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17TH Century Episodes

Jan. 13, 2025

The Women of the Rendezvous Plantation on Barbados in the 17th Century

In 1686, Susannah Mingo, Elizabeth Atkins, Dorothy Spendlove, and their children, all of whom were half-siblings, along with some of their children's other half-siblings and their children's father, boarded a ship headed fro…
Guest: Jenny Shaw
Nov. 20, 2023

The Long History of the Chicago Portage

When Europeans arrived in the Great Lakes region, they learned from the Indigenous people living there of a route from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, made possible by a portage connecting the Chicago River and the Des Plaines…
Aug. 22, 2022

Henrietta Maria

Henrietta Maria, the French Catholic wife of King Charles I of England, Scotland, and Ireland in the 17th Century, was called a “Popish brat of France” by her British subjects, blamed for the English Civil War, and seen as a…
Dec. 27, 2021

Women-Led Slave Revolts

Enslaved Africans in what is now New York State and in the Middle Passage resisted their enslavement, despite the risk of doing so. In the previously accepted history of these slave revolts, the assumption was that men led t…
Guest: Rebecca Hall
Nov. 22, 2021

The Wampanoag & the Thanksgiving Myth

In Autumn of 1621, a group of Pilgrims from the Mayflower voyage and Wampanoag men, led by their sachem Massasoit, ate a feast together. The existence of that meal, which held little importance to either the Pilgrims or the …
Guest: Kisha James