Second Decade

You’ve probably heard of Daniel Boone and “Grizzly” Adams, the quintessential frontier mountain men who helped forge America’s frontier identity in the 19th century. But you’ve probably never heard of Estwick Evans. An eccentric New Hampshire lawyer, something compelled to Evans put on a skin-tight suit made of buffalo fur, hoist a 6-foot rifle across his shoulders and take off into the snowy wilderness of New England on a frigid day in February 1818. Evans’s epic journey covered over 4,000 miles, overland across the Great Lakes to Detroit and then down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, out into the Gulf of Mexico at New Orleans, and then by ship around Florida and up the Eastern Seaboard back to Boston. On the journey—which he chronicled in an unusual book—Evans observed much of what America was in the Second Decade, and correctly predicted at least some of what it was to become. Historian Sean Munger takes you along on Evans’s journey, often quoting Evans’s own words and descriptions of the landscapes he saw

Church steeples, horse-drawn sleighs, picket fences, snow-covered fields...is this what you think of when you picture an old-time winter in New England? The cultural and historical roots of these images go back to Colonial times, but the historical reality isn’t always so idyllic. On January 19, 1810, a strange and sudden cold snap, accompanied by violent winds, plunged the region into a sudden deep freeze that nearly everyone who lived through it remembered vividly for the rest of their lives. As the wind tore apart roofs, shook down barns and snapped the masts of sailing ships like toothpicks, New Englanders braced for a punishing assault from the weather. When it was over, the memory of the “Cold Friday” gave them a new benchmark for measuring extreme weather, and the story of one particular family’s tragedy, printed in a single newspaper, somehow became one of the most often-told tales in all of New England’s 19th century folklore. In this revealing episode, the first in the second season of Second Decade

You may not have heard of David Ramsay, but if you lived in Charleston, South Carolina in the second decade, you would probably know him—if you were part of the city’s rich white elite, that is. Ramsay, born in Pennsylvania, Princeton-educated, served in the South Carolina State Legislature and the Confederation Congress, was a protegé of revolutionary doctor Benjamin Rush—a signer of the Declaration of Independence—and tried to rid Charleston’s steamy streets of yellow fever by predicting the weather. His life was tragically ended by a deranged assassin, convinced Ramsay (and everybody else) was out to get him, who blew away the good doctor with a “horseman’s pistol” in broad daylight on one of Charleston’s busiest streets in full view of hordes of witnesses. This odd story from the 1810s shines a fascinating light on Ramsay’s life and personality, and also on the precarious world of Charleston in which he lived, which was built on the backs and the labor of the city’s enslaved African-American population. D

The early months of the War of 1812 served up a relentless drumbeat of bad news for the United States: our untrained and ill-equipped forces, fighting a war they were unprepared for in the first place, suffered reverse after reverse on the battlefield. But on the high seas, the exploits of one remarkable ship, the USS Constitution, provided the only bright spot in the gloom and demonstrated that the new republic could, when circumstances called for it, compete militarily even with the greatest naval power on Earth. Sent to patrol the Atlantic coast, the Constitution and her captain quickly found themselves tangling with the overconfident British commander James Dacres, who went so far as to capture an American vessel and write a literal taunt into her log daring an American frigate to come out and fight him. The result was a thrilling real-life adventure involving a desperate chase, booming cannons, crackling muskets and every cliché you’ve ever seen in a nautical adventure film from the Age of Sail—except in

The image and concept of Frankenstein’s monster—most notably personified by Boris Karloff in the 1931 Universal horror film—are indelible in literature, cinema and popular culture. Far more than just an 1818 novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein is a philosophical journey as well as a cultural phenomenon. But how did it come about? The idea for the novel was famously hatched at a lakeside chateau in Switzerland, the Villa Diodati, in the late spring and early summer of 1816 by Mary Shelley (then Mary Godwin), her future husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron (who was then having an affair with Mary’s step-sister, Claire Clairmont), and his doctor John Polidori, who went on to write The Vampyr. A nightmare summer of inclement climate-changed weather, haunting visions of dead children and monstrous women, endless cycles of personal and sexual jealousy, and the toxic personality of Lord Byron all contributed to Mary’s flash of genius. The story of Frankenstein’s origin is wrapped up in the broader

Since the beginning of film as a narrative and artistic medium, historical events and eras have been popular subjects for filmmakers. The decade of the 1810s, however, has not tended to show up in movies or on TV as frequently or consistently as other eras—but there are still plenty of examples of the second decade on film. Beginning in the 1920s with French filmmaker Abel Gance, depictions of the 1810s, many involving Napoleon or adaptations of popular and classic novels, have woven their way through the history of visual media with varying results. From Miriam Hopkins’s Technicolor turn as Becky Sharp in 1935 to Paul Dano as Pierre Bezhukov in the 2016 miniseries War and Peace, the analysis of the second decade in film covers a lot of fun and interesting ground. In this episode, a slight departure from the usual emphasis on factual events, historian Sean Munger takes you on a brief tour of the 1810s as they appear on the screen. Films and shows discussed include Ridley Scott’s The Duellists, the 2002 Europe

Despite being one of the longest-reigning British monarchs as well as wildly popular among his own people, King George III gets a bad rap as the “mad king who lost America.” In truth the story of George’s life is touching and sad. After dealing with not one but two world wars that occurred on his watch, as well as two world-shaking revolutions in America and France, George was ultimately felled by a mysterious illness that affected his body as well as his mind. Signs of his recurring malady appeared as early as 1765, but in 1810, the beginning of the second decade, the King was finally unable to discharge his royal duties. Supplanted by his son (the future King George IV) as regent, George’s illness ended an entire era of British history, the Georgian Era, and began another, the Regency. But this is more than a story of politics and power. It’s a story of a family, struggling to deal with the far-reaching effects of a difficult and ultimately tragic illness whose nature and origin is still debated more than 2

Despite seeming to the West as if it was “sleeping,” China in the 1810s was in fact experiencing the crucial transition of the Qing (Manchu) Dynasty from its cultural and political zenith under the Qianlong Emperor to the ruin and chaos that would ramp up in the later 19th century. Ruled at this time by Aisin Gioro Yongyan, also known as the Jiaqing Emperor, China rebuffed not one but two British diplomatic missions and continued its policy of isolation and indifference to the West. But at the same time dangerous and dramatic events were brewing, including a rebellion in 1813 that almost toppled the dynasty, and a nefarious plan by British merchants to introduce addictive drugs into Chinese society. Overshadowed by his illustrious father, Yongyan was unable to arrest the cancers that were just beginning to eat away at the foundations of his country—but the evidence indicates he was fully aware of them. China, in fact, was not “sleeping” at all. In this episode, historian Sean Munger takes you into one of the

The year 1814 was one of the bleakest in American history. It opened with the country embroiled in war, with most of its coast blockaded by the British Navy, the economy collapsing, the frontiers aflame with violence, and the government teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. And now that Britain’s war with Napoleon was effectively over, things were bound to get even worse for the United States. American troops scored a few victories in the field, some of them surprising, but the capture and burning of Washington, D.C. by British forces in August vividly demonstrated America’s disadvantages. Yet throughout this dark period the seeds of a more or less honorable peace had already been planted, with negotiations going on in Europe and a growing desire on both sides to simply end the conflict. Of all the participants, the Native Americans paid the steepest price in the War of 1812. Historian Sean Munger completes this three-part series on America’s most obscure war, although there are still many more stories from t

Having declared war at a time it was woefully unprepared to face the world’s most powerful country on the battlefield, the United States spent the first phase of the War of 1812—at least on land—lurching from disaster to disaster, with most efforts aimed at the theoretically achievable goal of conquering Canada. Unable at first even to feed or supply its troops competently, and with serious doubts about the objects of the war still lingering in the public mind and the halls of Congress, the administration of James Madison muddled through as best it could, buoyed slightly by a string of surprising naval victories. But in 1813, with a politically and physically weakened Madison reeling from an unexpectedly difficult re-election and a serious illness that almost killed him, two developments, one on the Native American frontier and the other in Europe, forever ended the chances of the U.S. taking Canada and would soon open a new and darker phase of the conflict. Historian Sean Munger presents the mysterious War o

What was the War of 1812? Which countries were involved? What were the stakes? Why is it so obscure? Why does it have such a funny name? How come you were never taught much about it in school? These questions, and many more, lie at the heart of understanding the first military conflict fought by the United States since the founding of the Constitution. The causes of the war are surprisingly murky and confusing, everything from a mutual misunderstanding between the U.S. and Great Britain as to the meaning and scope of national citizenship, to a desire to cement political unity by a Congress and a Presidency drifting toward entropy. The picture involves more than just maritime issues and border tensions with British-held Canada. It also includes Native Americans, caught in the middle between two essentially hostile powers, and a broad roster of unfinished business left over from the American Revolution. In this, the first of a series dealing with the broad issues of the War of 1812, historian Sean Munger will a

Harvard, America’s first college, is thought of as a bastion of privileged patricians, a place filled with old brick buildings, ivy-covered walls and inscrutable ancient traditions. But it’s also a real college where real young people live, learn, struggle and try to find themselves. In 1813 two boys, Stephen Salisbury and Aaron White, fifteen and sixteen, respectively, left their homes in Massachusetts to become freshmen in the Harvard College class of 1817. The remarkable personal day-to-day accounts both of them left behind illustrate in vivid and sometimes amusing detail what it was really like to go to college in the 1810s. Stephen engages in endless battles with his parents over pocket money and dirty laundry; Aaron in the meantime struggles against depression, feelings of guilt and unworthiness, and his own temptations. Both somehow manage to graduate, but one senses it wasn't easy! Historian Sean Munger takes a personal and often humorous look at college in the 1810s, and tries to break down the ivory

Most of us were taught in school about Abraham Lincoln’s humble origins: the log cabin on the Kentucky frontier, his lack of formal education, and colorful tales of rail splitting and backwoods adventures. But the traditional American mythology leaves out a lot about Lincoln’s formative years. Lincoln was born at the beginning of the Second Decade into a complex and deeply contested environment, shaped by economic hardship, conflict with Native Americans, and simmering resentments over slavery and land ownership. Add to this the ravages of disease and environmental hazards, such as the dreaded “milk sickness” that almost wiped out his family, and a picture of Lincoln’s childhood emerges that you may not have thought about. Furthermore, only recent (21st century) scholarship has discovered a previously unknown aspect of Lincoln: the rare genetic disorder, called MEN2B, from which he suffered, and which may well have strongly influenced one of the most significant events in all of American history. In this epis

Why did Napoleon, with the largest army the world had ever seen up until that time, lose his war with Russia so badly and so tragically? You may have heard that it’s because he didn’t take the threat of the cold Russian climate seriously enough, and his army froze to death on the retreat from ruined, burnt-out Moscow. This is at best a half-truth. The French Army was already disintegrating even before Napoleon occupied Moscow, and despite the “alternative facts” that Bonaparte desperately spun as to why the retreat was so disastrous, the roots of his ultimate defeat had less to do with ice and snow than it did with Napoleon’s own willful blindness. But even this debate obscures the real story of the 1812 retreat from Moscow and the almost unfathomable suffering it inflicted on the hundreds of thousands of real people—not just soldiers—who lived through it. This episode presents that story, in graphic and sometimes unsettling detail. Historian Sean Munger tries to cut through the veil of half-truths and miscon

Despite being warned repeatedly—by his enemy, Tsar Alexander, and even by some of his own generals—Napoleon Bonaparte, the self-proclaimed Emperor of France, made one of the costliest and most lethal mistakes in the history of warfare by invading Russia in the summer of 1812. Though it’s usually the harsh Russian winter that’s credited with crushing the French Army, in reality Napoleon and his troops were in deep trouble long before that, from literally the moment they crossed the Niemen River in Poland. It almost didn’t matter that the Russian Army kept retreating and refusing, for the most part, to fight. The half-million men of the Grand Armée had to fight dusty roads, sticky marshes full of mud, freezing rain in June, blazing heat in July, mosquitoes, dysentery, starvation and dehydration without having to worry about tangling with the Russians in battle. When the inevitable clash did finally occur at a town called Borodino, it led to an even more epic disaster: a man-made firestorm that virtually wiped M

In the summer of 1812 Napoleon’s France invaded Russia, ruled by Tsar Alexander I, with the largest army ever assembled in pre-modern times. Leo Tolstoy famously called this conflict “an event opposed to human reason and human nature.” How and why did it happen? In the first of three parts, the complicated political backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars comes into focus through an examination of the lives and personalities of the two men most responsible for it, Napoleon and Alexander. After becoming unlikely friends at an intimate summit meeting on a river raft in the summer of 1807, a series of missteps, misunderstandings and divergent destinies eventually brought these two fascinating people into direct conflict with each other—with millions of their citizens’ lives at stake. The result was world-shaking history with far-reaching consequences. In this series, Sean Munger cuts through the usual historians’ clutter of maps and army formations with a close look at the actual people behind this incredible event. In

On New Year’s Eve, 1812, Theodosia Burr Alston, First Lady of South Carolina and daughter of former U.S. Vice-President Aaron Burr, boarded a ship bound for New York City and was never seen alive again. More than 50 years later, in Nag’s Head, North Carolina, an old woman gave a doctor a painting, as payment for medical services, that the doctor came to believe was a portrait of Theodosia. But was it, and if so, how did it get there? These two unsolved mysteries bookend the unusual life and personality of Theodosia Burr Alston, an educated, talented woman, outspoken feminist, who was utterly devoted to her father Aaron Burr, the “gadfly” of the Early Republic, a controversial man accused of murder and treason, who ultimately lost both of the women he held most dear in his life. In drilling down into the twin mysteries of Theodosia Burr, historian Sean Munger sets the stage with colorful examples from her life and her father’s. In this episode you’ll not only meet various members of the Burr family, but you’ll

Second Decade wishes you happy holidays with this Christmas-themed episode. Of all the Christmases of the 1810s, the year 1814 stands out as especially significant. The world was celebrating its first holiday season in over two decades in the midst of general peace, except for one last pesky war that wouldn’t quite die. While the crowned heads at the Congress of Vienna—supposedly working for world peace but in reality boozing and partying like there was no tomorrow—were exposed to the highly flammable new holiday tradition known as the Christmas tree, a team of diplomats including future U.S. President John Quincy Adams were actually putting the Yuletide greeting “peace on earth” into practice. A convoluted and sometimes disheartening round of negotiations between two unequally-matched teams of statesmen yielded the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812 despite consciously avoiding resolution of all the major issues that caused the war in the first place. Now that’s diplomacy! Historian Sean Munger beg

On the island of Sumbawa, in what is now Indonesia but was previously called the East Indies, there is a collapsed, sunken shell of a volcano that was once a mighty peak taller than Mt. Fuji in Japan. On a warm spring night in 1815 this mountain, Tambora, exploded with a force so powerful that it can scarcely be measured in terms intelligible to humans. In addition to being an environmental disaster of staggering proportions that killed over 100,000 people and changed the world’s climate, the eruption of Mt. Tambora occurred at an unusual moment of transition for the people of the East Indies. The British, having brieftly wrested the spice-rich Indies from the control of French-allied Holland during the Napoleonic Wars, were struggling to leave a permanent political and strategic mark on the islands before returning them to Dutch rule. Lost in the geopolitical shuffle for colonial possessions were the people of the islands themselves, at once opaque to history but who also left behind haunting clues of their

When Thomas Jefferson retired from public life in 1809 after serving two terms as U.S. President, he thought his retirement years at Monticello, his Virginia plantation, would be peaceful, quiet and relaxing. He couldn’t have been more wrong. Utterly broke as a result of his out-of-control spending sprees while in the White House, Jefferson returned home to his farm just as a series of environmental disasters made it almost impossible to earn a living from his sole remaining source of income: farming. What was more, Jefferson suddenly had to support his grown daughter, her alcoholic husband and their eleven children as well as lay out the red carpet for the steady streams of visitors and well-wishers who descended on Monticello. And that’s to say nothing of Jefferson’s own unacknowledged children by his slave mistress Sally Hemings. Add to this a war, a crippling drought and a boneheaded financial move, the 1810s proved to be nothing less than the very long winter(s) of Jefferson’s discontent. Sean Munger not