The "glorious revolution" of 1688-89 would change the terms of the English monarchy, and reverberate through American history.
Heading as we are into the 1680s on the timeline of the History of the Americans, it will be useful for all of us to know a few basic things about English politics in the 1680s, including especially the “exclusion crisis” of 1679-1681 and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Both had a big impact on our own history. Along the way we learn more about John Locke, how the acquittal of William Penn transformed the law in England and ultimately the United States, the actual conspiracy between the English...
Going down a rabbit hole while learning about the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, I started reading about something I have wondered about – how and when did the Indians of the American West acquire horses and learn to use them rather than eat them? The answer is not what you think, or at least not what I thought before I did this work. The story begins with the discovery of silver in Mexico, which I did not see coming. Subscribe to my Substack! X – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Faceboo...
It is August, 1680 in New Mexico. The rebelling Pueblo Indians have sprung their ambush and quickly killed 400 Spaniards. About 2500 survivors have concentrated in two groups, at the government buildings in Santa Fe, and 70 miles to the south at Isleta Pueblo. Each has reason to believe that everybody else has died, and they are alone. The Indians beseige Santa Fe, but Governor Antonio de Otermín leads a successful defense. Still, they are isolated and out of food, and determine to retreat to th...
In August 1680, an alliance of Puebloan peoples, led by a mysterious religious man named Po’pay (also spelled Popé), launched a surprise attack that forced the Spanish entirely out of New Mexico 82 years after they had first settled it. Po’pay’s rebellion would combine elements that will remind longstanding listeners of King Philip’s War in New England and Opechancanough’s surprise attack in Virginia in March 1622. Unlike the Wampanoags and the Pamunkeys, however, Po’pay would achieve his war ai...
In 1677, the longtime residents of the old and remote county of Albemarle in northern Carolina, a collection of cranks and dissidents who had fled from Maryland and Virginia and were used to living free of interference from the Carolina proprietors and the Crown’s tax collectors, revolted against new attempts to collect duties on tobacco. Quite astonishingly, they succeeded! And not without some history comedy along the way. In the long history of the Americans, it is easy to ignore Culpeper’s R...
Twenty-five year-old bookseller Henry Knox, his 19 year-old brother Will, and teamsters led by John Becker, Sr., move a long “noble train” of 59 pieces of salvaged artillery from Fort Ticonderoga to Cambridge. The route crossed frozen rivers and the not-dreamlike Berkshire Mountains under unbelievably arduous conditions. As word spread, crowds of Americans would turn out to cheer them on, and serve them cider and whiskey. The artillery, when hoisted to the commanding heights of Dorchester above ...
Exactly 250 years ago, a rotund twenty-five year-old Boston bookseller named Henry Knox was riding his horse between Springfield and Worcester Massachusetts, on his way to George Washington’s headquarters in Cambridge. Washington’s ragtag, ill-equipped Continental Army had kept the British garrison under General Thomas Gage bottled up in Boston and Charlestown since the summer of 1675. Washington had a whole load of problems, including insufficient arms for his men, many with expiring enlistment...
In the last episode on the Timeline, “Bacon’s Aftermath 1: Diplomacy and Conspiracy 1677-1685,” we looked at the political and geopolitical aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion. This time we tackle the changes inside Virginia’s society and economy in the years following Bacon’s Rebellion, some of which may have been because of the Rebellion, and others of which probably would have happened anyway. The first half of the episode looks at the governorship of Thomas, Lord Culpeper, and his deft efforts to...
Matthew Restall is an historian and author of over forty books, focusing on the Spanish Conquest era in the Americas; on Aztec and Maya history; on the history of colonial Mesoamerica, primarily Yucatan but including Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize; on the historical African diaspora in the Americas; and on the history of popular music. Matthew is most recently the author of The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus , the topic of and inspiration for this conversation. Finally, he is Edwin Erle Spark...
This episode looks again at the causes of Bacon’s Rebellion in light of what we have now learned, before turning to the region of the Chesapeake in the years after the Rebellion. There are two big themes in the post-Bacon Chesapeake. The first, the subject of this episode, is geopolitical. After Bacon, what changed in intercolonial affairs, in the relationship between the Chesapeake colonies and England, and between those colonies and the indigenous nations? The second theme, for part 2, is esse...
It is late January 1677 in Virginia. Loyalists under the command of Governor Sir William Berkeley had suppressed Bacon’s Rebellion just after New Year. Now Berkeley was prosecuting the surviving leaders of the rebellion, and loyalist units were looting the estates of wealthy Baconistas to recover losses they had suffered during the war. Then a fleet from London materialized at the mouth of the James, carrying three royal commissioners and a thousand “red coats,” English regular infantry. Their m...
Last episode ended with Sir William Berkeley, on the deck of a ship in the James, watching Jamestown burn to the ground in the wee hours of September 19, 1676. The rebels under Nathaniel Bacon were ascendant, and Berkeley resolved to return to his refuge on the Eastern Shore and plot the next phase of his increasingly desperate war. Little did he know that the tide of the war was about to turn again in his favor. This episode begins in London in the summer of 1676, where Crown officials were jus...
Virginia Governor Sir William Berkeley has fled to the Eastern Shore with a small group of loyalist planters and a detachment of perhaps only fifty armed men. Nathaniel Bacon has occupied Berkeley’s estate near Jamestown, and dispatched men to capture loyalist ships anchored there. Bacon’s “navy” has out in search of Berkeley, but Berkeley turned the tables in an audacious amphibious attack and grabbed control of the Bay and the rivers. While Bacon was mucking around in the Dragon Swamp hunting ...
Nathaniel Bacon and his army of volunteers have returned from beating up on the friendly Occaneechees (Occaneechis) on the Roanoke River in southern Virginia. It is election day, and Henrico County will elect Bacon and his sidekick, James Crews, to the Virginia Assembly, which has been called into session on June 5, 1676. This episode describes the dramatic session of that Assembly, which began with Bacon’s arrest and ended with he and his army holding the Assembly at gunpoint. Sir William Berke...
The Susquehannocks, having successfully escaped from their beseiged fort on Piscataway Creek in Maryland, fled through the Virginia Piedmont to set up winter quarters on the James and Roanoke Rivers. In January 1676, they launched a measured counterattack. The settlers on the frontier panicked and evacuated. Rumors of war spread. The horrors of King Philip’s War loomed large, especially in the thinking of Sir William Berkeley, the governor. A fundamental debate over how to respond to those Susqu...
The year is 1675, and we are in Virginia. All kinds of social, demographic, fiscal, and economic pressures have been building for decades, and the common people are restive. There have been a string of small revolts and disruptions in the years since 1660, but they all failed for lack of effective leadership. The “masterless men” in the colony needed a leader, and the leader, when he arose, would need a cause. Nathaniel Bacon, a ne’er do well son of a wealthy gentleman in English, would be that ...
We are back in Virginia, finally! In my defense, offered in response to the many listeners who have asked for “more Virginia,” the thirty years before the Third Anglo-Powhatan War and Bacon’s Rebellion are almost blank spaces on published timelines of Virginia history, most noting only the legalization of slavery in 1661. Well, we are now on the brink of the civil war known as Bacon’s Rebellion, which was ramping up as the tide was turning in King Philip’s War in the spring of 1676. To understan...
I got the idea for this episode talking to a bartender in Prague. The place was empty, and the fellow was garrulous and quickly said he loved American history, which naturally prompted me to suggest a podcast where he could find some. The barkeep called my bluff – “did I know who Augustine Herrman was?” Uh, noooo. It turns out he was a Bohemian – now we would say Czech – from Prague who became one of the wealthiest and most influential men in mid-17th century English and Dutch America, particula...
Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify Dr. Phillip W. Magness is an economic historian and the David J. Theroux Chair in Political Economy at the Independent Institute. Magness’ research has appeared in multiple scholarly venues, including the Economic Journal, the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of Business Ethics, the Southern Economic Journal, and Social Science Quarterly. He is the author of several books including, most recently, The 1619 Project Myth , which is the subject of...
This is the last episode of our telling of King Philip’s War. We cover the fate of the last Algonquian sachems, including the daring capture of Annawon, and the consequences of the war for the Indians who fought it and the colonies of New England. We consider the wisdom of the war, and especially the morality, or lack thereof, in the fighting of it. Finally, we explore the fates of the main characters who were still alive at the end of the fighting. [ Errata: Sam from Marietta, Georgia points ou...
Maps of New England during King Philip’s War In May 1676 the tide of King Philip’s War had turned against the Algonquians of southern New England, but the New English settlers didn’t know it yet. They would soon. Suddenly, in a matter of a few weeks, the Algonquian resistance collapsed. This episode looks at that collapse through the eyes of Benjamin Church, whose men would finally catch and kill Metacom on August 12, 1676. Along the way, Church would persuade the Sakonnets, a Wampanoag group, t...
Maps of New England during King Philip’s War March 1676 had been catastrophic for the settlers of New England. Algonquians allied with Metacom (King Philip) attacked all across the frontier, forcing the evacuation of far-flung towns in both Massachusetts and Plymouth, and destroying Providence, Rhode Island. The tide, however, was about to turn. The New English captured Canonchet, the leading military commander of the Narragansetts on April 3, 1676. Less than three weeks later, the Algonquians w...
Maps of New England during King Philip’s War After the Great Swamp Fight, Josiah Winslow turned away overtures from the Narragansetts for a ceasefire, incorrectly believing he had the upper hand. Instead, he pursued the Narrangansetts, stumbling into the “hungry march,” in which Winslow and his starving militia were lured to the north by the Narragansetts, who were moving to join the Nipmucs and the Wampanoags in attacks on Massachusetts border towns. February and March would see a string of cat...
Maps of New England during King Philip’s War It is the fall of 1675, and “King Philip’s War” rages on. The English colonies of Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Connecticut have been at war with the Wampanoag nation and its powerful allies, the Nipmucs, since late June. The Indians are beating the English everywhere, in part because the English cannot easily distinguish friendly and neutral Indians from enemies. The still neutral Narragansetts were the most powerful nation in the region. Massachu...
This is an encore presentation of a Sidebar episode we originally posted on Memorial Day 2023. It seems even more relevant today, strange as that may seem, consumed as we are now about questions of war and peace, and the role of elite universities, such as Harvard, in our own national project. On May 30 – Memorial Day — 1895, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., a Harvard man and then a justice on the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, delivered an address to the graduating class of 1895 in Cambridge. The s...
Matthew J. Tuininga is Professor of Christian Ethics and the History of Christianity at Calvin Theological Seminary in Michigan. He is author or editor of several books, including most recently The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People , which has been an important source for this podcast’s series on King Philip’s War. This episode is useful context not only for our series on King Philip’s War, which is still very much in progress, but also many of the other stories we...
Maps of New England during King Philip’s War At the end of July 1675 two important things were happening at once. King Philip, known as Metacom to his people, and the sunksqua Weetamoo, were in flight along with at least 250 of their people. Reports coming into the colonial militias in the Fall River area suggested that Philip and Weetamoo intended to cross the Providence River and head for Nipmuc country. Farther north, at almost exactly the same time, Massachusetts Bay Colony had heard rumors ...
This is the second of two “Sidebar” episodes in honor of the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s famous ride, which we will celebrate on the night of April 18 by putting two lights in a window of our house. Last time we explored the prelude to the ride in the months before the final crisis that triggered the march of the British “Regulars” on Lexington and Concord. This episode is the story of Paul Revere’s “midnight” ride on the night of April 18-19, 1775, including the famous lanterns of Old No...
April 18, 2025 is the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s “Midnight Ride” to alarm the towns around Boston that the “Regulars” were marching out to capture artillery and ammunition at Concord, or perhaps to arrest Samuel Adams and John Hancock. This was but the last of a series of crises that rocked New England in the months before the midnight ride and the battles of Lexington and Concord the next day. This episode explores those crises, known as the “Powder Alarms,” and Paul Revere’s central ro...
