It is late May, 1607, and Jamestown has survived the first organized attack against the settlement, this time from an alliance of five tribes from the Powhatan Confederacy. Captain Christopher Newport and John Smith don't know this yet, because they have taken twenty-two men in their boat and were exploring up the James River. There they hear about a "paramount chief" for the first time, and the large tribal confederacy that confronts them.

As the summer and fall of 1607 grinds on, disease, starvation, and Indian attacks afflict the colonists, and more than half will die before the end of the year. John Ratcliffe replaces Edward-Maria Wingfield as president of the colony, but John Smith is its chief operating officer, rallying the men to build houses an clear fields, and trading with the local tribes for food. While exploring upriver, he is captured by the military leader of the Powhatans, Opechancanough. Smith eventually meets the paramount chief Powhatan. The episode closes with a first look at the famous scene in which Pocahontas either saved John Smith's life, or didn't!

Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2

Selected resources for this episode

James Horn, A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America

James Horn, A Brave and Cunning Prince: The Great Chief Opechancanough and the War for America

David Price, Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Start of a New Nation

This episode looks at the prophecy that animated Powhatan's consolidation of power in the region, the violent first encounters between the Virginia Company expedition and the indigenous peoples at the mouth of the Chesapeake, internal squabbles within the English leadership, and the bizarre decision by Jamestown's president Edward-Maria Wingfield to disarm unilaterally, in the fruitless hope of winning the favor of the locals. We also take a first look at the staggering body count that would pile up over the first eighteen years of the Jamestown settlement.

Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2

Selected resources for this episode

Carl Bridenbaugh, Jamestown, 1544-1699

James Horn, A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America

David Price, Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Start of a New Nation

Karen Ordahl Kupperman, "Apathy and Death in Early Jamestown," The Journal of American History, June 1979.

In late December, 1606, in London’s River Thames, three small ships were anchored awaiting a voyage across the Atlantic. Those three ships were the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery, and they would take 105 men and boys to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay to establish the Virginia Company’s southern colony. They would plunge into a complex geopolitical morass that would very nearly destroy the venture. This episode looks at the context for the expedition that would become Jamestown, including especially the rise of the powerful Powhatan confederacy that would be waiting there when the English arrived, and prepared by a long-ago confrontation with the Spanish to confront the newcomers .

Selected resources for this episode

Carl Bridenbaugh, Jamestown, 1544-1699

Charlotte M. Gradie, “Spanish Jesuits in Virginia: The Mission That Failed”

James Horn, A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America

James Horn, A Brave and Cunning Prince: The Great Chief Opechancanough and the War for America

David Price, Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Start of a New Nation

John Smith (Wikipedia)

This week we continue and complete our story of the English adventures along the coast of New England in the first decade of the 17th century, including the fate, and the historical debate over the fate, of the Popham Colony, the Virginia Company's sister colony to Jamestown. Along the way we learn about the astonishing origin of the word "Iroquois," the first dog names in North America that come down to us, and the medicinal value, or not, of sassafras!

Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2

Selected references for this episode

Henry Otis Thayer, The Sagadahoc Colony: Comprising the Relation of a Voyage Into New England

Christopher J. Bilodeau, "The Paradox of Sagadahoc: The Popham Colony, 1607–1608," Early American Studies, Winter 2014.

Alfred A. Cave, "Why Was the Sagadahoc Colony Abandoned? An Evaluation of the Evidence," The New England Quarterly, December 1995.

"The Voyage of Martin Pring 1603," American Journeys Collection

First Charter of Virginia

The English established a colony on the coast near today’s Phippsburg, Maine in 1607, only a couple of months after the founding of Jamestown. It would survive just over a year.  The Popham or Sagadahoc Colony was the culmination of several exploratory missions along the New England coast from approximately Cape Cod to Maine between 1602 and 1605.  In 1602, Bartholomew Gosnold, who would eventually die at Jamestown, led the first of those missions to the New England coast and gave several famous places names that we use today, including Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard.  His expedition would stay in the Elizabeth Islands, which shelter Buzzard's Bay in Massachusetts, for more than three weeks, and have extensive encounters with local indigenous peoples. The Gosnold narrative of those encounters has all sorts of interesting stuff!

Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2

Selected references for this episode

Henry Otis Thayer, The Sagadahoc Colony: Comprising the Relation of a Voyage Into New England

Warner F. Gookin, "Who was Bartholomew Gosnold?", The William and Mary Quarterly, July 1949.

A briefe and true relation of the discouerie of the north part of Virginia being a most pleasant, fruitfull and commodious soile: made this present yeere 1602, by Captaine Bartholomew Gosnold, Captaine Bartholowmew [sic] Gilbert, and diuers other gentlemen their associats, by the permission of the honourable knight, Sir Walter Ralegh, &c. Written by M. Iohn Brereton one of the voyage.

It is 1580. Virtually no Spaniards have returned to New Mexico or the American southwest since the return of the remnants of the Coronado and Soto expeditions in 1542.  Neither had found a third great indigenous civilization to conquer, or even more than scant evidence of precious metals.  By 1580 most of the survivors of those expeditions had died, and the narratives produced in their aftermath would have been known to very few people. The most durable legacy of those expeditions would have been the rumors of gold, which always persist long after the actual facts are gone from living memory.  So it was that circa 1580 various aspirational conquistadors set to scheming for a return to the region that some were now dreaming of as “New Mexico.”  These new Spanish probes into the American southwest were minor affairs and of relatively little consequence, except insofar as they stirred up the Indians living in the Pueblos of the region and generated a new round of propaganda that would lead to the colonization project of Juan de Oñate y Salazar in 1598.  That would be of surpassing significance, for Oñate would stay for twelve years, kill a lot of Indians, found Santa Fe just before he departed, and establish the foundation of Spanish society in the southwestern United States.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheHistoryOfTh2

Selected references for this episode

George P. Hammond and Agapito Rey, The Rediscovery of New Mexico, 1580-1594 (Coronado cuarto centennial publications, 1540-1940)

Stan Hoig, Came Men on Horses: The Conquistador Expeditions of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and Don Juan de Oñate

John L. Kessell, Pueblos, Spaniards, and the Kingdom of New Mexico

J. Lloyd Mecham, "Antonio de Espejo and His Journey to New Mexico", The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, October 1926

In this episode we look at the tangled debate over the location of Drake's "fair and good bay." Was it in California? Or do we only believe that because of unbelievably unscrupulous behavior by famous California academics? We recount the story of Drake's "plate of brass," and discuss the connection between that fraud and the "Dare stone." Along the way we take a close look at academic conspiracy, California's "national myth," and the brilliant woman who revolutionized the history of Drake's circumnavigation only to be denounced by some of the leading lights in the profession of history.

Finally, we consider the legacy of Sir Francis Drake, and the matter of changing the names of high schools.

Oh, and the recording sounds a bit weird in places -- I recorded it in a hotel room in Boston, and had to edit out a rather noisy air handler in the background. There is nothing we won't do to bring you the podcast!

Selected references for this episode

Melissa Darby, Thunder Go North: The Hunt for Sir Francis Drake's Fair & Good Bay

Samuel Bawlf, The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake: 1577-1580

Miranda Kaufmann, Black Tudors: The Untold Story

Drake's Plate of Brass (Wikipedia)

Dare Stones (Wikipedia)

This November, it has been 400 years since the traditional First Thanksgiving at Plymouth Colony - Patuxet in 1621. But the history of that collaborative feast of the English and the Wampanoag Indians was lost for more than 200 years. For most of that time, Americans celebrated "thanksgiving" all over the country at different days in the autumn, decreed by local and state governments, without knowing its origin story. This episode explores the conversion of thanksgiving from a local custom to a revered national holiday. Along the way, we learn about Sarah Josepha Hale, the remarkable woman to whom Americans owe the greatest debt for the holiday they will celebrate today.

There were political objections to Thanksgiving, too, rooted in exactly the debates we have today after the proper role of the federal government, and how precisely to separate church and state.

Finally, we learn about the central role of football on Thanksgiving, dating from Thanksgiving of 1873, only four years after the first college football game. By 1893, Americans were playing thousands of games of football across the country on Thanksgiving Day. Oh, and we should all be grateful that President Franklin Roosevelt didn't screw it all up, which he very nearly did.

Selected references for this episode

Melanie Kirkpatrick, Thanksgiving: The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience

Melanie Kirkpatrick, "Don't Let Ideologues Steal Thanksgiving"

"How the Great Colchester Molasses Shortage Nearly Ruined Thanksgiving"

All the Presidential Thanksgiving Proclamations 1789-2018 (pdf)

The West Wing, "I get to proclaim a national day of Thanksgiving"

The American Story Podcast: Sarah Josepha Hale

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This episode is off the timeline. We look at the various crimes against humanity to be found on "History Twitter," the idea of pursuing a "useable" history and the perils therein, whether we should reduce the Constitution to Twitter-friendly labels such as "pro-slavery" or "anti-slavery," and the disrespect many younger professors and graduate students show for the greatest historian of the American Revolution and the founding period, Brown University's Gordon Wood, who is still pumping out sharply written books in his late eighties and standing up for history as a discipline. I also talk about some other podcasts that I like.

Oh, and it sounds slightly different because I have a new microphone in Austin and forgot to buy a foam cover for it. That will be fixed next time.

Enjoy!

References for this episode

Gordon Wood, Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution

Good Will Hunting (Bar Scene)

The University of Austin

Podcasts mentioned

History of England Podcast

Ben Franklin's World

American Revolution Podcast

The American Story

[Abridged] Presidential Histories

Civics and Coffee

The History of North America

Age of Jackson Podcast

A New History of Old Texas

Nudie Reads

The Reason Roundtable

The Fifth Column Podcast

Making Sense by Sam Harris

The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan

Walk-Ins Welcome with Bridget Phetasy

The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway

Honestly with Bari Weiss

In this episode we wrap up loose ends before moving on down the timeline: What happened after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and what happened after John White left the Roanoke Colony in August 1587? We also see what happened to all those Elizabethan characters we've been talking about for the last three months, including Francis Drake, Elizabeth herself, John Hawkins, Martin Frobisher, Francis Walsingham, and Philip II. Finally, we explore the long-term consequences of both the Armada and the Roanoke Colony for the History of the Americans.

Oh, and we read a poem in the spirit of the day.

Selected references for this episode

Garrett Mattingly, The Armada

Robert Hutchinson, The Spanish Armada: A History

James Horn, A Kingdom Strange: The Brief and Tragic History of the Lost Colony of Roanoke

David Beers Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584-1606

Paul E. Hoffman, "New Light on Vicente Gonzalez's 1588 Voyage in Search of Raleigh's English Colonies"

Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604) (Wikipedia)

In Flanders Fields (Wikipedia)

Neal Casal, "Virginia Dare" (Youtube, song)