In Jamestown, Virginia, the first elected legislative assembly in the New World—the House of Burgesses—convenes in the choir of the town’s church.

On or about August 20, 1619, “20 and odd” Angolans, kidnapped by the Portuguese, arrive in the British colony of Virginia and are then bought by English colonists. The exact date is not definitively known (a letter from the time identified the ship's arrival coming in "the latter part of August"), but this date has been chosen by many to mark the arrival of the enslaved Africans in the New World—beginning two and a half centuries of slavery in North America.