American Political History

In 1492, no one in the Old World had ever tasted a potato, smoked tobacco, or drunk a cup of chocolate — and no one in the Americas had ever seen a horse or a stalk of wheat. Then the wall between the...

24 Jul 202132min

Before the rebellion there were two men, and the only way to understand what happened is to understand each of them. William Berkeley had governed Virginia for thirty years — grown it from a starving ...

24 Jul 202122min

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