Age of Exploration

The forces that would shape my home state’s violent history were set in motion by a 480-year-old map made by a Spanish explorer.

A new book investigates the indigenous Americans who were brought to or traveled to Europe in the 1500s—a story central to the beginning of globalization.

15th century dogma connects the genocide and land dispossession of Native Americans with the enslavement and oppression of African Americans throughout history.

A re-examination of the Age of Exploration may have more than a little to teach us about modern venture capitalists.

To fully understand the deep roots of today’s white Christian nationalism, we need to go back at least to 1493.

A new book works to counteract the “symphony of erasure” that has obscured and denied Africa’s contributions to the contemporary world.

Asian sailors came to the west coast of America in 1587. Within a century they were settled in colonies from Mexico to Peru.

A new book reverses the narrative of the Age of Discovery, which has long evoked the ambitions of Europeans looking to the Americas rather than vice versa.

The site offers rare evidence of interactions between de Soto and Indigenous people.

Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, Geronimo, Robert Oppenheimer, Steven Spielberg, and the mysteries of New Mexico's desert.

An excerpt from a new book that explores the threat of made-up monsters in the age of imperial conquest.

How scientific thought informed colonization and religious conversion during the Age of Discovery.

Until the 1600s, Spain, France and Portugal were much bigger players in the settlement of the New World.

The discovery of a lost shipwreck has pitted treasure hunters and archaeologists against each other, raising questions about who should control sunken riches.

Ed Ayers visits with public historians in Texas and explores what's wrong with remembering the Alamo as the beginning of Texas history.

Meet cartography's most persistent mistake.

A newly digitized map offers a rare glimpse at the way Europeans conceived of the Americas before British colonization.

However the Little Ice Age came to be, we now know that climatic cooling had profound consequences for contemporary societies.

Columbus wasn't unique in his belief that bizarre, monstrous humanoids inhabited the far reaches of the world.

Considering astronomy's history from the shadow of the Arecibo Observatory reveals the discipline's intimate ties to imperialism.

The self-confidence that kept Columbus going was his undoing.

Confused 17th-century Europeans argued that human groups were separately created, a precursor to racist thought today.

This is the story of Giovanni da Verrazzano, who never reached Asia, but became the first European to set foot on the site of the future city of New York.

It is impossible to understand the U.S. without understanding its Indigenous history, writes Ned Blackhawk.

In his final book, David Graeber looks at an experiment in radical democracy and piratical justice in Madagascar.

Why do we eat pumpkin pie spice in the fall?

James M. Smith explains the last debates between Loyalists and Patriots prior to the official outbreak of the American Revolution.

Oregon became ground zero of America’s racial reckoning protests last summer. But activists say it doesn’t know its own history.

Distributing them equally is key to defeating the coronavirus.

Centuries before Columbus, Vikings came to the Western hemisphere. How far into the Americas did they travel?