The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

	Additional resources for this issue of History Now Age of Exploration Columbian Exchange Native Americans Jamestown Magellan New Netherland

James Horn, the author of the essay you’ve just read, has also written two book length studies you’ll find useful:

You may also want to read his The Conquest of Eden: Possession and Dominion in Early Virginia, an excellent collection of scholarly essays on a variety of Jamestown-related topics. You’ll find pieces here on Captain John Smith, seventeenth century Virginia Native Americans, and African Americans.

Appelbaum, Robert, and Sweet, John Wood, eds. Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.

Milton, Giles. Big Chief Elizabeth: The Adventures and Fate of the First English Colonists in America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.

This book by a scholar at New York University focuses on the experiences of the Jamestown settlers:

Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. The Jamestown Project. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007.

This book is directed toward a more general audience:

Doherty, Kieran. Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of the First English Colony in the New World. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2007.

Anyone with a taste for naval history will like this “biography” of one of the ships that brought the first “Adventurers” to Jamestown:

Lavery, Brian. The Colonial Merchantman: Susan Constant 1605. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1988.

These may help fill in your knowledge of other British explorers of the period:

Edwards, Philip, ed. Last Voyages: Cavendish, Hudson, Ralegh: The Original Narratives. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

McDermott, James. Martin Frobisher: Elizabethan Privateer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.

Miller, Shannon. Invested with Meaning: The Raleigh Circle in the New World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.

The ill-fated Roanoke Island settlement is studied in:

Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1984.

Miller, Lee. Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2001.

Quinn, David B. Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584-1606. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.

This study of the Virginia Company is an old one, but still eminently worthwhile:

Craven, Wesley Frank. The Virginia Company Of London, 1606-1624. Williamsburg, Virginia 350th Anniversary Celebration Corporation, 1957.

There’s been much good recent work in the history of native tribes in seventeenth century Virginia. Chief Powhatan and his family, of course, receive special attention:

Allen, Paula Gunn. Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003.

Lemay, J. A. Leo. Did Pocahontas Save Captain John Smith? Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992.

Price, David. Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of a New Nation. New York: Knopf, 2003.

Rountree, Helen C. Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005.

Rountree, Helen C. The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989.

Townsend, Camilla. Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma: An American Portrait. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004.

The saga of the first Africans to find themselves unwilling settlers in British North America is told in:

Hashaw, Tim. The Birth of Black America: The First African Americans and the Pursuit of Freedom at Jamestown. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2007.

Parent, Anthony S. Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660-1740. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

This year’s celebration of the 400th anniversary of the founding of the first permanent British colony in North America has generated an enormous amount of online material. Fortunately, the best of these sites are simply great. The two with broadest coverage are:

1. Jamestown Colony: Jamestown Resources for Students and Teachers. This is a joint project of the History Channel, ABC-CLIO (publishers of scholarly works in American and European history), and National History Day. It’s mounted at the ABC-CLIO website, and here’s its homepage:

http://www.jamestown.abc-clio.com/Default.aspx

Here you’ll find short videos from the History Channel, classroom activities from National History Day, and two contributions from ABC-CLIO that deserve special mention. The broader one is Frank Grizzard’s and Boyd Smith’s “Complete Reference Library” for Jamestown. Grizzard and Smith have created an online encyclopedia containing subject-based entries, biographical sketches of Jamestown-related figures, and the like. These aren’t superficial paragraphs, either. They’re substantial but very readable contributions with up-to-date citations. Grizzard and Smith supplement their own work with “Images,” “Documents,” and “Additional Resources” (glossaries, biographical listings, chronologies, etc.). Don’t miss this one. Of somewhat narrower interest is the ABC_CLIO “Perspectives” section of the website. You’ll find excellent essays by three historians (including James Horn) on changing historical interpretations — and expanding knowledge of — Jamestown's impact on Native Americans. While this is too advanced for grades 1-6, it’s excellent background reading for any teacher—and for motivated high school students.

2. The next broad-based Jamestown site you’ll want to visit is Virtual Jamestown, a collaborative product created by Virginia Tech, the University of Virginia, and the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia with the aid of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

http://www.virtualjamestown.org/

The University of Virginia’s contributions here include “First Hand Accounts of Virginia, 1575-1705,” which you can search by date or subject

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/jamestown-browse?id=J1002

I found Virtual Jamestown’s “Maps and Images” section fascinating. It will enable you and your students to sort out place names and settlement patterns. You can use contemporary maps (with all of their fascinating distortions) and modern maps. The sections on images and artifacts are also good:

http://www.virtualjamestown.org/maps.html

“Virtual Jamestown in the Classroom” provides their original lesson plans as well as links to classroom materials at other websites:

http://www.virtualjamestown.org/tscreators.html

The “Jamestown Interactive” section here may require some plugins, but you’ll find fascinating stuff – including a virtual tour of a Jamestown fort created by a Virginia Tech student a couple of years ago:

http://www.virtualjamestown.org/interactive.php

Finally, there’s Virtual Jamestown’s “Atlantic World Online Resources”. A daunting title for a wide-based search engine that will allow you and your students to find Jamestown-related materials all over the Internet:

http://www.virtualjamestown.org/awresources/index.php

While the Reference Center hasn’t the depth of the Jamestown Colony’s Reference Library, it, too, will come in handy:

http://www.virtualjamestown.org/reference.html

Smaller but interesting websites include the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities' Jamestown Rediscovery archaeological project. It investigates the continuing discovery and analysis of the remains of 1607-1698 Jamestown on the APVA property on Jamestown Island, Virginia.

http://www.apva.org/jr.html

While it’s still a work in progress, it boasts two nice online exhibits on the site:

http://www.apva.org/exhibit/index.php

Distinct from its contributions to the “Jamestown Colony” website, the History Channel recently launched its own interactive Jamestown site with a wealth of video clips and useful links:

http://jamestown.invioni.com/real_index.php

Before taking you to websites directly connected to the actual fort and settlement at Jamestown, here’s a brief bit of modern Virginia history. This area of Tidewater Virginia, “Historic Jamestowne,” is managed by a partnership between The Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (APVA), which acquired 22.5 acres in 1893, and the National Park Service, which acquired the remaining 1500 acres in 1934. The Park Service handles tours and most on-site activities as part of its Colonial National Historical Park, while APVA runs Historic Jamestowne’s programs in teaching, research, outreach. Historic Jamestowne’s website has very good education section, including lesson plans and “interactive exercises” that will help teach archaeology to younger students:

http://www.thealamo.org/main.html

For the moment, however, the lesson plans here are limited to how to build a model of the Alamo:

http://www.historicjamestowne.org/learn/

The Park Service programs are described at:

http://www.nps.gov/jame/index.htm

And they provide a useful summary of the history of celebrations at Jamestown and of the various parks and historic sites left behind by each:

http://www.nps.gov/archive/colo/Jthanout/JTCele.html

To round out the selection you may want to visit “Jamestown Journey” the website of the Official Jamestown 400th Commemoration Commission.

http://www.jamestownjourney.org/resources/
index.htm;jsessionid=DB7F4072843504F21FA431B0866D2F