American Political History

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

Before we can understand what Carolina became, we have to understand the thing the Barbadians carried onto its shore — and it is far older and far stranger than the story usually told. This episode st...

16 Okt 202131min

To understand Carolina, you have to leave it — and sail to a single small island in the eastern Caribbean. Carolina was not really founded from England; it was the child of Barbados. And Barbados, in ...

16 Okt 202122min

After Bacon’s Rebellion, a certain kind of Virginian gave up on the Chesapeake and looked south — to a coast the advertisements called empty, warm, and waiting. It was none of those things. It was the...

16 Okt 202123min

The season ends on the water. Virginia is split in two, and the war turns on a single captured ship; then Jamestown burns, Bacon dies of disease in a swamp at twenty-nine, and an old governor hangs so...

16 Okt 202114min

This is the scene the season has been building toward. Nathaniel Bacon comes down the James River with five hundred armed men; Governor William Berkeley, able to raise barely forty, throws open the ga...

9 Okt 202114min

It did not begin with a manifesto or a meeting. It began with an unpaid debt and some stolen pigs — and from that squalid little quarrel on the Virginia frontier, a chain of killings unwound that no o...

24 Juli 202114min