Click here to learn more about the New England Colonies.Click here to learn more about the Middle Colonies.Click here to learn more about the Southern Colonies.

Some 40,000 years from now, give or take a few millennia, someone, somewhere in the universe may find and listen to the Golden Record, NASA’s attempt to describe Earth and its peoples to anyone out there who might be interested. There are actually two copies of the Golden Record, each on its own spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, which were launched out into the cosmos in 1977, one year after the Bicentennial of the United States and almost five centuries after the first sustained encounters between the peoples of the Americas and the peoples of Europe. It is interesting that...

Was colonial America a democratic society?Were the colonists justified in resisting British policies after the French and Indian War (1754–1763)?Were the origins of the American Revolution primarily economic or ideological?Were the colonists’ responses to the Stamp Act (1765) justified?How did the Stamp Act Congress pave the road for American independence?Is violence a sound strategy to bring about significant political and social change? (Case studies to help examine this question could include: the Stamp Act riots [1765], the Boston Massacre [1770], the Boston Tea Party [1773],...

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Of the 10 to 16 million Africans who survived the voyage to the New World, over one-third landed in Brazil and between 60 and 70 percent ended up in Brazil or the sugar colonies of the Caribbean. Only 6 percent arrived in what is now the United States. Yet by 1860, approximately two thirds of all New World slaves lived in the American South. For a long time it was widely assumed that southern slavery was harsher and crueler than slavery in Latin America, where the Catholic church insisted that slaves had a right to marry, to seek relief from a cruel master, and to purchase their...

In 1915, fifty years after the end of the Civil War, D.W. Griffith released his epic film Birth of a Nation. The greatest blockbuster of the silent era, Birth of a Nation was seen by an estimated 200 million Americans by 1946. Based on a novel by a Baptist preacher named Thomas Dixon, the film painted Reconstruction, the period following the Civil War, as a time when vengeful former enslaved people, opportunistic White scalawags, and corrupt Yankee carpetbaggers plundered and oppressed the former Confederacy until respectable White southerners rose up and restored order. A ...

By early 1863, voluntary enlistments in the Union army had fallen so sharply that the federal government instituted an unpopular military draft and decided to enroll black, as well as white, troops. Indeed, it seems likely that it was the availability of large numbers of African American soldiers that allowed President Lincoln to resist demands for a negotiated peace that might have including the retention of slavery in the United States. Altogether, 186,000 black soldiers served in the Union Army and another 29,000 served in the Navy, accounting for nearly 10 percent of all...

In 1854 Horace Greeley, a New York newspaper editor, gave Josiah B. Grinnell a famous piece of advice. "Go West, young man, and grow up with the country," said Greeley. Grinnell took Greeley's advice, moved west, and later founded Grinnell, Iowa.Before 1830 Iowa was Indian land, occupied by the Sauk, Fox, Missouri, Pottowatomi, and other Indian tribes. The defeat of the Sauk and Fox Indians in the Black Hawk War in 1832 opened the first strip of Iowa to settlement. By 1840 Iowa's population of settlers had risen to 40,000.Because no government land office was established in Iowa...

The day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt suspended naturalization proceedings for Italian, German, and Japanese immigrants, required them to register, restricted their mobility, and prohibited them from owning items that might be used for sabotage, such as cameras and shortwave radios. The curfews on Italian immigrants were lifted in October 1942, on Columbus Day.Approximately 600,000 Italian aliens lived in the United States in 1940. About 1,600 Italian citizens were interned, and about 10,000 Italian-Americans were forced to move from their houses in...

Each spring, pioneers gathered at Independence and St. Joseph, Missouri, and Council Bluffs, Iowa, to begin a 2,000 mile journey westward. For many families, the great spur for emigration was economic: the financial depression of the late 1830s, accompanied by floods and epidemics in the Mississippi Valley. Said one woman: "We had nothing to lose, and we might gain a fortune." Between 1841 and 1867, more than 350,000 trekked along the overland trails. Most pioneers traveled in family units. At first, pioneers tried to maintain the rigid sexual division of labor that characterized...