistant at the Old New-Gate Prison and Copper Mine, a Connecticut State Historic Site, helps us investigate both the history of early American mining and the history of early American prisons by taking us on a tour of the Old New-Gate Prison and Copper Mine in East Granby, Connecticut.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/195
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As part of its mission, the National Park Service seeks to protect and preserve places saved by the American people so that all may experience the heritage of the United States. These places include those with historical significance.
Supervisory Park Ranger Garrett Cloer joins us to explore the Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site so we can discover more about the Siege of Boston (1775-76) and the birth of the Continental Army and the life and work of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/194
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In 1959, the Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press published Lester J. Cappon’s The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and John and Abigail Adams. It was the first time that all 380 letters between Jefferson and the Adamses appeared in a single volume.
Why did Lester Cappon and the Omohundro Institute undertake this great project? And how did they put together this important documentary edition?
Karin Wulf, Director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, takes us behind-the-scenes of The Adams-Jefferson Letters and its publication.
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