This is the story of the New Haven Colony from 1643 until is absorption by Connecticut in 1664. We look at the colony’s economic, military, and geopolitical successes and disasters, and the famous story of the “Ghost Ship,” perhaps the most widely witnessed supernatural event in early English North America. Finally, confronted with the restoration of the Stuarts in England, the Puritan colonies of New England, the greatest supporters of Oliver Cromwell and the Commonwealth, struggle to establish their legitimacy under the monarchy. Connecticut Colony secures a charter from Charles II, and thro ..read more

Of the organized Puritan settlements in New England in the first half of the 17th century – Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Connecticut being foremost – the New Haven Colony was in some respects the most peculiar.  It was probably the wealthiest of the four United Colonies of New England on a per capita basis, the most insistent on religion’s role in civil governance, and the least democratic, being, basically, not democratic.  The men who founded it, Theophilus Eaton and the Reverend John Davenport, had great expectations and ambitions for spiritual communion and commercial profit ..read more

Dr. James Horn is President and Chief Officer of Jamestown Rediscovery (Preservation Virginia) at Historic Jamestowne.  Previously, he has served as Vice President of Research and Historical Interpretation at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Saunders Director of the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, and taught for twenty years at the University of Brighton, England.  He has been a Fulbright Scholar and held fellowships at the Johns Hopkins University, the College of William and Mary, and Harvard University.  He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Soc ..read more

In order to understand the history of English North America during the 1640s to the 1660s, one really needs to know at least something about the English Civil Wars, Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth, and the restoration of the Stuarts in 1661. This episode is a high level look at that period, oriented toward the events and themes most important to the history of the Americans. But there are still some great details, including a graphic description of the execution of Charles I, and an elegy of sorts, to Sir Henry Vane! It must be said that British listeners and others who know a lot about this pe ..read more

It is the late 1640s. More than forty years before the famous witch hunt in Salem, William Pynchon’s town of Springfield, Massachusetts Bay Colony, was roiled by the strange doings of Hugh and Mary Parsons, an unhappy and anxious couple with poor social skills. In that dark, solitary place on the edge of the North American wilderness, anxiety, depression, a bad marriage, and conspiracy theories combined with bad luck and no little neurosis to produce an epic tragedy, preserved for us by many pages of deposition transcripts taken by Pynchon. True crime, Puritan theology, rumor mongering, strang ..read more

This episode tells the story of three “lost voices” from early Maryland, surprising people who remind us of the complexity of the 17th century Atlantic world. Mathias de Sousa was of African descent, and is called “the first Black colonist” of Maryland. He would skipper a pinnace in the Chesapeake, trade with the local tribes, and sit in the Maryland Assembly. Margaret Brent was a stone-cold businesswoman, executor for the estate of Leonard Calvert, and would become famous for demanding not just one vote, but two, in the Maryland Assembly. Trust me when I say she had her reasons. Finally, ther ..read more

Joe Kelly is professor of literature and the director of Irish and Irish American Studies at the College of Charleston, and the author of Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of America’s Origin.  In addition to Marooned, in 2013 Joe published America’s Longest Siege:  Charleston, Slavery, and the Slow March Towards Civil War, which details the evolving ideology of slavery in America. He is also author of a study of the Irish novelist James Joyce, censorship, obscenity, and the Cold War (Our Joyce:  From Outcast to Icon). This conversation, which was great fun, cove ..read more

Welcome to the first “true crime” episode of the History of the Americans Podcast, the story of Oscar Hartzell and the Sir Francis Drake estate scam, perhaps the most audacious con of the 1920s, the great golden age of the confidence man. Hartzell swindled as many as 200,000 Midwesterners, many from my own state of Iowa, out of millions of dollars posing as the rightful heir to the lost estate of Sir Francis Drake. Eventually, it would drive him insane, at least as adjudged by the director of the behavioral clinic of the criminal court of Cook County, Illinois. Enjoy! X (Twitter): @TheHis ..read more

William Pynchon, ancestor of the American novelist Thomas Pynchon, was the founder of Springfield, Massachusetts, a successful fur trader, merchant, and magistrate, and at age 60 wrote the first of many books to be banned in Boston. Pynchon had come to Massachusetts with the Winthrop Fleet in 1630, and soon became one of the wealthiest merchant/traders in the colony. He founded Springfield on the main trail between the Dutch trading posts near Albany and Boston, and controlled the fur trade coming down the Connecticut River from the north. He had unusually modern opinions about the Indians and ..read more

It is now 1648. In this episode, two tough guys, Johan “Big Belly” Printz of New Sweden and Peter “Peg Leg” Stuyvesant of New Netherland, escalate their competition to control the critical Delaware River, now an essential artery for the fur trade coming out of Susquehannock territory in Pennsylvania and points farther west. Sweden and Netherland were at peace in Europe, so there would be no shooting, but all sorts of guns would be pointed without pulling the trigger or lighting the match. Eventually, the Dutch would put together the largest European army in North America since Soto and Coronad ..read more