Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast, episode 157. I'm your host, Jack Heneman,

and I'm recording this episode on July 17th, 2024, in Austin, Texas. We are telling the history of the lands now encompassed by the United States from the beginning without intentional presentism.

We believe there's dignity in our national story, along with tragedy, triumph, brilliance, hypocrisy, magnificence, depravity, corruption, venality, inspiration, oppression,

genius, defeat, and glory.

The early history of North Carolina, originally part of a territory called Carolina, C-A-R-O-L-A-N-A, gets short shrift in most

surveys of American history. After a fast start, both the Spanish and the English had short-lived

settlements there in the 16th century before anywhere to the north of the future Tarheel state had been settled by Europeans.

A long period of failure followed until the late 1650s, when it became a favored destination for a happy-go-lucky rural society of free thinkers, democratically inclined

veterans of the new model army, and Quakers, before English normies would arrive on the scene

in force. In this overview episode, we'll bring together those long decades of failure, which are often the fun and interesting parts.

Longstanding and attentive listeners will be familiar with a good deal of this, having heard it in bits and pieces since very nearly the beginning of this podcast.

But since I benefited from reviewing it, I thought you might too.

My main source for this episode is a history of North Carolina in the proprietary era, 1629 to 1729, by Lindley S. Butler, published only in 2021.

North Carolina listeners will enjoy it, I think, and there is the usual link to Amazon

and the show notes on the website.

Butler is a North Carolinian.

So in arguing the case for studying the early years of the region, he sounds as if his feelings

are a bit hurt that it has received so little

attention.

In the national story, North Carolina, an exception that simply doesn't fit, has been

largely disregarded.

A reader looks in vain in American history surveys to find more than a paragraph or two about

...