You're listening to an airwave media podcast.

My name is Greg Jackson.

I'm a PhD holding historian, a professor and the creator of history that doesn't suck.

A podcast that makes legit seriously researched

American history come to life through entertaining stories. Join me for a

chronological telling of the United States story. From the revolution to

fractious civil war, tenacious inventors, brave reformers, and more.

With more than 100 episodes, you can already binge a listen to your way from 1776 to the early 20th century.

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That's Commodore's Kane, Conway, Hefe, Jennings, Two Gun Tony, Drunken-Dack, Antonio, The Pirate

No Palace, Matthew the Navigator, Bull, Vertagon, Conifallende, Rumgut, and Bootstraps Bailey. Oh, Hello. Hello, welcome to the Pirate History Podcast. My name is Matt. Thank you for listening.

It took me a while to figure out how I wanted to frame today's episode.

This is actually my third pass at it. I danced around the topics I want to cover and just sort of strolled leisurely through 3,000 years or so of European history, as well as philosophy.

Instead of doing all of that, I'm going to get right to the point.

The era in which our story takes place is called the early modern period.

I'd like to talk about early modern ideas because they can help us understand why the people in our story, including the pirates themselves, why they did what they did, but it also helps us to understand our modern world.

The early modern period roughly spans the 300 years from 1500 to 1800.

One could say from Columbus to Napoleon.

Again, that's not an exact time frame, but when dealing with European history, it works well enough.

All the big events that we've talked about on the show, in depth at any rate, they are early modern events.

We see social trends like the Reformation, the introduction of the

...