Colonial America

The first settlers at the English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia hoped to forge new lives away from England―but life in the early 1600s at Jamestown consisted mainly of danger, hardship, disease and death. All of the early settlers in 1607 were men and boys, including ...read more

The Great Awakening was a religious revival that impacted the English colonies in America during the 1730s and 1740s. The movement came at a time when the idea of secular rationalism was being emphasized, and passion for religion had grown stale. Christian leaders often traveled ...read more

Freedom of religion is protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits laws establishing a national religion or impeding the free exercise of religion for its citizens. While the First Amendment enforces the “separation of church and state” it doesn’t ...read more

What fuels your world? If you were a colonist or a citizen of the early United States, the answer would be firewood—the material that not just warmed people’s bodies, but allowed them to power the expansion of a new nation. In many ways, firewood helped create America. But it ...read more

Archaeologists working at one of the oldest historic homes in Boston have uncovered a privy that may have belonged to the family of Paul Revere. And while it may seem unusual to be thrilled over an outhouse, the find may yield some intriguing colonial clues. The discovery was ...read more

Frog’s legs, gooseberries, candied fruit peel, eggs, sugar, cinnamon, cloves, artichoke hearts and potatoes. It may sound like the weirdest shopping list ever, but in reality it’s the recipe for a pie once considered a delicacy by Virginia’s richest colonists. And Frank Clark, ...read more

Most Americans are familiar with France, Spain, Holland and England’s colonial history in the United States, but lesser-known is New Sweden, a Swedish holding that once spanned parts of Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The upstart settlement dates to the early 17th ...read more

Many of the details of the Popham colony have been lost to history, but in its heyday the tiny settlement in Maine was considered a direct rival of Jamestown. Both colonies got their start in 1606, when the British King James I granted the Virginia Company a charter to establish ...read more

In the summer of 2014, archaeologists from the Commonwealth Heritage Group were excavating a site located at the corner of South Third and Chestnut Streets in Philadelphia, the future home of the new Museum of the American Revolution. In the course of the work, they found a dozen ...read more

Early in October, a local historian named Tom Garner was driving through downtown Pensacola when he noticed ground disturbed on a private lot where a house had recently been bulldozed. Garner had read the translated version of Don Tristán de Luna’s papers years earlier and ...read more

Blaring trumpets and thundering artillery serenaded Don Pedro Menéndez de Avilés as he waded ashore on September 8, 1565. The Spanish admiral kissed a cross held aloft by the fleet’s captain, Father Francisco Lopez, then claimed Florida for both his God and his country. As ...read more

On a moonlit night in 1796, Harvard University student John Collins Warren and a pack of shadowy figures snuck into Boston’s North Burying Ground with tools in their hands and mischief on their minds. The trespassers crept over to the cemetery’s freshest grave, belonging to a ...read more

1. An Englishman gave the colony its start. Hired by English merchants, explorer Henry Hudson twice entered the Arctic Ocean in an attempt to find a Northeast Passage to Asia, only to be stymied each time by sheets of sea ice. Though unable to gain additional backing in his home ...read more

In the winter of 1757, one of the bluest of Colonial Connecticut’s bluebloods set sail from New London. Colonial governors sprouted from Dudley Saltonstall’s family tree, and his ancestors included John Winthrop, the Puritan founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and Sir ...read more

Great Britain’s victory over France in the Seven Years’ War, also known as the French and Indian War, gave it control over all of eastern North America. In an attempt to further flex their dominance in the New World, King George III issued a royal proclamation on October 7, 1763, ...read more

In 1566, Spanish explorer Juan Pardo began the first of two expeditions along the southeast coast of North America, establishing a series of fortifications in what is now South Carolina. The following year, Pardo travelled west, journeying almost 300 miles into what is now North ...read more

Jamestown, the first permanent English colony in North America, was founded in May of 1607 by 104 settlers who arrived aboard three ships: the Susan Constant, the Discovery and the Godspeed. They founded their colony on a narrow peninsula in the James River, constructing a wooden ...read more

In late March 1662, John and Bethia Kelly grieved over the body of their 8-year-old daughter inside their Hartford, Connecticut, home. Little Elizabeth had been fine just days before when she returned home with a neighbor, Goodwife Ayres. The distraught parents, grasping at any ...read more