Desperate Shores — The Nations

American Political History · Mar 27, 2021 · 24m

For six episodes, they were always present — standing at the edge of the English story, named but rarely centered. This episode brings them forward. The nations of the eastern seaboard in 1620 were not a backdrop. Wa-hun-se-na-cah ran a thirty-tribe paramount chiefdom across six thousand square miles of Virginia, held Jamestown in a posture of strategic patience for more than a decade, and watched the English die by the hundreds while he calculated whether they were worth more alive. Massasoit, ruling a Wampanoag Confederacy weakened by epidemic and threatened with absorption by the…