Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast, episode 11, holy palindrome.

I'm your host, Jack Heneman, and I'm recording this episode on No Foolin, April 1st, 2023 in Austin, Texas.

We are telling the history of the lands now encompassed by the United States

from the beginning without presentism,

or at least as little as possible.

For those of you listening to this before April 11th, 2023, I'll be doing a meetup in

Washington, D.C. that evening. Time and place to be announced on Twitter, the Facebook page,

and the website, the history of the Americans.com, probably in a blog post. Send me an email or direct message by some means if you think

you can make it so I can plan accordingly. So my muse wandered off and wondered about the first

European sitting or settlement of cities that today host national football league teams.

By the mid-1630s, by my reckoning, Europeans had touched or seen from offshore at least

nine places within today's United States that have NFL franchises in 2023.

In 1513, Ponce de Leon sailed into Biscayne Bay off Miami. Counting sightings

from ships, Miami's the first NFL city to have been visited by Europeans. Barrizano, of course,

sailed into New York Harbor in 1524, so if we can consider the giants and jets to be New York

teams, perhaps we can credit that as the second stop. There is, of course, no evidence that

Verrazano or any of his men made it anywhere near the Meadowlands, so maybe not. That would not

happen decisively until the Dutch arrived in the region after Henry Hudson's voyage of 1609.

Since Cabezza-Avaca's raft probably landed on Galveston Island or thereabouts in late 1528,

and since he spent six years in the region roaming around with his tribe and then as a long-distance intertribal trader,

he almost certainly passed through Houston Metro.

And of course, the entire NAR Vice expedition had landed at Tampa Bay, the first example

...