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The American Legal History Podcast

Dec 25, 2020

The most interesting fact about the American Revolution, which makes it unique in the annals of all our wars, is that it was the unintended consequence of a dispute about the law. Two principle arguments emerged on both sides of the Atlantic and it was the failure to reconcile these competing views of the law that led...


Nov 1, 2020

In episode ten we will discuss the deadliest war in American history as a proportion to population, King Phillips War. Native American legal culture in the south; the importance of the Amerindian Confederacies in the 17th and 18th centuries. The different perspectives of the Crown and the colonies toward Native peoples....


Jul 26, 2020

In episode nine we will explore the fascinating but often neglected topic of the influence of Amerindians on the law. We will discuss why the English gained supremacy along the North American coast at the expense of other European powers; how "virgin soil epidemics" devastated indigenous peoples throughout the New World;...


Jun 20, 2020

In episode eight we will continue our examination of the law in early Colonial America. First, we will examine the trial and banishment from the Massachusetts Bay Colony of Anne Hutchinson in 1637. Next, we will discuss one of the strangest episodes in American legal history, the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. Last,...


May 23, 2020

In this episode we will explore the motivations for the founding of colonies in British North America; how their corporate charters served as a template for the organization of their governments; the highly coercive legal system initiated in Jamestown to control the immigrants; the Massachusetts Bay Colony, its founding,...