About Whencery
Whencery is an animated history series. Each ten-minute episode tells how a place came to be, and follows the money the whole way.
The name answers the question every episode asks: whence, from where, did this place come? Season 1 is New York City. It starts with the ice that made the land, turns to the Lenape and their harbor, and runs through the Dutch trading post, the English city, the printers, the fires and the merchants to 1764. Each episode runs about ten minutes, and the business of the place runs through all of them: what people traded, who paid, and who held the land.
Sources first
Every episode is researched before a word of it is written. The research gathers the record: journals kept on the ships, the letters and minutes of the trading company and the city, laws, court records, travelers' accounts, Lenape tradition as it was written down, and the geological surveys and later histories that explain the land. Each fact is checked against the source it comes from, with the page.
The script is then written from that research, and every line of it is tied to a source. Each episode page shows the result: the full transcript, with a note on each passage that names its source, and a How We Know section that lists every work the episode relies on, with links to free copies where they exist.
What you see on screen
The scenes are animated reconstructions, not footage and not paintings from the time. The maps are built from elevation data and today's shoreline, so the land and water sit where they really sit. Where the sources do not record a detail, such as the exact spot where something happened or what a room looked like, the scene makes a setting choice, and the episode labels it as one.
Where to watch
Episodes are published on the Whencery YouTube channel and play on this site through YouTube's privacy-enhanced player, which loads only when you press play.
This site
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