Interview with Joseph Kelly

The History of the Americans

Joe Kelly is professor of literature and the director of Irish and Irish American Studies at the College of Charleston, and the author of Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of America’s Origin. In addition to Marooned, in 2013 Joe published America’s Longest Siege: Charleston, Slavery, and the Slow March Towards Civil War, which details the evolving ideology of slavery in America. He is also author of a study of the Irish novelist James Joyce, censorship, obscenity, and the Cold War (Our Joyce: From Outcast to Icon).

This conversation, which was great fun, covers a whole range of topics familiar to longstanding and attentive listeners, but with a new and provocative perspective. We talk about John Smith, Sir Francis Drake – who literally takes up a chapter in Joe’s book – the Sea Venture wreck, the role of the commoners in the struggle to survive on Bermuda, and the political philosophy of Stephen Hopkins, the one man to spend years in Virginia and then go on to sail on the Mayflower as a Stranger among the Pilgrim Fathers. Was Hopkins the moving force for or even the author of the Mayflower Compact, and the true original English-American political theorist? Finally, we have it out over the fraught question, as between Jamestown and Plymouth, which of our founding mythologies most clearly reflects the American we have become? Joe brings a new and fascinating perspective to that timeless argument.

Buy the book!: Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of America’s Origin

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