An Overview of the European Settlement of the Northeast Before 1650

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In podcast time, we’ve been knocking around the northeast of today’s United States for just about two years, starting with the Popham colony episodes back in December 2021.  The recent high water mark, as it were, is 1647 or so, with the recovery of Maryland by the Calverts after the plundering time.  We are not entirely caught up to that date, however.  We need to get back to see what happened to New Sweden since its first year in the late 1630s, and the New Haven colony, which extended its writ to New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, deserves a couple of episodes.

In the 70+ timeline episodes since Martin Pring’s expedition of 1603 and Champlain’s St. Croix settlement in Maine, we’ve talked about English, Dutch, and French settlement and exploration in today’s United States as local stories, but we have not looked at the big picture, or at least not very often. Even I’m getting confused!  So in this episode we’ll do our best to bring it all together, which ought to make the next few episodes a bit easier to follow. 

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Map of Settlements on the Delaware

Selected references for this episode

Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America–The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675

Hampton L. Carson, “Dutch and Swedish Settlements on the Delaware,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 1909.

Pavonia (Wikipedia)

Zwaanendael Colony (Wikipedia)

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