This week on C-SPAN's Lectures and History podcast, we explore the history of the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, the Jamestown settlement established in 1607.

Joining C-SPAN is Amy Stalling's lecturer at the College of William and Mary, who has done extensive research on Jamestown's tumultuous early years

and the ongoing efforts to preserve its legacy over the past four centuries.

Established by the Virginia Company of London on a peninsula in the James River,

Jamestown faced many challenges, a lack of food, deadly diseases, and conflicts with the local Powhatan Confederacy.

And a note to our listeners. With the academic year now

wrapped, lectures and history will pause new episodes until September. Over the summer, we'll

revisit some of our most engaging past lectures and other history-focused content. This episode

was recorded in November of 2024. More in a moment.

Good afternoon. I'm Dr. Amy Stallings and I'm an adjunct history professor here at the College of William Mary. And today you find my class, Era of Jamestown, here in Swem Special Collections,

that's our library on campus, where they have pulled for us an array of items relating to the history of Jamestown.

And my lecture for the day is also detailing how James Town was lost,

and I mean that in a physical geographical sense,

but I also wanted to examine how Jamestown was, quote, lost

to memory and the ways in which,

especially in the 19th century,

Virginians and Americans more broadly sought to find James Town

and reclaim James Town on the assumption that the physical location was gone.

So that's the context, and off we go.

So all semester, we've been progressing through the history of Jamestown

approximately one decade per week with some extra attention given to setting the scene for the contacts and conflicts that followed.

We've learned from Philip Levy that the Palisade Wall constructed in 1634 to demarcate the bounds of English territory

...