On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass delivered a speech to an anti-slavery society and he famously asked “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” In this episode, we explore Douglass’ thoughtful question within the context of Early America: What...
How do you uncover the life of an enslaved person who left no paper trail? What can the everyday life of an enslaved person tell us about slavery, how it was practiced, and how some enslaved people made the transition from slavery to freedom? We...
Who gets to be a citizen of the United States? How does the United States define who belongs to the nation? Early Americans asked and grappled with these questions during the earliest days of the early republic. Martha S. Jones is a Professor of...
2019 marks the 400th anniversary of two important events in American history: The creation of the first representative assembly in English North America and the arrival of the first African people in English North America. Why were these Virginia...
Not all historians publish their findings about history in books and articles. Some historians convey knowledge about history to the public in public spaces and in public ways. We conclude the “Doing History: How Historians Work” series with a look...
Samuel Gray, James Caldwell, Samuel Maverick, Patrick Carr, and Crispus Attucks. These are the five men who died as a result of the shootings on Boston’s King Street on the night of March 5, 1770. Of these five victims, evidence points to Crispus...
The Atlantic World has brought many disparate peoples together, which has caused a lot of ideas and cultures to mix. How did the Atlantic World bring so many different peoples and cultures together? How did this large intermixing of people and...
What did it mean to be a person and to also be a commodity in early America? Daina Ramey Berry, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas, Austin and author of The Price For Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from...
Between 1775 and 1783, an estimated 230,000 men served in the Continental Army with another approximately 145,000 men serving in state militia units. But who were the men who served in these military ranks? What motivated them to take up arms and...
How did the smallest colony and smallest state in the union became the largest American participant in the slave trade? Christy Clark-Pujara, an Assistant Professor in the Department of African-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison...