Bonus Episode on Four Founding Themes from US Colonization

Unmoored: America Adrift in Historical Forgetfulness and Finding Our Way Back

For our second Bonus Episode, I am returning to a historical point that I made in Episode 8. In that episode, I first introduced my concept of “Four Founding Themes” that emerge from an examination of English colonization. When I cover European colonization in my college classes on early US History, one thing that I do with my students is to look for larger patterns to help us understand what is going on. I do this with them as we look at Spanish, French, and Dutch colonization, and then go into even more depth on English colonization. With the English colonies, we spend more time here is because the British won the geopolitical struggle for dominance in Europe, and that played out in the New World. So, what clues can we discover that helps us understand how those colonies developed into a new nation called the United States? For me, then, there are four dominant themes that one can uncover with these early colonies: Capitalism, Christianity, Risk, and Rebellion. In this bonus episode, I explore this in-depth with you to help explain what I had briefly described in the earlier episode.

If you want to read more about some of the historical moments that I mentioned, here you go:

• Bacon's Rebellion
• Paxton Boys or you can read more in this Brittanica article
• Shays Rebellion
• Frederick Turner's "Frontier Thesis" about the impact of the closing of the US Frontier, paper given in 1893
• About the concept of "Frontier Thesis"