Ben Franklin's World

In 1723, the College of William & Mary opened the Brafferton building, a permanent home for an Indian School the college had been chartered to run and struggled to fill for its first 30 years. The premise of the Brafferton: take Native boys and strategically teach them in ways that would make them more useful to the British Empire.
So what actually happened inside the Brafferton Indian School?
In this revisited episode, the first of a two-part series, our three guests investigate why the Brafferton School existed, how the English filled Brafferton with students even as Native families refused to send their children, and what the Indigenous students did with the knowledge the English taught them.
We’ll also explore how a school built on a colonial college campus during the reign of King George I connected to schools like the Carlisle School, which were still separating Indigenous children from their families in the 1950s.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/367
RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODES:
🎧 Episode 158: The Revolutionaries' Army
🎧 Episode 290: The World of the Wampanoag, Pt. 1
🎧 Episode 291: The World of the Wampanoag, Pt. 2
🎧 Episode 353: Women and the Making of Catawba Identity
🎧 Episode 368: The Brafferton Indian School, Part 2: Legacies
🎧 Episode 449: Stealing America
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More than half a million Indigenous people were enslaved within the present-day borders of the United States.
Historian Linford Fisher spent fifteen years in archives across North America, the Caribbean, and Britain to investigate this forgotten history. What he found was not a second story running alongside African slavery. It was something different in kind. Europeans and early Americans enslaved people who lived on land they intended to possess. This practice made slavery a tool of dispossession.
The American Revolution is where this process accelerated. Lin and Lorén Spears, a Narragansett tribal citizen and the executive director of the Tomaquag Museum, trace how the Revolution opened space for captive raiding on the western frontier, how Native nations weighed which side to take during the war, and how their Stolen Relations digital project is recovering the names of the Natives early Americans enslaved.
Lin’s Website | Book |

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/449

EPISODE OUTLINE
00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:23 The Declaration's Overlooked Grievance Against Indigenous People
00:02:29 The Other Revolutionary War
00:03:20 Investigating the Hidden History of Indigenous Enslavement
00:07:07 Uncovering the Scale of Indigenous Enslavement
00:13:43 Building Stolen Relations Through Archival and Tribal Collaboration
00:20:51 Decolonizing Archival Records
00:30:40 Connection Between Indigenous Enslavement & Land Dispossession
00:33:53 How Native Nations Navigated the American Revolution
00:37:16 From Colonial Experimentation to Revolutionary Expansion
00:41:15 How the American Revolution Expanded Indigenous Slavery
00:45:20 How Indigenous Nations Weighed Neutrality, Alliance, & Survival
00:52:51 The Declaration of Independence's Impact on Indigenous Communities
01:01:10 The Treaty of Paris, 1783 and the Continuation of Indigenous Dispossession
01:03:51 The Uncertain End of Indigenous Enslavement
01:11:59 Commemorating the American Revolution Through Indigenous History
01:24:36 Revolution to Freedom Through Indigenous Sovereignty

RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODES
🎧 Episode 163: The American Revolution in North America
🎧 Episode 264: The Treaty of Canadaigua
🎧 Episode 323: American Expansion & the Political Economy of Plunder
🎧 Episode 367: The Brafferton Indian School, Part 1
🎧 Episode 368: The Brafferton Indian School, Part 2
🎧 Episode 406: Threads of Power

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*Book links are affiliate links. Every purchase supports the podcast.

The Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all men are endowed with the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
But what did liberty and equality mean for the peoples the Declaration never named—the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi nations who had governed the vast Great Lakes homeland they called Anishinaabewake for generations before a single European sailed its waters?
In this revisited conversation, historian Michael Witgen, Professor of History at Columbia University and a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe, takes us inside the Anishinaabe world and reveals how the new United States set about transforming it.
The answer, Witgen shows us, wasn't simple conquest. It was something more elaborate, more profitable, and in some ways more insidious: what he calls the political economy of plunder—a system engineered to strip Indigenous peoples of their homelands while funneling the wealth of that dispossession directly into the settler colonial economy.
Michael's Website | Book
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/323

RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODES
🎧 Episode 051: A History of Early Detroit
🎧 Episode 064: Native American Slavery in New France
🎧 Episode 163: The American Revolution in North America
🎧 Episode 223: A Native American History of the Ohio River Valley & Great Lakes Region
🎧 Episode 286: Native Sovereignty
🎧 Episode 310: History of the Blackfeet

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The engrossed copy of the Declaration of Independence is on display at the National Archives building in Washington, DC. Millions of visitors flock to see it and the other Charters of Freedom. But how did it end up there and why do people approach it with religious reverence?
In this episode, we explore how the Declaration took on its symbolic role as the founding text of the United States.
Pauline's Book

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/403

EPISODE OUTLINE
00:00:00 Introduction
00:06:30 Introducing Mary Beth Norton
00:07:17 American Scripture: Pauline Maier
00:10:00 Graduate School with Pauline Maier
00:13:36 The State of Historians' Thinking in the 1990s
00:15:23 Other Declarations of Independence
00:21:08 Thomas Jefferson's Drafting of the Declaration
00:23:44 Why Create a Parchment Copy of the Declaration?
00:28:24 How the Declaration Became American Scripture
00:30:32 The Impact of American Scripture
00:32:10 Situating the Declaration in the American Revolution
00:35:39 The Role of the Parchment Copy Today
00:40:12 Closing Thoughts on Pauline Maier

RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODES
🎧 Episode 141: A Declaration in Draft
🎧 Episode 155: Pauline Maier's American Revolution
🎧 Episode 294: 1774: The Long Year of Revolution
🎧 Episode 325: Everyday People of the American Revolution
🎧 Episode 415: The Many Declarations of Independence

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🎁 Make a Donation to Ben Franklin’s World

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*Book links are affiliate links. Every purchase supports the podcast.

For the Haudenosaunee, the Six Nations People, the American Revolution brought not liberty, but land loss, displacement, and the dismantling of their world. The new United States seized land from Haudenosaunee nations regardless of which side they supported during the Revolution. And yet the Haudenosaunee survived, and Haudenosaunee women are central to this story.
In this revisited episode, Maeve Kane, Associate Professor of History at the University at Albany and author of Shirts Powdered Red, reveals how Haudenosaunee women used cloth, trade, and cultural creativity as tools of sovereignty and survival across three centuries of colonial pressure.
Maeve's Website | Book |

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/406

RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODES
🎧 Episode 021: Smuggling in Colonial America & Living History
🎧 Episode 163: The American Revolution in North America
🎧 Episode 223: A native American History of the Ohio River Valley & Great Lakes Region
🎧 Episode 264: The Treaty of Canandaigua
🎧 Episode 353: Women and the Making of Catawba Identity

SUPPORT OUR WORK
🎁 Make a Donation to Ben Franklin’s World

REQUEST A TOPIC
📨 Topic Request Form
📫 liz@benfranklinsworld.com

WHEN YOU'RE READY
🗞️ BFW Gazette Newsletter
👩‍💻 Join the BFW Listener Community
🌍 Join the History Explorers Club

TAKE THE QUIZ
🧭 Discover How You Explore History (under 2 minutes)
👉 https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/quiz

LISTEN 🎧
🍎 Apple Podcasts
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CONNECT
🦋 Liz on Bluesky
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SAY THANKS
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*Book links are affiliate links. Every purchase supports the podcast.