Shows / American Political History
American Political History
The full story of this country, told through the people who lived it. From the soldier in the mud to the statesman at the table. Chronological, self-contained seasons, built on the primary sources. New episodes Tuesdays and Thursday.
Episodes
- American Political History
The French and Indian War - A Few Acres of Snow
In the spring of 1760, two armies sat outside Quebec and stared at the river, because whoever’s ships came first would win a continent. This is the story of…
- American Political History
The French and Indian War - The Cherokee War
While the British took Quebec in the north, the southern colonies fought a war almost nobody up north was watching — a brutal frontier war against the…
- American Political History
The French and Indian War - The Plains of Abraham
In 1759, the year the British Empire could not stop winning, the largest prize of all sat on a cliff in the middle of North America: Quebec, the heart of New…
- American Political History
The French and Indian War - The Forks
The French and Indian War began at the forks of the Ohio in 1754, and in 1758 it came home to where it started. This is the story of how the British finally…
- American Political History
The French and Indian War - Pitt’s War
By 1758 the British had been losing the war in America for three years. Then William Pitt took hold of it in London — and instead of bullying the colonies as…
- American Political History
The French and Indian War – Montcalm Ascendant
By 1757 the most powerful empire on earth was losing — beaten up one side of the continent and down the other by a smaller, poorer enemy with a better general…
- American Political History
The French and Indian War - Battle of Lake George
In 1755 the most powerful native confederacy on the continent was pulled into a war that was not its own — and discovered that the balance it had worked for a…
- American Political History
The French and Indian War - Braddock's Defeat
On July 9, 1755, the largest army ever assembled in North America crossed the Monongahela River in perfect order, ten miles from its objective and certain of…
- American Political History
The French and Indian War - The Road West
In the summer of 1755, the largest army ever assembled in North America began cutting a road through the Appalachian wilderness toward a French fort at the…
- American Political History
The Edge of Empire - Fort Necessity
In the spring of 1754, a twenty-two-year-old Virginia lieutenant colonel named George Washington marched a few hundred men into the Ohio wilderness to make…
- American Political History
The Edge of Empire - Each for itself
In May 1754, a Philadelphia printer cut a snake into pieces and told his fellow colonists to join, or die. That summer, as the first shots of a world war…
- American Political History
The Edge of Empire - Ohio Country
In 1737, three runners set off through the Pennsylvania woods in a rigged footrace that stripped the Lenape of a million acres — and the men who lost their…
- American Political History
The Edge of Empire - New England’s Conquest
In 1745, an army of New England farmers, fishermen, and shopkeepers — not one of them a trained soldier — sailed six hundred miles north to do the impossible…
- American Political History
The Edge of Empire - Expended
It started with a pickled ear in a jar, held up before the House of Commons — and it ended by quietly destroying the one colony built to be different. When…
- American Political History
The Edge of Empire - The Road South
Before dawn on September 9th, 1739, a man named Jemmy led twenty enslaved Africans against a store on the Stono River, took the guns off its shelves, and…
- American Political History
The Edge of Empire - A Different Kind of Place
By 1738 the colony of Georgia is five years old and bleeding settlers across the river to South Carolina — because Georgia, alone in British America, forbids…
- American Political History
The Edge of Empire - Debatable Land
A generation after the Yamasee War nearly destroyed it, South Carolina has become something new on the American mainland: the first colony where the enslaved…
- American Political History
Wars Within Wars - Borrowed Guns
France built the opposite of Carolina. Where the English ran their frontier through free-lance traders who cheated and enslaved the nations they lived among…
- American Political History
Wars Within Wars - Carolina Remade
South Carolina had won its battles and was still losing its war. Eight months after the Good Friday massacre, the colony was ringed, starving, and unable to…
- American Political History
Wars Within Wars - The Good Friday Massacre
South Carolina in 1715 was not a colony of farms — it was a trading firm with a coastline, running the largest deerskin and Indian-slave operation in English…
- American Political History
Wars Within Wars - The Sixth Nation
John Lawson knew the Tuscarora better than almost any Englishman alive. He had walked their country, written the finest book yet penned about the native…
- American Political History
Wars Within Wars - Assault on Florida
In 1702 the governor of Carolina took an army south to seize the oldest city in America — and came home in disgrace, his ships burned, his name ruined, beaten…
- American Political History
Wars Within Wars - Indian Country
Four hundred miles from the coast, an English trader winters in a town that will never see an English soldier — selling guns, buying deerskins and human…
- American Political History
Wars Within Wars - The Great Peace
In October 1690, a Boston man stood blindfolded before the governor of New France and gave him one hour to surrender Canada — to an army that belonged not to…
- American Political History
Wars Within Wars - One Fire
In the late summer of 1684, a French royal army sat starving on the shore of Lake Ontario — and an Onondaga orator walked into its camp and dictated terms to…
- American Political History
Wars Within Wars - Left to Themselves
On a frozen leap-day morning in 1704, a French and Native war party came over the palisade of a sleeping Massachusetts town, and New England’s most famous…
- American Political History
By What Authority - The Fortunate Revolution.
The Dominion of New England did not fall because the colonies resisted it. It fell because the king who built it lost his throne in a single winter. This is…
- American Political History
By What Authority - Holy Experiment
In 1670 a London jury was locked up without food, water, or heat and ordered to convict a young Quaker named William Penn. They refused — and the ruling that…
- American Political History
By What Authority - The Inner Light
In 1659 a woman stood on the gallows on Boston Common with a rope around her neck — and was cut down alive at the last moment, by a reprieve her son had ridden…
- American Political History
By What Authority - The Dominion
In 1683, in a colony that had never held an election, under an Irish Catholic governor appointed by a Catholic duke, New York — of all colonies — wrote down a…
- American Political History
By What Authority - The King's Diagnosis
For six years Edward Randolph tried to collect the king's customs in Boston, and for six years the city beat him — every ship he seized returned by a colonial…
- American Political History
By What Authority - Accounting Empire
There was a man in London who knew more about America than almost anyone alive, and who never crossed the ocean to see it. William Blathwayt sat in the…
- American Political History
By What Authority - The Duke's Colony
In 1681, the king's own customs collector stood trial for treason in New York — charged by the colony's merchants with levying war on free Englishmen, for the…
- American Political History
By What Authority - The Dutch Problem
England planted the colonies. The Dutch carried the goods — and kept the profit. By 1640 Dutch trade was double England's, run on three inventions no one could…
- American Political History
The Grand Model - Ungovernable
In 1690 a man stepped off a ship in Charles Town and made himself governor of Carolina by overthrowing the governor — and the strangest part was that he was…
- American Political History
The Grand Model - Flesh and Deerskin
Before Carolina grew rich on rice, it grew rich on a commodity pulled out of the southern interior: people. Deerskins were the steady business, but slaves were…
- American Political History
The Grand Model - Charles Town
Three ships left England in 1669 to plant a colony designed in a London drawing room. Eight months later, only one of them reached the Carolina coast — the…
- American Political History
The Grand Model - Locke's Colony
Before he was the philosopher of the Glorious Revolution or the intellectual father of the Declaration of Independence, John Locke was a thirty-seven-year-old…
- American Political History
The Grand Model - The Plantation Machine
The institution was ancient and universal. The machine was new. This episode traces how the specific apparatus of Atlantic slavery — industrial, permanent…
- American Political History
The Grand Model - Older Than Writing
Before we can understand what Carolina became, we have to understand the thing the Barbadians carried onto its shore — and it is far older and far stranger…
- American Political History
The Grand Model - A Colony of a Colony
To understand Carolina, you have to leave it — and sail to a single small island in the eastern Caribbean. Carolina was not really founded from England; it was…
- American Political History
The Grand Model - Subject to Change
After Bacon’s Rebellion, a certain kind of Virginian gave up on the Chesapeake and looked south — to a coast the advertisements called empty, warm, and…
- American Political History
The First Revolution - War on the Water
The season ends on the water. Virginia is split in two, and the war turns on a single captured ship; then Jamestown burns, Bacon dies of disease in a swamp at…
- American Political History
The First Revolution - The Showdown
This is the scene the season has been building toward. Nathaniel Bacon comes down the James River with five hundred armed men; Governor William Berkeley, able…
- American Political History
The First Revolution - The Spark
It did not begin with a manifesto or a meeting. It began with an unpaid debt and some stolen pigs — and from that squalid little quarrel on the Virginia…
- American Political History
The First Revolution - What Was Left
In 1492, no one in the Old World had ever tasted a potato, smoked tobacco, or drunk a cup of chocolate — and no one in the Americas had ever seen a horse or a…
- American Political History
The First Revolution - Two Men, One Colony
Before the rebellion there were two men, and the only way to understand what happened is to understand each of them. William Berkeley had governed Virginia for…
- American Political History
The First Revolution - Six Parts in Seven
One hundred years before the Declaration of Independence, a Virginia planter named Nathaniel Bacon led an armed revolt against the colonial government — and…
- American Political History
The Catholic Refuge - The Refuge Closed
In the summer of 1689, a rumor ran through Maryland that the Catholics had hired the native nations to murder the Protestants in their beds. It was false. It…
- American Political History
The Catholic Refuge - Toleration
In 1649, Maryland passed the first law in English America to use the words "free exercise" of religion — a narrow, conditional, but genuinely remarkable order…
- American Political History
The Catholic Refuge - A Plantation of Trade
In early Maryland, the money in a man's pocket was a leaf. Tobacco was the colony's currency — wages, debts, fines, and the minister's salary all reckoned in…
- American Political History
The Catholic Refuge - The Tayac
In 1634 — the founding year of Maryland — the ruler of the most powerful native people on the Potomac was murdered by his own brother. The dead man, Wannas…
- American Political History
The Catholic Refuge - Assent
In 1638, the colony of Maryland had no laws at all. Lord Baltimore had sent a code across the ocean; the assembly of freemen voted it down. The freemen wrote…
- American Political History
The Catholic Refuge - Give No Offense
In November 1633, two ships slipped away from the English coast carrying the first settlers of Maryland — and three Catholic priests who had to be smuggled…
- American Political History
The Catholic Refuge - The Woeful Country
He had been one of the most powerful men in England — Secretary of State to King James, knighted, wealthy, trusted at the King's right hand. Then George…
- American Political History
The Catholic Refuge - A Kind of Treason
In the small hours of November 5th, 1605, a search party found a man named Guy Fawkes in a cellar beneath the House of Lords, standing among thirty-six barrels…
- American Political History
The Wages of the Covenant - The Dominion
The charter was gone — annulled by a London court in 1684. But a charter is paper, and for a year and a half the loss was an abstraction. This episode is about…
- American Political History
The Wages of the Covenant - The Charter
In the years after King Philip's War, the Massachusetts Bay Colony reformed itself with everything it had. The ministers had read the war as God's judgment on…
- American Political History
The Wages of the Covenant - The War
King Philip's War lasted fourteen months. More than half of the ninety English towns in southern New England were attacked. Twelve were destroyed. The death…
- American Political History
The Wages of the Covenant - The Children of the Peace
The forty-year peace was a friendship. The treaty signed in 1621 between Massasoit and the Plymouth Pilgrims was a transactional document at the moment of…