Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast episode 55.

I'm your host, Jack Heneman, and we are recording this on January 13, 2022, in Austin, Texas.

If you are new to the podcast, we are telling the history of the lands now

encompassed by the United States from the beginning without presentism. The best way to support

what we are doing here is to tell your friends, either the old-fashioned way or on your social

propaganda website of choice,

or write a nice review on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts, but mostly just tell

your friends. That means the most by a long shot.

This is James Town and the Powauhattans Part 2.

We're not insistent on prerequisites around here, but you will enjoy or at least understand.

This episode, quite a bit more if you listen to Jamestown and the Pauhattans part one, first.

It contains important background of the key players, including Paramount Chief Powhatan, his kinsman,

Opa Kankanah, John Smith, and sundry other English.

That episode also has a bit on my philosophical approach to the Jamestown saga, which bears a little repeating.

My American listeners, who are probably 95% of the total, almost all know that the narrative of the Jamestown-Powhatan story has become something of a

political struggle in the United States. James Town has long been weaponized in the service of

political narrative, but until perhaps

50 years ago, the weaponization was largely in one direction. At some point, when I was still

playing with hot wheels on a daily basis, historians began looking at Jamestown from the

perspective of non-English actors, including especially

the local Indians, and more recently the Africans who arrived in 1619 in some condition of

involuntary servitude. The reconsideration of Jamestown as something less than a heroic moment in

...