Establishing colonies in North America took an astonishing amount of work. Colonists had to clear trees, eventually remove stumps from newly cleared fields, plant crops to eat and sell, weed and tend those crops, and then they had to harvest crops...
On April 10th, 1606, King James I granted the Virginia Company of London a charter. Just over a year later, on May 14, 1607, this privately-funded, joint-stock company established the first, permanent English colony in North America at Jamestown, in...
What did it take to stage a successful slave uprising? Over the course of the early republic, we see a few violent slave uprisings in the United States. A particularly brutal rebellion took place in Louisiana in January 1811. Another violent...
What was everyday life like during the American War for Independence? Our Fourth of July series continues with an investigation of how the American War for Independence impacted those who remained on the homefront. As episode 332 explored how the...
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...