If we want to understand everyday life in early America we need to understand the everyday life of early American farms and farmers. Roughly three-quarters of Americans in British North America and the early United States considered themselves to be...
When we think about colonial American history we think about the colonies of the English, the Dutch, the French, and the Spanish. Rarely do we think about the colonies of the Russians. And yet Russia had colonies in North America. Gwenn Miller, an...
Aaron Burr: Revolutionary War hero, talented lawyer, Vice President, and Intriguer of treason? Between 1805 and 1807, Aaron Burr supposedly intended to commit treason by dividing the American union. How did Americans learn about and respond to this...
Did you know that maps have social lives? Maps facilitate a lot of different social and political relationships between people and nations. And they did a lot of this work for Americans throughout the early American past. Martin Brückner, a...
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...
The histories of early North America and the Caribbean are intimately intertwined. The same European empires we encounter in our study of early America also appear in the Caribbean and the colonies in these respective empires often traded goods...
When we think about North America during the American Revolution, most of our brains show us images of eastern Canada and the thirteen British American colonies that waged a revolution and war for independence against Great Britain. But what about...
How much merit do the economic factors behind the cry “No Taxation Without Representation” have when we consider the origins of the American Revolution? In this episode of the Doing History: To the Revolution series we begin a 3-episode exploration...
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 Americans find out about the Revolution? What effect did printed materials like newspapers, pamphlets, and books have on shaping the debate about independence? And just how big of a role did Thomas Paine’s Common Sense play in causing...