The History of the Americans

• Sidebar: The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere 2: The Ride

  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 North Church, the fraught trip across the Charles River under the guns of HMS Somerset, his spectacular horse Brown Beauty (one of the great equine heroes of American history), the "waking up the institutions of New England" that night in raising the alarm not just on the road to Lexington and Concord but throughout eastern New England, and his astonishing capture and release. And, sure, William Dawes and Dr. Samuel Prescott. Maps of Paul Revere's Ride X/Twitter – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – The History of the Americans Podcast – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride John Hancock's Trunk o' Papers

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• Sidebar: The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere 1: The Prelude

  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 role in the resistance movement among Boston Whigs - including the famous Sons of Liberty - during those fraught years before the shooting began. [Errata: I implied that Dr. Benjamin Church's betrayal of the Patriot cause wouldn't be understood "for years," but in fact it was uncovered during the summer of 1775, after the shooting had begun, when one of his letters to the British was intercepted. He was permitted to leave the country in lieu of imprisonment, and sailed for the West Indies. His ship disappeared at sea and Church was never seen again.] X/Twitter – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – The History of the Americans Podcast – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride Portrait of Paul Revere by John Singleton Copley Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "Paul Revere's Ride" Intolerable Acts Thomas Gage

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• King Philip’s War 3: The Fire Spreads

  It is July 1675 in New England. On June 23, fighting men of the Wampanoag nation and of Plymouth Colony had begun killing each other and enemy civilians in earnest. The question was whether this still small conflict would remain a local and short dust-up within Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoag lands encompassed by the colony’s borders as defined by the New Englanders, or would it spread more widely? That question was very quickly answered – the wildfire of King Philip’s War would spread to encompass virtually all of New England east of the Connecticut River and up the coast of Maine. This episode explains how it happened. The image for this episode on the website is a drawing of King Philip - Metacom - by Paul Revere, who 250 years ago today (April 8, 1775), was riding to Concord to warn the locals, not yet on the famous Midnight Ride but on a false alarm that turned out to be an unplanned dress rehearsal. Maps of New England during King Philip's War X/Twitter – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – The History of the Americans Podcast – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War Matthew J. Tuininga, The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War

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• King Philip’s War 2: Lighting the Match

  After Massasoit's death in 1660 or 1661, his son Wamsutta became sachem of the Pokonoket community and the leading sachem of the Wampanoag confederation, and early on he followed Algonquian custom and changed his name.  He asked the men of Plymouth Colony, longstanding allies of his nation, to give him an English name, and they proposed Alexander.  His brother Metacom also took an English name, Philip. Alexander would soon die under circumstances that deeply concerned the Wampanoags, and his brother Metacom, now known to the English as King Philip, assumed the paramount sachemship. During the 1660s and 1670s, a series of crises would degrade the now fifty year alliance between Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoag confederation, with war narrowly averted in 1671. Then, in early 1675, the Harvard-educated Christian Indian John Sassamon would be found dead, murdered by someone. Plymouth prosecuted and executed three Wampanoag men on scanty evidence, a violation of Philip's sovereignty. Misunderstandings piled on top of outrage, and pressure built on both Philip and the Plymouth authorities to mobilize. The deputy governor of Rhode Island tried to broker peace, but events moved too fast. On June 23, 1673, the war began. Errata: (1)Toward the end of the episode, I said that the town of Mattapoisett was "just east of New Bedford." Oops. There is a town with that name there today, per Google maps, but in 1675 the place with that name was on the water near Swansea, where the Taunton River flows into Mt. Hope Bay. (2) At another point, I said there had been "almost forty" narratives written about the war. Since there were at least 29, I should have said "almost thirty." Maps of New England during King Philip's War X/Twitter – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – The History of the Americans Podcast – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War Jill LePore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity Matthew J. Tuininga, The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People John Easton, A Relation of the Indian War (pdf) Philip Ranlet, “Another Look at the Causes of King Philip’s War,” The New England Quarterly, March 1988.

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• King Philip’s War 1: The Kindling of War

  This episode looks at the background causes of the brutal war between the New English colonies of Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, and Connecticut and their indigenous allies against a tribal alliance including both the Wampanoags and the Narragansetts between 1675 and 1678. King Philip’s War is the most widely used name of that bloody and arguably existential war. In surveys of American history, it is often the only event between the founding of Jamestown, Plymouth, and Massachusetts Bay and the end of the 17th century that rates more than a sentence or two. This is for good reason, insofar as King Philip’s War changed the trajectory of New England’s history. It is thought to be the bloodiest war in American history as a proportion of the affected population. As many as 1000 colonists died, including perhaps 10 percent of the English men of military age. Three thousand Indians were killed, and as many as a thousand were sold into slavery abroad. The war altered the relationship between the European colonists and the Indians of the region to a far greater degree than the Pequot War or any of the other conflicts that had preceded it, shattered the military and cultural power of New England’s most powerful indigenous nations, and so devastated the English that by some estimates per capita wealth in the region did not return to the level of 1675 until the eve of the American Revolution a century later.  The New England frontier, for better or worse, did not advance for forty years after King Philip’s War. Suffice it to say, we should understand the issues that broke the long peace in the summer of 1675, almost exactly 350 years ago. Maps of New England during King Philip's War X/Twitter – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2 Facebook – The History of the Americans Podcast – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website) Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip's War Jill LePore, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity Matthew J. Tuininga, The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America's First People Pekka Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America Philip Ranlet, "Another Look at the Causes of King Philip's War," The New England Quarterly, March 1988.

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