Colonial America Episodes

Plymouth Plantation occupies a powerful place in American national memory. Think of the First Thanksgiving in 1621; Englishmen escaping religious persecution; the rock marking the alleged spot where settlers first landed; and of course the Mayflower Compact. In the wake of the American Revolution, citizens of the new nation looked to the Compact for the origins of American Democracy. In Plymouth’s history, many Americans saw the history of the United States itself. But Plymouth has become ...

Two weeks ago, we brought you the story of Johann Peter Oettinger, a seventeenth-century German-speaking barber-surgeon who in 1693 journeyed to Africa and the West Indies on behalf of the Brandenburg African Company. His journal from that period captures the height of German participation in the transatlantic slave trade. Today, we bring you the story of the journal itself and how two historians, Craig Koslofsky and Robert Zaugg, found the manuscript independently of one another in the Berlin a...

In 1693, the young German barber-surgeon Johann Peter Oettinger joined a slave trading venture for the second time. In the employ of the Brandenburg African Company, Oettinger sailed with his shipmates from Europe to the African coast where they procured their captive human cargo, took the middle passage to the West Indies, and exchanged their enslaved people in the colonies for a variety of goods. Along the way, Oettinger encountered a mix of European, African, and colonial peoples who trade...

In this season of religious renewal, we bring you a story of religious dissent. In 1638, many of King Charles I’s Presbyterian subjects gathered at Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh to sign the National Covenant. By renewing their own covenant with the Almighty, they also pledged to resist encroachments on church government by the king, and the innovations in doctrine he sought to make for the Church of Scotland. As we’ve discovered in previous episodes, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries w...

With another American presidential election behind us, talk will inevitably turn to the economy and how the president will handle it. That begs a series of questions as we turn our thoughts back to the eighteenth century: How did early Americans think about the marketplace and the economy? How did they believe that were supposed to function? How were the butcher, the baker, the candle stick maker, and their aristocratic overlords supposed to relate to one another in the marketplace? And how did...

The Prince of Darkness wrought havoc on the souls of seventeenth-century Christians living throughout the Atlantic world. Whether they called him Satan, the Devil, Beelzebub, or by any other name, Lucifer tempted men and women to break their covenant with God in Heaven and do his dark bidding on Earth. At a time of great religious upheaval, when the Protestant Reformation swept through Europe and across the ocean to England’s American colonies, fears of Satan’s malevolent influence and the sear...

In 1757, Martha Dandridge Custis paid the artist John Wollaston the handsome sum of 56 pistoles for portraits of her, her husband Daniel Parke Custis, and their children, John and Martha. A pistole was a Spanish gold coin commonly used in the colony at the time. The future Mrs. Martha Washington was among the hundreds of Virginians who had their portraits painted over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They used portraiture to depict their wealth and status among the Virgin...

Three hundred years ago, timber and turtles were key commodities for English settlers on Barbados and Jamaica. Barbadians sailed northwest to the island of St. Lucia where they harvested timber while Jamaicans headed to the Cayman Islands to take turtles in astounding numbers. Why did they seek these resources hundreds of miles away from their home islands? And what does it have to tell us about how settlers adapted to the environment in the early modern Caribbean? On today’s episode, Dr. Mar...

On the morning of November 1, 1755, a devastating earthquake struck the Portuguese capital of Lisbon. The quake leveled buildings, triggered fires, and caused a tsunami that laid waste to the urban landscape. When it was all over, thousands were dead. The Lisbon earthquake was a disaster of epic proportions, so much so that it became the subject of the first major international disaster relief effort. People from around the Atlantic world contributed funds to Lisbon and its inhabitants, includi...

Dr. Nadine Zimmerli recently joined The University of Virginia Press as its editor of History and Social Sciences books. A former editor at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, Zimmerli is a historian of 20th century Europe by training. She is also a native of Germany, having grown up in East Germany in the years surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall. In this episode, Dr. Zimmerli shares with Jim Ambuske what it was like to grow up in East Germany before reunification ...