History, Natural History & the Arts
Independence from Great Britain provided the former British American colonists the opportunity to create a new, more democratic government than they had lived under before the American Revolution.
What did this new American government look like? Who could participate in this new American democracy? And what was it like to participate in this new democracy?
[Read more…] about Elections in Early America: Elections & Voting in the Early Republic
The British North American colonies formed some of the most democratic governments in the world. But that doesn’t mean that all early Americans were treated equally or allowed to participate in representative government.
So who could vote in Early America? Who could participate in representative government?
[Read more…] about Elections in Early America: Democracy & Voting in British North America
2020 commemorates the 300th anniversary of French presence on Prince Edward Island, just north of Nova Scotia. Like much of North America, the Canadian Maritime provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island, and Prince Edward Island were highly contested regions.
In fact, the way France and Great Britain fought for presence and control of this region places the Canadian Maritimes among the most contested regions in eighteenth-century North America.
[Read more…] about 300 Years of French Settlement on Prince Edward Island
Book purchases made through this link support New York Almanack’s mission to report new publications relevant to New York State.
Between 1760 and 1761, Great Britain witnessed one of the largest slave insurrections in the history of its empire. Although the revolt took place on the island of Jamaica, the reverberations of this revolt stretched across the Atlantic Ocean and into the British North American colonies.
In this episode of the Ben Franklin’s World podcast, Vincent Brown, author of Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Belknap Press, 2020), joins us to investigate Tacky’s Revolt and how that revolt served as an eddy within the larger current of Atlantic warfare.
[Read more…] about Tacky’s Revolt: Slave Insurgency in Jamaica
Book purchases made through this link support New York Almanack‘s mission to report new publications relevant to New York State.
We live in an age where big businesses track our shopping habits and in some cases our work habits. But is the age of data new? When did the “age of the spreadsheet” and quantification of habits develop?
In this episode of Ben Franklin’s World: A Podcast About Early American History, Caitlin Rosenthal, an Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Harvard University Press, 2019), leads us on an investigation into the origins of how American businesses came to collect and use data to manage their workers and their pursuit of profits.
[Read more…] about Masters and Management: The Business of Slavery
Book purchases made through this link support New York Almanack‘s mission to report new publications relevant to New York State.
The American Revolution is embedded in the American character. It’s an event that can tell us who we are, how we came to be who we are, and how we can strive to be who we want to be as a nation and people.
In this episode of Ben Franklin’s World: A Podcast About Early American History, Rick Atkinson, author of The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 (Henry Holt & Company, 2019), joins us to explore how the War for Independence has impacted and shaped the American character.
[Read more…] about The British Are Coming: Independence and American Character
As the first President of the United States, George Washington set many precedents for the new nation. One of the biggest precedents Washington set came in the form of the Cabinet, a body of advisors from across the U.S. government who advise the president on how to handle matters of foreign and domestic policy.
In this episode of the Ben Franklin’s World podcast, we investigate Washington’s creation of the Cabinet and how it became a government institution with Lindsay Chervinsky author of the book, The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution (Harvard Belknap Press, 2020).
Polygamy is not a practice that often comes to mind when many of us think about early America. But it turns out, that polygamy was a ubiquitous practice among different groups of early Americans living in 17th and 18th-century North America.
In this episode of the Ben Franklin’s World podcast, Sarah Pearsall, a University Teaching Officer, Fellow, and Historian at the University of Cambridge, joins us to discuss the surprising history of polygamy in early North America, with details from her book, Polygamy: An Early American History (Yale University Press, 2019). [Read more…] about Polygamy: An Early American History
On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass delivered a speech to the Rochester, New York Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society and he famously asked “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”
In this episode of Ben Franklin’s World, we explore Douglass’ thoughtful question within the context of Early America: What did the Fourth of July mean for African Americans in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries?
In this episode of the Ben Franklin’s World podcast, Stephen Fried, an award-winning journalist and author of Rush: Revolution, Madness, and Benjamin Rush, the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father (Crown, 2018), joins us to explore the life and deeds of one founder we don’t always talk about, Benjamin Rush.