It is time to get back to New France and the exploration of the middle of this beautiful country of ours. Our vehicle will René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, known to both his contemporaries and…
It is the spring of 1681. The “exclusion crisis,” an insurgency in Parliament proposing to exclude the king’s brother, James, Duke of York, from the line of succession, was reaching its climax. Even…
With Sir William Penn’s passing in 1671, and his deathbed admonition that his son stay true to himself, young William Penn was both financially independent and liberated from worrying that his own…
Today we kick off the story of the first real invasion of the American south, Hernando de Soto’s reconnaissance-in-force – the Spanish word is entrada -- from 1539-1542. Last week’s episode tied up…
Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast episode 16. This episode is called “Sidebar: Bringing it all Together.” In the History of the Americans podcast, a sidebar is an episode outside of the…
The last time the remnants of the ill-fated Narvaez expedition landed on a coastal island somewhere near today’s Galveston, Texas and, thereby, “discovered” Texas. Of the eighty or so alive at the end…
We will no longer refer to the Narvaez Expedition in the title of the episode because, as you know if you listened to Episode 13, in late November 1528 schizz got seriously real. It could no longer be…
This episode continues the shocking story of the doomed Narváez expedition and its almost unbelievable struggle to survive. In this episode, the expedition begins to unravel in Florida, and cooks up a…
This week we are kicking off perhaps the most unbelievable story of individual survival in all the History of the Americans, the disastrous Narváez expedition and the amazing journey of Cabeza de…
In this episode we venture back to Florida, and the first of several almost comically incompetent attempts by the Spanish to settle the area, including Ponce de Leon's second expedition in 1521, and…
