Desperate Shores — The World That Sent Them

American Political History · Mar 16, 2021 · 13m · transcript

Before Roanoke. Before Jamestown. Before any English ship sailed west with settlers and catastrophically bad planning, there was the world that sent them.

Europe in 1500 was not the Europe we know — it was a fabric of five hundred competing kingdoms, held together by the Catholic Church and nothing else. Then came the printing press, and a German monk named Martin Luther, and a continent that had been killing each other over religious belief for a century found a new arena for the argument: the Atlantic world.

This episode is about the moment that made English colonization not just possible…