American Political History

Before Roanoke. Before Jamestown. Before any English ship sailed west with settlers and catastrophically bad planning, there was the world that sent them.

Europe in 1500 was not the Europe we know — it was a fabric of five hundred competing kingdoms, held together by the Catholic Church and nothing else. Then came the printing press, and a German monk named Martin Luther, and a continent that had been killing each other over r...

The Virginia Company had a pitch: seven years of labor in exchange for passage to the New World and ten acres of land at the end of it. The handbill promised a second son his fortune. A new start. A land of butter and honey.

It was a lie — or at least, it was aimed at the wrong man entirely.

The people who actually filled those ships were prisoners purchased from the Crown, orphans bought from English churches, debtors who had ...

On August 27th, 1587, Governor John White stood at the rail of a ship watching the Carolina coast disappear. He was sailing back to England for supplies. Left behind on a sandy barrier island: over a hundred men, women, and children. Among them his daughter, her husband, and his granddaughter — nine days old, the first English child born in America. Her name was Virginia Dare.

White did not intend to be gone long. He would not...

May 14th, 1607. One hundred and four men and boys wade ashore onto a low, marshy Virginia peninsula and drive stakes into the ground. This is Jamestown — the first permanent English settlement in America. Permanent is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Within seven months, more than half of them will be dead.

They arrived at the edge of the Powhatan Confederacy — thirty nations, tens of thousands of people, controlled...

She was the daughter of the most powerful chief on the Virginia coast. She was taken hostage at seventeen. She learned English, converted to Christianity, married a tobacco farmer, and sailed to London to charm the court of King James I. Then she stood in a house in Brentford and made John Smith answer for every promise he had ever broken.

Rebecca Rolfe — known to history as Pocahontas — lived her entire life in the spac...

September 6th, 1620. The Mayflower leaves England six weeks late, on a companion ship's suspicious leaking, heading into the North Atlantic in autumn with two groups of people who have almost nothing in common. Before they ever set foot on shore, they write a document in the hold of the ship that will help start a revolution a century and a half later.

But the story of the Mayflower is not only the story of the people on it. It is t...

For six episodes, they were always present — standing at the edge of the English story, named but rarely centered. This episode brings them forward. The nations of the eastern seaboard in 1620 were not a backdrop. Wa-hun-se-na-cah ran a thirty-tribe paramount chiefdom across six thousand square miles of Virginia, held Jamestown in a posture of strategic patience for more than a decade, and watched the English die by the hundr...

On the morning of March 22, 1622, in roughly two dozen English settlements along the James River in Virginia, Powhatan men sat down to breakfast with English families they had known for years. By 1622 this was ordinary. In the eight years since the Peace of Pocahontas had ended the First Anglo-Powhatan War, the two cultures had grown together in ways that had no precedent in the colonial Americas. Powhatan visitors moved freely thr...

March 1630. Eleven ships leave Southampton carrying seven hundred Puritan settlers — not refugees scraping for survival, but lawyers, craftsmen, landowners, and clergy. They have a plan. They have a charter. And they have a sermon.

John Winthrop, the newly elected governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, tells the people on those ships that they are building a city on a hill. That the eyes of all people will be upon them. Tha...

By 1631 the city on the hill was no longer dying. Margaret Winthrop arrived in Boston harbor that November on the Lyon, sixteen months after John had left her on an English dock — without the daughter she had carried across the Atlantic, stepping ashore into a colony her husband had built in her absence. Within two years immigration was a flood. Within five, the Bay had courts, a college, a charter to defend, and a problem it...

By 1634, the Massachusetts Bay Colony had survived its first winters, built its courts and churches, and prepared to fight England itself to protect its charter. It looked, from the outside, like a success. From the inside, it was cracking.

Two fault lines ran through the commonwealth simultaneously. The first was political: a constitutional standoff between the elected justices and the magistrates, who claimed veto power the charte...

Providence in 1636 was a handful of houses and a radical idea — that the state had no business in a person's relationship with God. The Bay Colony to the north had not forgotten Roger Williams, and it had not forgiven him. What followed was a systematic campaign to destroy what he had built: militiamen marching through his streets, land deeds forged in Bay courtrooms, Rhode Island's borders picked apart by neighbors who smell...

In 1634, a woman arrived in Boston who had been reading theology since childhood — trained on her father’s heresy trial transcript, devoted to a preacher who made people feel grace rather than merely describe it. Her name was Anne Hutchinson, and she had a question the Bay Colony could not answer: if God’s grace was truly free and truly direct, what exactly were the ministers and magistrates there for?

What followe...

In July 1636, a Boston trader named John Gallop sailed alongside a drifting pinnace off Block Island and found his friend John Oldham dead inside it — head crushed, body mutilated, two surviving nephews captive in the hold. Oldham’s murder was real. What followed was not just a response to it.

The Pequot War of 1636 to 1638 was the first full-scale military conflict between English colonists and a native nation in New En...

While the Bay Colony was banishing Roger Williams and burning Pequot villages, something entirely different was being built three hundred miles to the south. Not a covenant community. A trading post with ambitions.

New Amsterdam was the opposite of Boston in almost every way that mattered: founded not on shared faith but on shared commerce, populated not by the covenantally unified but by an eclectic assembly of European outcasts sp...

The Massachusetts Bay Colony was not built despite England's crisis — it was built because of it. Without Charles I's eleven years of personal rule, without Archbishop Laud's campaign of religious persecution, without the Star Chamber and the forced loans and the mutilations in public, there is no Great Migration. There is no Bay Colony. The city on the hill was constructed entirely in the space opened by someone else's dysfu...

The Bay Colony in 1660 had survived everything its founders feared. It had built its courts and churches and its college on a standard that separated the elect from the rest: the visible saints, men and women who could stand before their congregation and testify to a personal experience of God's grace. It worked for the first generation. They had fled persecution, sold estates, buried children on a strange coast. The conviction was...

Most native people in colonial New England did not die in the wars. They became colonists.

The standard story runs: encounter, conflict, destruction. The colonists arrived, the natives helped them, then the colonists wanted land, there was a war, the natives lost, the natives were destroyed. The version varies by who tells it, but the basic arc is what most American schoolchildren learn. And it is wrong about the structural fact.

Yes...

The forty-year peace was a friendship.

The treaty signed in 1621 between Massasoit and the Plymouth Pilgrims was a transactional document at the moment of signing — both sides had reasons that made sense in their own world. What grew up around the document, across the four decades that followed, was something neither side could have predicted. Edward Winslow walked forty miles to nurse Massasoit through illness in 1623. Massas...