Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast, Episode 3.

I'm your host, Jack Heneman, and we are telling the history of the lands now encompassed by the United States from the beginning without intentional presentism.

This episode originally dropped on January 9th, 2021.

But it didn't sound very good because, well, we podcasters all get better with practice.

And therefore, re-recording this episode on July 8, 2025 in Orleans,

with a few edits to smooth out the cadence, adopt some of the style that I use in later episodes, correct a couple of things I wanted to correct, and so forth.

So here you go. This episode is the Admiral of the Ocean Sea Part one, that being the title by royal order of Christopher Columbus.

And, yes, I will use his English name rather than as Genoese, Portuguese, or Spanish names.

It was the practice in his day to address or refer to people by the local language rather than their native one, and it is particularly reasonable to do so with

Columbus, given the widespread expression of his name in English and Spanish, and the shortage of

people who speak the language of his birth,

Genoese.

Since this podcast is the history of the Americans, and since by that we mean the history of

the people who occupy the land that is now the United States, one might well ask why

we are talking about Columbus at all.

There are several reasons.

First, without Columbus, or somebody who came along when Columbus did and connected the

eastern and western hemispheres the way he did it, we Americans would have a very different

history. That is why there are,

or at least were, statues of him everywhere. Well, and nobody wants to irritate Italian Americans,

if they can avoid it, as every fan of the Columbus Day episode of the Sopranos well knows.

Second, many of the histories of the United States in the last couple of centuries start with

...