29 items
For most of New England’s history, African Americans have been present. Their history here begins as far back as at least 1629, when enslaved Africans were brought to Massachusetts, African Americans subsequently making significant...
The New York African Burial Ground
The unearthing of the “Negroes Burying Ground” in New York City in 1991 challenged the narrow, popular perception of slavery as an antebellum, southern-based, agrarian institution. It revealed to the public what historians had long...
"What We Leave the Earth": The African Burial Ground in New York City
In October 2021, the African Burial Ground National Monument commemorated the thirtieth anniversary of the New York City slave cemetery’s rediscovery by the General Services Administration (GSA). In 1991, the GSA started construction...
Abolition and Religion
One verse of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," the unofficial anthem of the Northern cause, summarized the Civil War’s idealized meaning: In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in His bosom that...
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The Colonial Virginia Frontier and International Native American Diplomacy
Telling the story of Native Americans and colonial Virginians is a complex challenge clouded by centuries of mythology. The history of early settlement is dominated by the story of a preteen Pocahontas saving the life of a courageous...
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Anti-Slavery before the Revolutionary War
Anti-slavery is almost as old as slavery itself. Indeed it could easily be argued that the first enslaved person who jumped overboard or led an on-ship rebellion on the Middle Passage launched the anti-slavery movement. The modern...
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England on the Eve of Colonization
When James VI of Scotland and his entourage began his journey south to take up the crown of England in April of 1603, it looked as if the ancient enmity between the two realms had finally been swept away. With England’s aristocratic...
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The League of the Iroquois
No Native people affected the course of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American history more than the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, of present-day upstate New York. Historians have been attempting to explain how and why ever since,...
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Jamestown and the Founding of English America
Shortly before Christmas 1606, three small ships left London’s Blackwall docks to establish a settlement on Chesapeake Bay, in North America. The largest of the ships, the heavily armed, 120-ton merchantman Susan Constant , carried...
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The Impact of Horse Culture
For all the calamities that came in the long run, European contact at first offered American Indian peoples many opportunities and advantages. Old World technologies provided a range of trade goods that brought vast improvements to...
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Women and the United States Supreme Court
If you ask most people about the history of women and the United States Supreme Court, they are likely to point to the historic nomination of Sandra Day O’Connor as the first female justice, in 1981. That is a watershed moment in our...
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The Revolutionary Era West, before and after American Independence
In December 1772, a year before angry colonists heaved chests of East India tea into Boston Harbor, the British government seemed on the cusp of creating a new North American colony. Named “Vandalia,” in honor of Queen Charlotte’s...
The Pueblo Revolt
In 1680 the people known collectively as "Pueblos" rebelled against their Spanish overlords in the American Southwest. Spaniards had dominated them, their lives, their land, and their souls for eight decades. The Spanish had...
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Iberian Roots of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1640
In its broadest sense, African American history predates the history of the United States, colonial or otherwise; by the time the English colony of Virginia was founded in 1607, Africans and people of African descent had already been...
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