American Political History

It started with a pickled ear in a jar, held up before the House of Commons — and it ended by quietly destroying the one colony built to be different. When England went to war with Spain in 1739, Gene...

25 Dec 202215min

Before dawn on September 9th, 1739, a man named Jemmy led twenty enslaved Africans against a store on the Stono River, took the guns off its shelves, and turned south for Spanish Florida and the freed...

4 Dec 202217min

By 1738 the colony of Georgia is five years old and bleeding settlers across the river to South Carolina — because Georgia, alone in British America, forbids slavery, rum, lawyers, great estates, and ...

23 Juli 202218min

A generation after the Yamasee War nearly destroyed it, South Carolina has become something new on the American mainland: the first colony where the enslaved outnumber the free two to one — a Caribbea...

23 Juli 202220min

France built the opposite of Carolina. Where the English ran their frontier through free-lance traders who cheated and enslaved the nations they lived among, the French in Louisiana learned the langua...

23 Juli 202219min

South Carolina had won its battles and was still losing its war. Eight months after the Good Friday massacre, the colony was ringed, starving, and unable to finish a fight it could not afford to lose ...

23 Juli 202216min

South Carolina in 1715 was not a colony of farms — it was a trading firm with a coastline, running the largest deerskin and Indian-slave operation in English America through a web of rough men who liv...

23 Juli 202218min

John Lawson knew the Tuscarora better than almost any Englishman alive. He had walked their country, written the finest book yet penned about the native peoples of Carolina, and recorded, in plain wor...

23 Juli 202214min