American Political History

There was a man in London who knew more about America than almost anyone alive, and who never crossed the ocean to see it. William Blathwayt sat in the Plantation Office at Whitehall, where the Englis...

30 Apr 202220min

In 1681, the king's own customs collector stood trial for treason in New York — charged by the colony's merchants with levying war on free Englishmen, for the crime of collecting the duties his sealed...

30 Apr 202215min

England planted the colonies. The Dutch carried the goods — and kept the profit. By 1640 Dutch trade was double England's, run on three inventions no one could match: the first public bank, the first ...

30 Apr 202220min

In 1690 a man stepped off a ship in Charles Town and made himself governor of Carolina by overthrowing the governor — and the strangest part was that he was one of the colony’s own proprietors. This i...

20 Apr 202217min

Before Carolina grew rich on rice, it grew rich on a commodity pulled out of the southern interior: people. Deerskins were the steady business, but slaves were where the money was — and the colony had...

6 Nov 202115min

Three ships left England in 1669 to plant a colony designed in a London drawing room. Eight months later, only one of them reached the Carolina coast — the other two wrecked or scattered along the way...

6 Nov 202125min

Before he was the philosopher of the Glorious Revolution or the intellectual father of the Declaration of Independence, John Locke was a thirty-seven-year-old physician who had published nothing — and...

6 Nov 202120min

The institution was ancient and universal. The machine was new. This episode traces how the specific apparatus of Atlantic slavery — industrial, permanent, hereditary, and racial — was assembled and c...

23 Okt 202124min