173 Colonial Port Cities and Slavery

Inns and taverns played prominent roles in early American life. They served the needs of travelers who needed food to eat and places to sleep.They offered local communities a form of poor relief. And ...

1 Jan 201952min

Have you ever wondered where the Christmas traditions of stockings, presents, and cookies come from? What about jolly, old Saint Nicholas? Who was he and why do we often call him Santa Claus? Peter ...

25 Dec 201843min

How do you uncover the life of an enslaved person who left no paper trail? What can the everyday life of an enslaved person tell us about slavery, how it was practiced, and how some enslaved people m...

18 Dec 201850min

What do George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Abraham Lincoln have in common? They all grew-up in blended or stepfamilies. Lisa Wilson, the Charles J. MacCurdy Professor of American History at ...

11 Dec 201845min

We tend to view gay marriage as a cultural and legal development of the 21st century. But did you know that some early Americans lived openly as same-sex married couples? Rachel Hope Cleves, a Prof...

4 Dec 201853min

Was the early United States a “Christian nation?” Did most of its citizenry accept God and the Bible as the moral authority that bound them together as one nation? Scholars have taken a binary stance...

27 Nov 201857min

In 1621, the Pilgrims of Plimoth Colony and their Wampanoag neighbors came together to celebrate their first harvest. Today we remember this event as the first Thanksgiving. But what do we really kno...

20 Nov 201859min

How do historians and biographers reconstruct the lives of people from the past? Good biographies rely on telling the lives of people using practiced historical methods of thorough archival research ...

13 Nov 20181h 10min