History, Natural History & the Arts
What do historians wish more people better understood about early American history and why do they wish people had that better understanding?
In celebration of the 300th episode of Ben Franklin’s World, a podcast about early American history, we posed these questions to more than 30 scholars.
What do they think? Join the celebration to learn more about Early America and take a behind-the-scenes tour of the podcast. [Read more…] about Vast Early America: The 300th Episode of Ben Franklin’s World
Colonial America comprised many different cultural and political worlds. Most colonial Americans inhabited just one world, but today, we’re going to explore the life of a woman who lived in three colonial American worlds: Frontier New England, Northeastern Wabanaki, and Catholic New France.
[Read more…] about One Woman, Three Colonial American Worlds
The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution doesn’t always make headlines, but it’s an amendment that undergirds foundational rights. It’s also an amendment that can show us a lot about the intertwined nature between history and American law.
In this episode of Ben Franklin’s World, the third in our 4th Doing History series, we explore the early American origins of the Fourth Amendment with Thomas Clancy, a Professor Emeritus at the University of Mississippi School of Law and an expert on the Fourth Amendment.
[Read more…] about Creating the Fourth Amendment
How and why did Congress draft the First Ten Amendments to the Constitution?
In the United States, we use the Constitution and Bill of Rights to understand and define ourselves culturally. Americans are a people with laws and rights that are protected by the Constitution because they are defined in the Constitution. And the place where the Constitution defines and outlines our rights is within its First Ten Amendments, the Bill of Rights. [Read more…] about Bill of Rights: Creating the First Ten Amendments
Law is all around us. And the basis of American Law comes not only from our early American past, but from our founding documents.
This episode begins our 4th Doing History series. Over the next four episodes, we’ll explore the early American origins of the Bill of Rights as well as the history of the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment will serve as our case study so we can see where our rights come from and how they developed from the early American past. [Read more…] about How The Bill of Rights Developed
The Second Continental Congress voted for independence on July 2, 1776 with 12 colonies and one abstention. The delegation from New York abstained from the vote. And Pennsylvania voted in favor of independence because two of its delegates were persuaded not to attend the vote given their opposition. [Read more…] about John Dickinson, Life, Religion, & Politics
What was it like to live as a woman of faith in early republic America? What was it like to live as a Catholic in the early United States?
In this episode of Ben Franklin’s World, Catherine O’Donnell, an Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University and author of Elizabeth Seton: American Saint (Cornell University Press, 2018), helps us investigate answers to these questions by taking us through the life of the United States’ first saint: Elizabeth Ann Seton [Read more…] about Elizabeth Seton, An Early American Life
How do empires come to be? How are empires made and who makes them?
What role do maps play in making empires?
Christian Koot is a Professor of History at Towson University and the author of A Biography of a Map in Motion: Augustine Herrman’s Chesapeake (NYU Press, 2017). Christian has researched and written two books about the seventeenth-century Anglo-Dutch World go better understand empires and how they are made. He joins us in this episode of Ben Franklin’s World to take us through his research and to share what one specific map, Augustine Herrman’s 1673 map Virginia and Maryland, reveals about empire and empire making. [Read more…] about Mapping Empire in the Chesapeake
Who gets to be a citizen of the United States? How does the United States define who belongs to the nation?
Early Americans asked and grappled with these questions during the earliest days of the early republic. [Read more…] about Birthright Citizenship
We read and hear a lot about money. We read and hear about fluctuations in the value of the Dollar, Pound, and Euro, interest rates and who can and can’t get access to credit, and we also read and hear about new virtual currencies like Bitcoin and Facebook’s Libra.
We talk a lot about money. But where did the idea of money come from?
Did early Americans think about money a lot too? [Read more…] about The Money Question in Early America