The History of the Americans

Notwithstanding the promising expeditions of William Hilton and Robert Sandford, by the end of 1666, with the Carolina proprietors waging war with the Netherlands and contending with plague and fire i...

Spaniards had been in South Carolina off and on since perhaps 1514, and certainly by 1521. Even in the 1660s Spaniards occasionally came up the coast to trade and visit Santa Helena on Parris Island, ...

New Jersey is something of a puzzle, especially as a matter of early colonial history.  The future Garden State rates barely a mention in most surveys of American history until it becomes a primary ba...

In recognition of the holiday(s),* this is a revision of one of the podcast’s earliest episodes, Introduction to the Columbian Exchange. The “Columbian Exchange” refers to the interhemispheric transmi...

This blessedly short episode encapsulates the types of English colonial government in the 17th and 18th centuries, which were chartered corporations, proprietary “counties palatine,” and royal colonie...

David T. Beito’s most recent book, and the subject of this conversation, is The New Deal’s War On the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR’s Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance (...

In August 1664, an English fleet acting under the orders of James, Duke of York, the brother of King Charles II, materialized off Manhattan and forced the bloodless surrender of New Amsterdam and New ...

While the English were consolidating their territory on most of the eastern seaboard of North America in the 1600s, Spanish Florida plugged along with its sole city at St. Augustine, with little Europ...

We are back to Spanish Florida after a long hiatus, with the story of St. Augustine, La Florida after the founding of the city and the slaughter of the Huguenots at Fort Caroline until the constructio...

In March 1663, after 97 years of failed attempts by first the Spanish and then the English to establish settlements in North Carolina, King Charles II granted eight aristocrats a vast territory extend...