Ben Franklin's World

Long before European arrival in the Americas, Indigenous people and nations practiced enslavement. Their version of enslavement looked different from the version Christopher Columbus and his fellow Europeans practiced, but Indigenous slavery also shared many similarities with the Euro-American practice of African Chattel Slavery.

While there is no way to measure the exact impact of slavery upon the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, we do know the practice involved many millions of Indigenous people who were captured, bound, and sold as enslaved people.

Estevan Rael-Gálvez, Executive Director of Native Bound-Unbound: Archive of Indigenous Slavery, joins us to discuss the digital project Native Bound-Unbound: Archive of Indigenous Slavery.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/371

 Complementary Episodes

🎧 Episode 008: Greg O'Malley, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America

🎧 Episode 139: Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery

🎧 Episode 184: David J. Silverman, Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violence Transformation of Native America

🎧 Episode 197: Brett Rushforth, Native American Slavery in New France

🎧 Episode 220: Margaret Ellen Newell, New England Indians, Colonists, and Origins of Slavery

🎧 Episode 367: The Brafferton Indian School, Part 1

🎧 Episode 368: The Brafferton Indian School, Part 2: Legacies

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Happy Halloween! In honor of the 31st of October and All Hallows Eve, we investigate a historical incident of witches and witchcraft in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1651.

Malcolm Gaskill, Emeritus Professor of Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and one of the leading experts in the history of witchcraft, joins us to discuss details from his new book, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/370

Complementary Episodes

🎧 Episode 049: Malcolm Gaskill, How the English Became American

🎧 Episode 053: Emerson W. Baker, A Storm of Witchcraft

🎧 Episode 192: Brian Regal, The Secret History of the New Jersey Devil

🎧 Episode 225: Elaine Forman Crane, The Poison Plot: Adultery & Murder in Colonial Newport

🎧 Episode 341: Mairi Cowan, Possession and Exorcism in New France

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Establishing colonies in North America took an astonishing amount of work. Colonists had to clear trees, eventually remove stumps from newly cleared fields, plant crops to eat and sell, weed and tend those crops, and then they had to harvest crops, and get the crops they intended to sell to the nearest market town, and that was just some of the work involved to establish colonial farms.

Colonists did not often perform this work on their own. They enlisted the help of children and neighbors, purchased enslaved people, and used animals.

Undra Jeter is the Bill and Jean Lane Director of Coach and Livestock at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. He joins us to explore the animals English and British colonists brought with them to North America and used to build, run, and sustain their colonial farms and cities. Animals provided many benefits to early Americans, so Undra also shares information about the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s efforts to bring back the population numbers of some of these historic animal breeds through its rare breeds program.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/369

Complementary Episodes

🎧 Episode 067: John Ryan Fischer, An Environmental History of Early California & Hawaii

🎧 Episode 168: Andrea Smalley, Wild By Nature: Colonists and Animals in North America

🎧 Episode 187: Kenneth Cohen, Sport in Early America

🎧 Episode 234: Richard Bushman, Farms & Farm Families in Early America

🎧 Episode 275: Ingrid Tague, Pets in Early America

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The Brafferton Indian School has a long and complicated legacy. Chartered with the College of William & Mary in 1693, the Brafferton Indian School’s purpose was to educate young Indigenous boys in the ways of English religion, language, and culture. The Brafferton performed this work for more than 70 years, between the arrival of its first students in 1702 and when the last documented student left the school in 1778. 

This second episode in our 2-episode series about the Brafferton Indian School will focus on the legacy of the Brafferton Indian School and how it and other colonial-era Indian Schools established models for the schools the United States government and religious institutions established during the Indian Boarding School Era. 

As one of the architects of these later Boarding Schools, Richard Henry Pratt, stated, the purpose of these boarding schools was to “kill the Indian and save the man.” Pratt meant that the United States government desired to assimilate and fully Americanize Indigenous children so there would be no more Native Americans. 

But Indigenous peoples are resilient, and they have resisted American attempts to extinguish their cultures. So we’ll also hear from three tribal citizens in Virginia who are working in different ways to reawaken long-dormant aspects of their Indigenous cultures.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/368

Complementary Episodes

🎧 Episode 290: The World of the Wampanoag, Part 1: Before 1620

🎧 Episode 291: The World of the Wampanoag, Part 2: 1620 and Beyond

🎧 Episode 310: Rosalyn LaPier, History of the Blackfeet

🎧 Episode 314: Colin Calloway, Native Americans in Early American Cities

🎧 Episode 343: Music and Song in Native North America

🎧 Episode 353: Brooke Bauer, Women and the Making of Catawba Identity

🎧 Episode 367: The Brafferton Indian School, Part 1

Series Music

🎵 WarPaint Singers

🎵 WarPaint Singers on YouTube 

🎵 Blue Dot Sessions

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In 1693, King William III and Queen Mary II of England granted a royal charter for two institutions of higher education in the Colony of Virginia. The first institution was the College of William & Mary. The second institution was the Indian School at William & Mary, known from 1723 to the present as the Brafferton Indian School.

The history of the Brafferton Indian School is a story of power, trade, land, and culture. It’s an Indigenous story. It’s also a story of English, later British, colonialism.

Over the next two episodes, we will investigate the Brafferton Indian School and the stories it tells about power, trade, land, culture, and colonialism in early America. We’ll also explore the legacy of the Brafferton and other colonial Indian schools by examining the connections between these schools and the creation of the Indian Boarding Schools that operated within the United States between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries.

In this episode, we focus on the history and origins of the Brafferton Indian School.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/367

Complementary Episodes

🎧 Episode 104: Andrew Lipman, The Saltwater Frontier: Native Americans and Colonists on the Northeastern Coast

🎧 Episode 132: Coll Thrush, Indigenous London

🎧 Episode 171: Jessica Stern, Native Americans, British Colonists, and Trade in North America

🎧 Episode 290: The World of the Wampanoag, Part 1: Before 1620

🎧 Episode 291: The World of the Wampanoag, Part 2: 1620 and Beyond

🎧 Episode 310: Rosalyn LaPier, History of the Blackfeet

🎧 Episode 314: Colin Calloway, Native Americans in Early American Cities

🎧 Episode 353: Brooke Bauer, Women and the Making of Catawba Identity

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On September 17, 1787, the members of the Constitutional Convention concluded their work by signing the final draft of their new proposed government. The document they signed was the United States Constitution, which is why the United States marks Constitution Day each year on September 17.

In honor of Constitution Day, we explore the life of a Founder who played a large role in the creation and shaping of the United States Constitution: James Wilson.

Michael H. Taylor, Professor of United States History and Political Science at Northeast Community College and author of James Wilson: The Anxious Founder, joins us to investigate the life of James Wilson, who stands as one of the United States’ overlooked founders. 

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/366

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🎧 Episode 055: Robb Haberman, John Jay: Forgotten Founder

🎧 Episode 094: Cassandra Good, Founding Friendships

🎧 Episode 107: Mary Sarah Bilder, Madison’s Hand

🎧 Episode 143: Michael Klarman, The Making of the United States Constitution

🎧 Episode 153: Committees and Congresses: Governments of the American Revolution

🎧 Episode 212: Researching Biography

🎧Episode 258: Jane Calvert, “John Dickinson Life, Religion, & Politics”

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2020 commemorated 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.

This episode originally posted as Episode 283. 

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/365

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🎧 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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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.

This episode originally posted as Episode 303.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/364

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🎧 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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About 620 miles north of New Orleans and 62 miles south of St. Louis, sits the town of Ste. Geneviéve, Missouri.

Established in 1750 by the French, Ste. Geneviéve reveals much about what it was like to establish a colony in the heartland of North America and what it was like for colonists to live so far removed from seats of imperial power.

Claire Casey, a National Park Service interpretative ranger at the Ste. Geneviéve National Historical Park, joins us to explore the early American history of Ste. Geneviéve.

This episode is originally posted as Episode 318. 

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/363

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🎧 Episode 102: William Nester, George Rogers Clark and the Fight for the Illinois Country

🎧 Episode 108: Ann Little, The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright

🎧 Episode 120: Marcia Zug, Mail Order Brides in Early America

🎧 Episode 139: Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery

🎧 Episode 308: Jessica Marie Johnson, Slavery and Freedom in French Louisiana

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The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian has an exhibit called Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States & American Indian Nations. This exhibit allows you to see treaties the United States has made with American Indian nations and learn more about those treaties and their outcomes.

David W. Penney is the Associate Director of Museum Scholarship, Exhibitions, and Public Engagement at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. He’s also an internationally recognized scholar and curator who has a lot of expertise in Native American art history, and he was involved in creating the Nation to Nation exhibit. He joins us to guide us through this exhibit and some of the treaties the United States has made with Indigenous nations.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/362

Complementary Episodes

🎧 Episode 163: The American Revolution in North America

🎧 Episode 223: Susan Sleeper-Smith, A Native American History of the Ohio River Valley & Great Lakes Region

🎧 Episode 264: Michael Oberg, The Treaty of Canandaigua, 1794 

🎧 Episode 286: Elections in Early America: Native Sovereignty

🎧 Episode 323: Michael Witgen, American Expansion and the Political Economy of Plunder

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