The Papal Bull "Inter Caetera," issued by Pope Alexander VI on May 4, 1493, played a central role in the Spanish conquest of the New World. The document supported Spain’s strategy to ensure its exclusive right to the lands discovered by Columbus the previous year. It established a demarcation line one hundred leagues west of the Azores and Cape Verde Islands and assigned Spain the exclusive right to acquire territorial possessions and to trade in all lands west of that line. All others were forbidden to approach the lands west of the line without special license from the rulers of Spain. This…

The first English settlers in Jamestown, Virginia, who arrived in 1607, were eager to find gold and silver. Instead they found sickness and disease. Eventually, these colonists learned how to survive in their new environment, and by the middle of the seventeenth century they discovered that their fortunes lay in growing tobacco. This 1622 letter from Jamestown colonist Sebastian Brandt to Henry Hovener, a Dutch merchant living in London, provides a snapshot of the colony in flux. Brandt, who likely arrived in 1619 in a wave of 1,200 immigrants, writes of his wife’s and brother’s deaths the…

The Dutch colonization of New Netherland (which included parts of present-day New York, Delaware, New Jersey, and Connecticut) began in the 1620s. From the outset, New Netherland was a multiethnic, multireligious society: about half of the population was Dutch and the remainder included French, Germans, Scandinavians, and small numbers of Jews from Brazil. Settlers were attracted to the colony’s promises of freedom of worship, local self-government, and free land that would remain tax-exempt for ten years. Between 1652 and 1674, the Dutch and English fought three naval wars, battling for…

Like many other explorers, Henry Hudson stumbled upon North America almost by accident. Employed by the Dutch Republic to find a sea passage to the Far East, Hudson and the crew of his ship the Halve Maen landed at what is today New York on September 11, 1609, claiming the region for the Dutch.Efforts to map the region began almost immediately after Henry Hudson landed and culminated with this map, made by Nicholas Visscher and printed in 1682. This map depicts not only the former Dutch holdings of New Amsterdam (which had been taken over by the British), but also New England and New Jersey…

Most Americans’ knowledge of the seventeenth century comes from heavily mythologized events: the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth, Pocahontas purportedly saving Captain John Smith from execution in early Virginia, and the Salem witch trials of 1692. The myths surrounding what happened in Salem make the true story that much more difficult to uncover. Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, which forms the basis of many Americans’ knowledge of the trials, takes liberties with the story. Miller transforms Tituba, a young Native American girl, into an African slave who led a group of young women into the…

This map of “la Louisiane” was published by French geographer Guillaume de l’Isle. It is the first detailed map of the Gulf Coast region and the Mississippi River, as well as the first printed map to show Texas (identified as “Mission de los Teijas etablie en 1716”). The map is also the first to identify New Orleans, founded in 1718 (see the inset detail of the mouth of the St. Louis River). De l’Isle obtained most data from French explorers and fur-traders traveling through North America. A close examination of the map reveals the land routes of early explorers in North America. Each route is…

By the beginning of 1770, there were 4,000 British soldiers in Boston, a city with 15,000 inhabitants, and tensions were running high. On the evening of March 5, crowds of day laborers, apprentices, and merchant sailors began to pelt British soldiers with snowballs and rocks. A shot rang out, and then several soldiers fired their weapons. When it was over, five civilians lay dead or dying, including Crispus Attucks, an African American merchant sailor who had escaped from slavery more than twenty years earlier.Produced just three weeks after the Boston Massacre, Paul Revere’s historic…

On Christmas Day in 1776 the American Revolution was on the verge of collapsing. Since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the American forces had been driven from New York City to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and reduced to a mere three thousand men. Washington knew that a victory was needed to raise the Americans’ morale and turn the tide of war. With winter on its way and thousands of enlistments soon expiring, his time was running out. Washington, seeing an opportunity, decided to attack Trenton, New Jersey, a nearby town guarded by only fifteen hundred Hessians, German…

Of the nine presidents who were slaveholders, only George Washington freed all his own slaves upon his death. Before the Revolution, Washington, like most White Americans, took slavery for granted. At the time of the Revolution, one-fifth of the colonies’ population lived in bondage. Although most enslaved people were in the South, slavery was a legal institution in each of the thirteen colonies. Fourteen percent of the state of New York’s population was enslaved, for example, and New York City had more enslaved people than any other city in the colonies except Charleston, South Carolina…

On May 25, 1787, the fifty-five delegates to the Constitutional Convention began meeting in a room, no bigger than a large schoolroom, in Philadelphia’s State House. They posted sentries at the doors and windows to keep their "secrets from flying out." They barred the press and public, and took a vow not to reveal to anyone the words spoken there. There were speeches of two, three, and four hours. The convention, which lasted four months, took only a single eleven-day break. First draft of the United States Constitution, with notes by Pierce Butler, August 6, 1787 This copy of the draft of the…