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 Wages of the Covenant - The Praying Indians
Most native people in colonial New England did not die in the wars. They became colonists. The standard story runs: encounter, conflict, destruction. The…
- American Political History
The Wages of the Covenant - The Children of the Covenant
The Bay Colony in 1660 had survived everything its founders feared. It had built its courts and churches and its college on a standard that separated the elect…
- American Political History
The Covenant & the Charter - Above or Below the Law
The Massachusetts Bay Colony was not built despite England's crisis — it was built because of it. Without Charles I's eleven years of personal rule, without…
- American Political History
The Covenant & the Charter - New Amsterdam
While the Bay Colony was banishing Roger Williams and burning Pequot villages, something entirely different was being built three hundred miles to the south…
- American Political History
The Covenant & the Charter - The Pequot War
In July 1636, a Boston trader named John Gallop sailed alongside a drifting pinnace off Block Island and found his friend John Oldham dead inside it — head…
- American Political History
The Covenant & the Charter - Visible Saints
In 1634, a woman arrived in Boston who had been reading theology since childhood — trained on her father’s heresy trial transcript, devoted to a preacher who…
- American Political History
The Covenant & the Charter - The Garden and the Wilderness
Providence in 1636 was a handful of houses and a radical idea — that the state had no business in a person's relationship with God. The Bay Colony to the north…
- American Political History
The Covenant & the Charter - Soul Liberty
By 1634, the Massachusetts Bay Colony had survived its first winters, built its courts and churches, and prepared to fight England itself to protect its…
- American Political History
The Covenant & the Charter - The Body Politic
By 1631 the city on the hill was no longer dying. Margaret Winthrop arrived in Boston harbor that November on the Lyon, sixteen months after John had left her…
- American Political History
The Covenant & the Charter - The City on the Hill
March 1630. Eleven ships leave Southampton carrying seven hundred Puritan settlers — not refugees scraping for survival, but lawyers, craftsmen, landowners…
- American Political History
Desperate Shores - The Anglo-Powhatan Wars
On the morning of March 22, 1622, in roughly two dozen English settlements along the James River in Virginia, Powhatan men sat down to breakfast with English…
- American Political History
Desperate Shores — The Nations
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…
- American Political History
Desperate Shores - The Mayflower
September 6th, 1620. The Mayflower leaves England six weeks late, on a companion ship's suspicious leaking, heading into the North Atlantic in autumn with two…
- American Political History
Desperate Shores — Rebecca Rolfe
She was the daughter of the most powerful chief on the Virginia coast. She was taken hostage at seventeen. She learned English, converted to Christianity…
- American Political History
Desperate Shores —The Starving Time
May 14th, 1607. One hundred and four men and boys wade ashore onto a low, marshy Virginia peninsula and drive stakes into the ground. This is Jamestown — the…
- American Political History
Desperate Shores — Roanoke
On August 27th, 1587, Governor John White stood at the rail of a ship watching the Carolina coast disappear. He was sailing back to England for supplies. Left…
- American Political History
Desperate Shores - The Price of Passage
The Virginia Company had a pitch: seven years of labor in exchange for passage to the New World and ten acres of land at the end of it. The handbill promised a…
- American Political History
Desperate Shores — The World That Sent Them
Before Roanoke. Before Jamestown. Before any English ship sailed west with settlers and catastrophically bad planning, there was the world that sent them…
- American Political History
An Introduction to American Political History
American Political History is the full story of this country, told through the people who lived it. The bayonet charge at Little Round Top. The boys from…