What can a portrait reveal about the history of colonial British America? Portraits were both deeply personal and yet collaborative artifacts left behind by people of the past. When historians look at multiple portraits created around the same time...
The name “Great Dismal Swamp” doesn’t evoke an image of a pleasant or beautiful place, and yet, it was an important place that offered land speculators the chance to profit and enslaved men and women a chance for freedom in colonial British America...
Between 1760 and 1761, Great Britain witnessed one of the largest slave insurrections in the history of its empire. Although the revolt took place on the island of Jamaica, the reverberations of this revolt stretched across the Atlantic Ocean and...
What do we know about how and why England came to establish its first permanent colony at Jamestown? And what do we know about the English colony that came before it, the Colony of Roanoke? Alan Gallay, Lyndon B. Johnson chair of United States...
How do empires come to be? How are empires made and who makes them? What role do maps play in making empires? Christian Koot is a Professor of History at Towson University and the author of A Biography of a Map in Motion: Augustine Herrman’s...
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...
Between 1789 and 1825, five men would serve as President of the United States. Four of them hailed from Virginia. Many of us know details about the lives and presidencies of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. But what do we know about the life and...
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...
2018 marks the 241st anniversary of the American victory at the Battle of Saratoga and the 240th anniversary of the Franco-American Alliance. But was the victory that prompted the French to join the American war effort, truly the “turning...
What did British imperial officials in London and their North America-based representatives make of the American Revolution? In this episode, we explore the American Revolution through the eyes of John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, a British imperial...