In 1682, the first Assembly of Pennsylvania and the Delaware counties met in Chester, Pennsylvania, and adopted “the Great Law,” a humanitarian code that guaranteed the people of Pennsylvania liberty of conscience. “The Great Law” created an...
It’s impossible to overstate the importance of African and African American music to the United States’ musical traditions. Steven Lewis, a Curator of Music and Performing Arts at the Smithsonian, notes that “African American influences are so...
Prepare for tricks, treats, and time travel! In honor of Halloween, we’re traveling back to the mid-seventeenth century to investigate a case of demonic possession and the practice of exorcism in New France. Mairi Cowan, an Associate Professor of...
In a town as old as Williamsburg, Virginia, which was established in 1638, it’s often the case that historic buildings with interesting pasts stand unnoticed and in plain sight. Such was the case for the building that once housed Williamsburg’s Bray...
Death is one of the few universals in life. Everyone who is born, will die. How do the living make peace with death? While different cultures make peace with death in different ways, Erik Seeman joins us to investigate how white, American...
What do historians wish more people better understood about early American history and why do they wish people had that better understanding? In celebration of the 300th episode of Ben Franklin’s World, we posed these questions to more than 30...
We read and hear a lot about money. We read and hear about fluctuations in the value of the Dollar, Pound, and Euro, interest rates and who can and can’t get access to credit, and we also read and hear about new virtual currencies like Bitcoin and...
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...
Before the English settled in Jamestown, Virginia in 1607 or the Dutch settled near Albany, New York in 1615, a group of French-speaking, Catholic settlers established a settlement in Nova Scotia in 1605. By 1755, nearly 15,000 Acadians lived in...
Historians use archives to create the histories we love to read, watch, and listen to. So we’re going into one archive to investigate how historians use them and to discover more about the religious lives of the Adams Family. Sara Georgini, Series...