King Philip’s War

King Philip’s War was an armed conflict primarily between English colonists and Indigenous nations in what’s now New England, although there were some Indigenous peoples who were allied with the colonists. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
In our recent episode about Paul Cuffey, we mentioned just
really briefly that after King phillips War, indigenous men in

(00:24):
New England were enslaved and sent to the Caribbean, and
that felt like a pretty big thing to just drop
into an episode without explaining it more, especially since we
have only really mentioned King Philip's War in passing on
the show. It came up as part of the context
and our episodes on Bacon's Rebellion also way back in
It was part of the context for our our show

(00:46):
on the Sham Battle and the Cohico Massacre, which we're
gonna have as a Saturday Classics soon. For folks who
haven't heard that King Phillip's War was an armed conflict
primarily between English colonists and indigenous nations and what's on
New England, although there were also some indigenous peoples who
were allied with the colonists, and it took place primarily
between sixteen seventy five and sixteen seventy six. In terms

(01:10):
of per capita deaths. That's been described as the deadliest
war in US history, and it had a massive ongoing
collection of ramifications for indigenous people and for the colonists
in and around New England. Sometimes it's called the First
Indian War, but that name and King Phillip's War are
both misnomers, and we will be talking about that as

(01:33):
we go along. So to set up some context, Plymouth
Colony was the first permanent British settlement in New England,
established after about one people arrived aboard the Mayflower in
sixteen twenty. About forty of the people aboard the Mayflower
were Puritans. These were members of a religious reform movement
that believed that the Church of England was corrupt and

(01:53):
retained too many Catholic influences after the Protestant Reformation. Other
English colonies followed to that one. This included the Massachusetts
Bay Colony, established in sixteen twenty nine and named after
the indigenous Massachusetts Nation living in the area. Roger Williams
founded Rhode Island Colony in sixteen thirty six after being

(02:14):
banished from Massachusetts. The Connecticut Colony was established the same
year with its name coming from an Algonquin word meaning
beside the long title river. Throughout this whole time, between
sixteen thirty and sixteen forty, thousands more people migrated to
North America from Britain, many of them Puritans who believed

(02:34):
that this so called New World was theirs by divine decree.
The region where English colonists were establishing settlements was home
to numerous indigenous tribes and nations, many of them Algonquin
speaking people's. The Wampanag nation alone included sixty nine different tribes,
and these societies were highly interconnected through economics and through kinship,

(02:58):
including an extensive trading network that spans throughout New England.
The colonists became part of and influenced this network as
they brought different trade goods, including firearms, to this whole system.
English colonization of North America required colonists to get land,
or at least the rights to use the land, from
the local indigenous people, and especially in the earlier decades

(03:21):
of colonization, a lot of these land deeds read a
lot more like treaties than straightforward purchase agreements. In a
lot of cases, the colonist was given the right to
use the land, but the deed also included some kind
of provisions for an Indigenous family or community to keep
living on or using that land in some way. Deeds

(03:41):
also often included some kind of lifetime payment on the
part of the colonists, something along the lines of a
bushel of corn. This was similar to what Indigenous families
were expected to contribute to their own communities. So from
the Indigenous point of view, English colonists were becoming part
of their interconnected community that was already made up of
lots of different nations and people's The colonists were gaining

(04:05):
access to the land but also contributing to the community
with the goods that the land produced. But from the
English point of view, it was more like they were
buying the land outright and continuing to have some kind
of payment long term with this bushel of corn or
something similar every year. And this disparity on how each
side understood this was complicated by the fact that very

(04:28):
few people in the colonies were fluent in both English
and an Algonquin language, and most cases the negotiating parties
might speak some of what another's language, but not fluently.
This gives me a brief flashback to Thomas Harriet and
his visit to the America's under Sir Walter Raleigh, and
how he put some of these ideas in motion that

(04:51):
led to all of these problems going forward. On top
of having fundamentally different ways of understanding these transactions, English
colonists all so wanted access to more and more land
as their population grew, and as the first generation of
English children born in North America reached adulthood, it was
expected that firstborn sons would inherent land from their fathers.

(05:14):
These firstborn sons thought of this inheritance as their birthright
and something that was exclusively There's not something that they
shared with their indigenous neighbors. So, because of this need
to get more and more land, negotiations for the land
and the deeds that came out of those negotiations became
increasingly exploitive and absolute in terms of the rights that

(05:35):
the English people were getting. More and more of the
deeds were signed under duress. This included things like the
English taking someone captive and refusing to release them until
they had signed their land over. A lot of these
deeds included no more provisions about the indigenous people's continued
use of the land, and then that led to disputes
within indigenous communities as people, especially women, realized that the

(06:00):
land that they had been cultivating or living on had
been sold without their involvement and with no provision made
for them. It also wasn't just people who were encroaching
onto indigenous land. As this situation progressed, colonists introduced a
lot of domesticated livestock to North America, including cattle and pigs.
Colonists fenced their own crops and then allowed their livestock

(06:22):
to roam and graze freely. Much of the plant life
and grazing land back in Britain was well adapted to
being eaten and stomped on by grazing livestock and then
having the seeds of those plants propagated through dung. The
plants in North America were not adapted in the same
way as the colonists. Animals encroached onto indigenous land, they

(06:42):
tore up that land, and they were incredibly destructive to
cultivated crops. This wasn't restricted to just you know, planted
crops that someone was cultivating, which the animals did trample
and eat. A lot of the colonists. Domestic animals also
destroyed things like claim and beds and woodland berry bushes

(07:02):
that people gathered from, and when Indigenous people complained about
this destruction of their crops and their other food sources,
for the most part, the colonists just told them to
build fences rather than doing anything to contain their own animals.
Among the Wampanog and other Algonquin speaking people's women were
generally the people who cultivated and managed this crop land,

(07:23):
producing food for their own families and their whole communities
and for trade with the colonists and other indigenous nations.
And colonial records are full of indigenous women's efforts to
resolve this and to protect and fairly distribute what remained
of their communities food stores. Whether something was about a
land deed or animal encroachment, or some other dispute, the

(07:46):
English colonists expected Indigenous people to follow English colonial law
and to seek restitution through colonial courts. One justification for
this on the part of the colonists was their belief
that the Indigenous people were primitive and Huthens who needed
to be converted to Christianity and taught the ways of
English society. Another justification was that in a lot of cases,

(08:08):
an indigenous leader or someone else speaking for a tribe
had made some kind of allegiance to the colony, which
the colony regarded as a commitment to follow colonial law.
But in general, these courts were skewed in favor of
the colonists, so the colonists were forcing Indigenous people to
resolve disputes in a legal system that was stacked against them.

(08:29):
Court decisions could be particularly egregious, like enforcing the terms
of a land deed only if an indigenous family surrendered
all its weapons, when those weapons were needed for both
hunting and defense and were necessary to the family survival.
All of this was also happening in the context of
an indigenous population that had been reduced dramatically due to

(08:50):
introduced diseases, especially smallpox. A smallpox epidemic in sixteen thirty
three and sixteen thirty four killed an estimated seventy per
scent of the indigenous population of the Northeast. King Philip's
War wasn't the first time that all of this fed
into a violent conflict, which is why it's not really
accurate to call it quote the First Indian War, as

(09:12):
it is sometimes known. You'll read that in various uh places.
Although there had been violent conflicts on a smaller scale
going back to the beginning of a European presence in
what is now New England, the first sustained conflict in
these English colonies was the Peaquot War, fought mainly in
what is now Connecticut in sixteen thirty six and sixteen
thirty seven. In addition to all these things that we've

(09:34):
just discussed, another influence in the Peaquot War was trading
relationships with the Dutch and the Peaquat nations existing relationships
with its indigenous neighbors. The Peaquat nation had extended its
influence throughout the region through military conquest and inner marriage
and diplomacy, and it had become the most powerful indigenous
nation in the area. At the end of the war,

(09:56):
though most of the Peaquat fighting force had been killed,
the surviving women and children were mostly captured and enslaved
and sent to two tribes that had sided with the
English in this conflict. After the Peaqua War, relationships between
the indigenous people and the colonists were relatively free from
violence for the next few decades. We're gonna get to

(10:17):
how that changed after we have a quick sponsor break.
The King Philip of King Philip's War was Medicom also
known as Medicomet or Po Medicom. These kinds of name
changes were really common among the Wampanag. He was the

(10:37):
stm or leader of the poconoc At Wampanag, and the
name King Philip came from the English colonists. They basically
gave him a name after Philip of Macedon. Medicom's father
was osa Mequin, also known as the massasoit Stum or
Great Statum. You'll often see him called massasoit as though
that was his name, but that is really a title.

(10:58):
He was the inter tribal leader of the Wampanog nation.
When the Mayflower arrived in sixteen twenty, he signed a
treaty with the Colonists and maintained relatively peaceful relations with them.
He was present at the meal that has become commemorated
as the First Thanksgiving that colonists basically survived with the
help of osam Equin and the rest of the Wampanog.

(11:19):
Osam Aguin died in sixteen sixty one, and his son,
Wemsuda became stageum. English colonists called Wemsuda Alexander, after Alexander
the Great, but he died suddenly in sixteen sixty two.
The English had arrested him under suspicion that he was
planning some kind of uprising with the Narraganset people, something

(11:40):
there was not actually any evidence for, and he had
suddenly become very ill while he was imprisoned. A lot
was suspicious about this. English authorities also maintained that Wamsuda
had been ordered to appear in court over this suspicion,
but that he hadn't shown up and authorities had to
go bring him in, but there is absolutely no core
documentation to back that up. Many of the Wampanag, including Medicom,

(12:04):
believed that Wemstuda had been poisoned, and then Medicom was
also summoned before the court, also on suspicion of plotting
against the English. And this case, what the colony interpreted
as signs of an uprising was probably just a traditional
spring festival. Combined with everything that we talked about before
the break, this really eroded the last of the goodwill

(12:27):
that osam Equin had maintained with the colony. Although all
the people that we have just mentioned were men. Women
were also a critical part of the Wampanag leadership and
in diplomatic relationships with the colony. In particular, Medicalm's sister
in law, Wamu, was heavily involved in the events leading
up to and during King Philip's war. She was a

(12:48):
song squaw or a squaw statum, which was a role
English colonists often described as queen. It was a role
that was on equal footing with a shm and held
by a woman. But this wasn't a position that she
had because of her marriage to Wamsuda. It predated that marriage,
and it continued after his death in sixto. Yeah, the

(13:08):
the colonists referred to the statims and the squaw statims
as like kings and queens, but the leadership structure was
really a lot more about leading and about diplomacy than
it was about being a ruler with like authoritative ordering
right over people. They were trying to fit it into
the European model of monarchy, which it was not. Yeah.

(13:32):
So all the factors that we talked about before the
break led to the start of King Philip's War, but
it's immediate precursor was the death of a man known
as John Sassamon. Sassamon was an Indigenous man whose parents
had died in an epidemic, and he was raised in
a praying town. These were communities that were established by
Puritans for the purpose of converting Indigenous people to Christianity

(13:55):
and encouraging them to live under English law and following
English customs. So the Indigenous people that were living in
these praying towns were people who converted to Christianity and
we're adopting like an English colonial lifestyle. Sassamon also attended
Harvard for a time before the Indian College there was
formerly established. Sasamon had worked as an interpreter for the

(14:18):
English before becoming one of Medicom's secretaries, and his motivations
and actions in all of this really are not clear.
There is some suggestion that the English sent him to
spy on Medicom, and in late sixteen seventy four he
reportedly told authorities in Plymouth that Medicom was planning and uprising.
The colonial government doesn't seem to have taken this warning seriously,

(14:40):
and then sometime in early sixteen seventy five, Sassamon's friends
reported that he was missing After a search, his body
was found under the ice an assawamps at Pond in
what's now southeastern Massachusetts. Forensics was really not an established
discipline at this point, but apart from that, there wasn't
much of an ex himanation of Sassamon's body at all.

(15:02):
A witness came forward and said that he had seen
three of Medicom's counselors murder Sasamon and throw his body
into the lake. Authorities had concluded that it had been
because Medicom really was planning an uprising, and that he'd
ordered Sassamon to be killed for betraying him to the English. However,
there really was not any evidence for any of this,

(15:24):
and there are also a couple of complicating factors. The
witness that testified to all of this also owed a
gambling debt to one of the counselors that he implicated
in the crime, and a sawaps that Pond was at
the heart of a land dispute involving many of these
same people. So it's possible that he was killed and

(15:44):
it like was something that was ordered because of this
whole warning that there was an uprising being planned. It's
also possible that he was killed and it was something
related to this land dispute, or he might have just drowned,
like it's totally unclear. Colonial authorities brought the three counselors
involved to trial to create the appearance of fairness. They

(16:05):
assembled a jury that included six indigenous men and twelve colonists,
but the trial itself was still pretty shoddy. Uh. This
one witnesses testimony was really the only thing connecting Medicom's
counselors to Sassamon's death, which may or may not have
even been a murder, as Tracy said, could have been
an accident. The evidence presented at court included a report

(16:27):
that when Sassimon's body was brought to Medicom's counselor Tobias,
that the corps started bleeding, and that that was evidence
of Tobias's guilt. The three counselors were found guilty and
sentenced to be hanged on June eighth, sixteen seventy five.
Two of them were executed on that day. The third
was given a reprieve after the rope broke, and then

(16:48):
he said that he had seen the other two men
commit this crime but hadn't participated in it or intervened
by the end of June, though he had also been
executed by firing squad. Regardless of what their meta coom
really had been planning, some kind of action against the colonists.
Violence began shortly after these hangings. In early June, several
English farms were burned, apparently in retaliation. Then on June

(17:14):
a colonist in Swansea fatally shot a Wapanog man while
defending his farm from a wapanog graid. The next day,
in retaliation for that death, a Wapanog party killed seven
colonists in Swansea, which is generally marked as the start
of King Philip's War, So if you go read articles
about this, you'll often see it described as this series

(17:35):
of events that started with the death of John Sassmont,
with the trial and the execution leading to this escalating
back and forth that tipped into an all out war.
But at the same time, a few weeks before the
trial even happened, which was a month before these seven
colonists were killed in Swansea, we Tamu had been talking
to colonial authorities about her fears that the Wampanag We're

(17:56):
going to face persecution by the English, so tense had
clearly been increasing before this trial even began. There was
heavy fighting in what is now Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut,
and Maine. Over the next six months. Many of the
area's indigenous nations formed an alliance with the wampanag The
Mohegans allied with the colonists, as did many of the

(18:18):
indigenous people who had converted to Christianity and we're living
in praying towns. Some including the Narragansett, tried to stay neutral.
At first. Colonial forces fared really poorly in the fighting.
A lot of them were new recruits to the militia.
They really did not have a lot of training, and
the training that they did have was really geared towards

(18:38):
the style of fighting that was used in Europe. Meanwhile,
the indigenous forces tactics were more like what we might
describe as guerrilla warfare today. They were a very highly
mobile fighting force with marksman and snipers and just superior
knowledge of the terrain. As this was happening, English authorities
viewed Indigenous people in general with increasing suspicion. This included

(19:00):
people who had converted to Christianity and we're living in
praying towns. One example was James Printer, who was Nipmuck
but had been raised in an English household and educated
at Harvard Indian College. In August of sixteen seventy five,
he was captured and accused of participating in a raid
when he had actually been in church at that time. Similarly,

(19:22):
between thirty and forty Indigenous people were arrested and imprisoned
in Cambridge for burning down a haystack that belonged to
a man named Amos Richardson, even though Richardson himself insisted
that none of them were the culprits. On September eighteenth,
an indigenous force ambushed an English convoy that was trying
to remove what was left of the harvest from the

(19:42):
town of Deerfield. Deerfield had been abandoned. In the wake
of the fighting, at least sixty people from the convoy
were killed in what came to be known as the
Battle of Bloody Brook or the bloody Brook Massacre. In
October of sixteen seventy five, the Narragansett signed a treaty
of neutrality with the ma Instachusetts Bay Colony. Once they
had signed, colonial authorities demanded that they surrender. Wampanag and

(20:06):
other refugees who were being sheltered in Narragansett territory. The
Narragansett refused this. They considered the refugees to be their
kin and under their protection. So the English took this
as a sign of duplicity on the Narragansetts part and
a suggestion that they might abandon this treaty and joined
with Medicom. There had also overtime been individual Arrogancett people

(20:28):
who had participated in raids and things like that. So
the colonies mustered a militia of about a thousand people,
along with about a hundred and fifty indigenous allies, and
they marched to Narragancet Territory, burning the indigenous settlements that
they passed along the way. On December nineteenth, fighting began
in a swamp in what is now West Kingston, Rhode Island.

(20:49):
This became known as the Great Swamp Fight or the
Great Swamp Massacre, with the violence stretching into December twentieth.
At first, the Narragansett were able to drive the English
force back, but at the English regrouped and reinforcements arrived.
They took the main Narragance at fort, burning it down
with people, mostly elders, women, and children still inside. At

(21:10):
least seventy people were killed among the colonial force. With
the indigenous death tool much harder to estimate, it was
at least a hundred and fifty people, but it may
have been hundreds more. This was really a turning point
in the war, so we're going to take a quick
sponsor break before we move on. After the Great Swamp Massacre,

(21:34):
the Narragansett Nation unsurprisingly went to war against the colonies.
Narragansett sat Conanchet formed a coalition with other indigenous tribes
and nations, which mustered a fighting force of about two
thousand and what's now Rhode Island. He then moved into
central Massachusetts and organized another force of about fift hundred people.
As Canancha was forming this coalition, the weather was hampering

(21:57):
the colonists efforts in the war. Late December of sixteen
seventy five was very snowy, with militia commanders reporting depths
between two and three feet of snow. It wasn't at
all conducive to the militia's movements, especially since they didn't
know exactly where the indigenous forces were at any point.
The indigenous forces were affected as well, but they continued

(22:19):
to be a lot more mobile than the colonial forces were,
thanks to having more experience dealing with this kind of
weather and being more familiar with a lot of the
territory outside the colonial towns. It was also just a
lot easier for a small like raiding party in snow
shoes to come in and hit a place and leave
than it was for like a militia unit to march somewhere.

(22:44):
In the early months of sixteen seventy six, these two
indigenous fronts moved northward and eastwards through southern New England.
They converged in Providence, Rhode Island, which the Indigenous force
burned down in March of sixteen seventy six. By the spring,
in the face of these two advancing armies, the English
had abandoned at least eleven towns in Massachusetts, and the

(23:06):
Indigenous force had destroyed most of the colonial towns in
Rhode Island on the west side of Narragance at Bay.
But as the weather got warmer in the spring, there
was another shift. New England's Indigenous community had been on
the move through the winter. Whether it was the fighting
force advancing through the colony, or women, children, and elders
who were trying to stay out of the way of

(23:27):
the war. Fewer crops had been planted because people couldn't
stay in one place to tend them, and what did
get planted was often destroyed by the colonial militia. For example,
in May of sixteen seventy six, an English force attacked
a Nipmuck camp that had been established specifically for fishing
and planting. The colonial militia massacred many of the people

(23:48):
who were there, who were mostly again women, children, and elders.
This was about two hundred people. Then an indigenous force
that was nearby regrouped and killed about forty of the militia.
This continued to June, with the colonial militia arranging raids
to destroy the indigenous people's crops and to force them
away from their cultivated fields. Indigenous forces and refugees alike

(24:10):
simply started running out of food. Then, on July twenty,
Benjamin Church led a force that attacked Medicom's encampment, capturing
his wife and child and selling them into slavery. Medicom
was also captured and was assassinated. On August twelfth of
sixteen seventy six. His body was drawn and quartered, and
his head was placed on a pike and displayed outside

(24:33):
of Plymouth. That same month, we to Moo drowned while
trying to cross a river as she was fleeing from
colonial forces. Cananchet was also captured and killed in sixteen
seventy six. Medicom's death is often described as the end
of King Philip's War, but in reality, the indigenous forces
had been losing ground for months and fighting continued, particularly

(24:54):
in what's now Maine, for months. A treaty formally ended
the fighting along the Northern Front in April twelfth, sixteen
seventy eight, almost two years after Medicom's death. The idea
that the war was King Phillips and that it ended
with his death really came from Benjamin Church's entertaining History
of King Philip's War, which was published in seventeen sixteen.

(25:16):
That story recounted his own role in pursuing and killing
Medicom's through the stories that he had told to his son.
Church's account is one of many written from the colonial
perspective in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Colonists actually
started writing books about this war before the war was
even over. Increase Mather published a brief History of the

(25:37):
War with the Indians in New England in sixteen seventy six,
and William Hubbard published a narrative of the Trouble with
the Indians in New England in sixteen seventy seven. We
also have Mary Rowlinson's A Narrative of the Captivity and
Restoration of Mrs Mary Rowlinson, which was published in sixteen
eighty two. Rowlinson and her children were taken captive after

(25:58):
a raid on lancast Her. One of her children was
injured and died shortly afterward, and Rowland and her surviving
children spent almost three months as captives. They wound up
with a party led by Wamu as she tried to
guide refugees to safety. Rawlinson's account has been described as
North America's first bestseller, and it launched the genre of

(26:20):
the captivity narrative. By the end of this war, about
six hundred colonists and British soldiers had been killed, about
seventeen English settlements were completely destroyed or abandoned, and at
least fifty others were heavily damaged. The death toll on
the indigenous side is harder to say precisely, but it
was probably in the thousands. It's estimated that about five

(26:42):
percent of New England's white population was killed as a
result of the war, with forty percent of the indigenous
population either being killed or fleeing the region. At least
one thousand Indigenous people were also enslaved and sent out
of New England. This included people who surrendered with the
hope that they would be treated leniently. The colonists had

(27:03):
enslaved indigenous people starting before the war, but they really
expanded the practice during and afterward. Prior to the war,
colonists had enslaved indigenous people to make money, to take
their land, and to punish and remove anyone who was
viewed as a negative influence on other indigenous people. During
and after King Philip's War, most of the enslaved Indigenous

(27:24):
men were sent to Barbados or to other British territory
in the Caribbean, but a few were sent to other
places as well. Enslaved Indigenous women and children were often
forced to work in British households and businesses in North America,
and in some cases this enslavement became hereditary, with children
who were born to enslaved Indigenous women being claimed as

(27:46):
the property of the households where these women were being
forced to work. English attitudes toward the Indigenous people became
much harsher in the wake of the war. The colonies
passed prohibitions on selling weapons to Indigenous people, and that
was later expanded to selling anything to them. The colonies
also organized patrols to police indigenous communities and their movements.

(28:08):
In May of seventeen sixty six, Massachusetts ordered that all
Indigenous people in the colony's territory had to live in
one of four praying towns. Further laws were passed in
the early eighteenth century, often with laws targeting the indigenous
population being looped into laws that were related to enslaved Africans.
As for the colonists, the British government dispatched Edward Randolph

(28:32):
to investigate the causes of the war and to assess
the damage. He reported that the colonists generally believed that
it had been divine punishment for their own sinfulness. After
he made this report, the English colonies in New England
lost a lot of their autonomy. They became part of
the Dominion of New England, which was placed under the
control of New York Governor Edmund Andros. Of the hundreds

(28:55):
of indigenous tribes and nations in New England before and
during King Philip's War, only a few remain today. In
terms of nations that have come up in today's episode,
there's the Mohegan tribe of Indians of Connecticut, the Narragansett
Indian tribe of Rhode Island, and in Massachusetts the mashp
Wampanag and the Wampanog tribe of gay Head Aquinna. Of course,

(29:16):
there are also tribes that still exist but don't have
federal recognition. The Nipmuck nation is recognized by the Commonwealth
of Massachusetts but not by the federal government, and there
are also tribes that existent are not recognized by any
state or a government body. There are a lot of
books about King Philip's War, and they all offer their

(29:36):
own interpretation of what happened and why. And this includes
a lot of books written within the last few decades,
and that understanding is going to continue to evolve. In
terms of the Wampanoag perspective, in particular, the Wampanag adopted
reading and writing from the colonists in the seventeenth century,
but the Wampanag language was nearly lost in the centuries
that followed. That has changed recently thanks to the work

(29:59):
of Jesse Little Doe Baird, who was awarded a MacArthur
Grant for her efforts to revive the want Banag language.
In so as more people become fluent in Wapanag, that's
going to open another avenue of research for historians. I
read a lot of resources for this show, but the
book that I read um was Our Beloved Kin, A

(30:19):
New History of King Phillip's War by Lisa Brooks. That
is not so much if you're thinking of a book
about a war in history. It's not a book that's
like this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened.
It is more looking at all the factors of the
war from different angles, including like close readings of different
land deeds and letters and captivity narratives and all of

(30:41):
that stuff. Um. It is really interesting and is a
lot more about um the Wanpanag perspective and other indigenous
perspectives than some of the other books that are out there.
Folks are interested in that. It also has a really
fascinating companion website that is full of maps and pictures
and all kinds of other stuff. So I feel like

(31:01):
the point about the revival of UM the Wampano language
and that opening a new avenue of research is either
something that was in that book or something and one
of other things that I read as I was researching this.
Do you also have a little bit of listener mail, Jurie,
it's a correction. Sometimes we make mistakes and it's like, oh,
I didn't know that. That's an error I made. Sometimes

(31:24):
we make mistakes and I did know that, and that's
extra embarrassing UM, And that's what happened this time. This
is a letter from Mark and Marcus, one of a
few people that wrote to us about this. Mark says, Hi,
Holly and Tracy, I recently discovered your podcasts and I'm
so very glad I did. Fascinating topics, coupled with your
fun and fetching presentation styles, have made up my favorite

(31:44):
podcast for my early morning sixty minutes commute to work.
I was listening to a recent six Impossible Episodes show
and heard you mentioned the impeachment of Nixon. I'm sure
a lot of listeners have already reached out about this,
but just a reminder that Nixon was not impeached. He
was threatened with impeachment but resigned before suffering through what
appeared to be an inevitable end. I know you two

(32:07):
like to be accurate, So there it is. They keep
it coming. We are listening. Cheers, Mark, Thank you Mark
and the others who have written to us or tweeted
at us or Facebook commented on us about this. UH.
To recap the impeachment process of Richard Nixon had started.
There had been months of impeachment hearings and investigations, and

(32:29):
the House Judiciary Committee had approved articles of impeachment on
three different charges that happened in late July of nineteen
seventy four, but the House did not actually vote on
those articles because Nixon announced his resignation on August eight
of nineteen seventy four, and he left the White House
the next day, so there was no one left in office.

(32:49):
I mean, there was someone left in office, but like Nixon,
was not in office to impeach anymore. So instead, the
House adopted a resolution that accepted that the House Judiciary
report on the whole at or this all gets shorthanded
to impeached a lot because like it had gone on
for all of that time and included various impeachment proceedings,

(33:10):
but like there was no actual vote on the impeachment articles. Um,
it really seemed incredibly likely that he was going to
be impeached by the House and then convicted by the Senate.
But technically that vote never happened. So um, even though
it gets glossed over with the word impeachment a lot,
technically not impeach, impeached resigned from office to avoid that fate. Uh. Anyway, Yeah,

(33:40):
I knew that from eighth grade Civics class or whatever,
and that's I just wrote it wrong. I wrote it
wrong in the thing and didn't catch it anyway. So
thank you to the folks who have brought that up
gave me a chance to say it the right way.
If you would like to write to us, we're at
History Podcast at i heeart radio dot com. We're also

(34:01):
all over social media at missed in History. That's where
you'll find our Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram, and you
can subscribe to our show on Apple podcast the I
Heart Radio app neywhere else to get your podcasts. Stuff
You Missed in History Class is a production of I
heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts For my

(34:24):
heart Radio, visit i heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
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