American Political History

One hundred years before the Declaration of Independence, a Virginia planter named Nathaniel Bacon led an armed revolt against the colonial government — and the grievances he carried read like a first...

24 Jul 202119min

In the summer of 1689, a rumor ran through Maryland that the Catholics had hired the native nations to murder the Protestants in their beds. It was false. It did not matter. The colony had been founde...

5 Jul 202114min

In 1649, Maryland passed the first law in English America to use the words "free exercise" of religion — a narrow, conditional, but genuinely remarkable order that quarreling Christians leave each oth...

29 Jun 202112min

In early Maryland, the money in a man's pocket was a leaf. Tobacco was the colony's currency — wages, debts, fines, and the minister's salary all reckoned in pounds of cured leaf. A refuge founded for...

28 Jun 202116min

In 1634 — the founding year of Maryland — the ruler of the most powerful native people on the Potomac was murdered by his own brother. The dead man, Wannas, distrusted the English. His killer, Kittama...

27 Jun 202114min

In 1638, the colony of Maryland had no laws at all. Lord Baltimore had sent a code across the ocean; the assembly of freemen voted it down. The freemen wrote their own; the proprietor rejected those. ...

26 Jun 202113min

In November 1633, two ships slipped away from the English coast carrying the first settlers of Maryland — and three Catholic priests who had to be smuggled aboard, unsworn, after the King's officers f...

25 Jun 202113min

He had been one of the most powerful men in England — Secretary of State to King James, knighted, wealthy, trusted at the King's right hand. Then George Calvert became a Catholic, refused the oath, an...

24 Jun 202116min