The book The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution (Yale University Press, 2023) by Benjamin Carp explores the Great Fire of 1776 and why its origins remained a mystery even after the British investigated it in 1776 and 1783. [Read more…] about Who Started The Great New York Fire of 1776?
Atlantic World
The Virginia Venture: Colonization and English Society, 1580-1660
In this episode of Ben Franklin’s World, Misha Ewen, a Lecturer in early modern history at the University of Bristol and author of The Virginia Venture: American Colonization and English Society, 1580-1660 (University of Penn Press, 2022), joins host Liz Covart to discuss the early history of the Virginia Company and its early investors. [Read more…] about The Virginia Venture: Colonization and English Society, 1580-1660
Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765-1795
Leaders of the founding of the United States who called for American liberty are scrutinized for enslaving Black people themselves: George Washington consistently refused to recognize the freedom of those who escaped his Mount Vernon plantation. And we have long needed a history of the founding that fully includes Black Americans in the Revolutionary protests, the war, and the debates over slavery and freedom that followed. [Read more…] about Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765-1795
The Nature of Slavery: Environment & Plantation Labor
In the late 18th century, planters in the Caribbean and the American South insisted that only Black people could labor on plantations, arguing that Africans, unlike Europeans, had bodies particularly suited to cultivate crops in hot climates.
Katherine Johnston’s The Nature of Slavery (Oxford Univ. Press, 2022) disrupts this longstanding claim about biological racial difference. [Read more…] about The Nature of Slavery: Environment & Plantation Labor
The Sugar Act and the American Revolution
The initial Sugar Act of 1733 — also known as the Molasses Act — was designed to secure and encourage the trade of British colonies in the West Indies by placing prohibitive duties on the products of competing foreign colonies. The dramatic revision to that act in 1764 imposed duties for both revenue and trade regulation, in addition strengthening the laws of trade so as to tighten the connection between Great Britain and the colonies. [Read more…] about The Sugar Act and the American Revolution
Massacres & Migrants at Sea: Deadly Voyages To New York
The 1840s brought about a transformation in the nature of transatlantic shipping. With the development of European colonial empires, the forced transportation of African slaves had become big business.
Liverpool was the focus of the British slave trade. As a result of crusading abolitionist movements and subsequent legal intervention, the brutal practice declined there during that decade. But more or less simultaneously a new form of people trafficking took its place. [Read more…] about Massacres & Migrants at Sea: Deadly Voyages To New York
The First Slave Traders in New York
The first direct shipment of enslaved Africans arrived in New Amsterdam (now New York City) in 1655. The voyage of the White Horse came in the wake of significant changes in the Dutch Atlantic. In this eessay, American historian Dennis Maika outlines how family and business connections shaped the development of a slave-trading center in Manhattan.
New Amsterdam’s residents would have immediately noticed something different about the arrival of the Witte Paert (White Horse) in the early summer of 1655. The stench of human excrement and illness emanating from the newly arrived “scheepgen” (small ship), left little doubt that a slaver had arrived after a long voyage. [Read more…] about The First Slave Traders in New York
Missions and Mission Building in New Spain
In this episode of Ben Franklin’s World, Brandon Bayne, an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and author of the book Missions Begin with Blood: Suffering and Salvation in the Borderlands of New Spain (Fordham, 2021) joins host Liz Covart to investigate the work of Spanish missionaries and why this missionary work was carried out by just a few religious orders, namely the Franciscans and Jesuits. [Read more…] about Missions and Mission Building in New Spain
New Amsterdam & New York: What’s In A Name?
The small colonial town that the Dutch founded in North America was called New Amsterdam. We now know it as New York City. The story of how the name evolved has many twists and turns and is, in fact, a tale of war and peace. [Read more…] about New Amsterdam & New York: What’s In A Name?
Loyalism in the British Atlantic World
In this episode of the Ben Franklin’s World Podcast, Brad Jones, Professor of History at California State University, Fresno and author of the book, Resisting Independence: Popular Loyalism in the Revolutionary British Atlantic (Cornell, 2021), joins us to investigate what loyalists believed and how loyalism was not just a loyalty or ideology adopted by British Americans living in the 13 rebellious colonies, but by Britons across the British Atlantic World. [Read more…] about Loyalism in the British Atlantic World