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Overhead view of Jamestown

Colonial Jamestown, Assailed By Climate Change, Is Facing Disaster

The 400-year-old site of Jamestown, Va., battered by flooding and climate change, is listed as endangered.

How Jamestown Abandoned a Utopian Vision and Embraced Slavery

In 1619, wealthy investors overthrew the charter that guaranteed land for everyone.
Painting depicting Jamestown Fort under construction.

Learning from Jamestown

The violent catastrophe of the Virginia colonists is the best founding parable of American history.
John White's drawing of a Powhatan village.

Powhatan People and the English at Jamestown

A primary source set and teaching guide created by educators.
Reconstruction of Mt. Malady hospital at Henricus Historical Park, Virginia.
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Health Care in the New World

Reporter Catherine Moore visits the first hospital in the New World and finds out why the “public plan” in the Virginia colony may have had its drawbacks.
Sketch of tobacco cultivation at Jamestown.

The Other Founding

A review of two books exploring the importance and legacy of the founding of the English colony at Jamestown.
Men wielding muskets.

America’s Original Gun Control

Early in our history, firearms laws were everywhere.
English painting of Pocahontas by Simon van de Passe.

The Moment That Changed Colonial-Indigenous Relations Forever

How a massacre on March 22, 1622 irrevocably shaped relations between Indigenous Americans and English colonists.
Painting of the first Thanksgiving

The First Thanksgiving is a Key Chapter in America's Origin Story

What happened in Virginia four months later mattered much more.
The cover of Cynthia A. Kierner's "Inventing Disaster," which depicts a shipwreck during a storm.

On Inventing Disaster

The culture of calamity from the Jamestown Colony to the Johnstown Flood.
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How the Kikotan Massacre Prepared the Ground for the Arrival of the First Africans in 1619

America was built by the labor of stolen African bodies, on stolen Native American lands.

The Hopefulness and Hopelessness of 1619

Marking the 400-year African American struggle to survive and to be free of racism.

Women in Jamestown and Early Virginia

A conversation with the curator of an exhibit about the oft-overlooked lives of women in early colonial Virginia.

A Symbol of Slavery — and Survival

Angela’s arrival in Jamestown in 1619 marked the beginning of a subjugation that left millions in chains.

Dropouts Built America

When the going gets tough, the tough start something better.

Twenty-Four Things You Should Know about Pocahontas

To begin with, her formal name was Amonute.

Will the Real Pocahontas Please Stand Up?

We might be better off if we knew a little more – or a little less – about her actual life.

An Icy Conquest

“We are starved!” cried the sixty skeletal members of the English colony of Jamestown as provisions arrived in 1610.
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Was It Bad Luck or Climate Change?

Our circumstances have changed a lot since early colonial times. Unfortunately, our thinking about climate hasn’t changed enough.

The Fallacy of 1619

Rethinking the history of Africans in early America.

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, Jamestown Women

A new British television series, Jamestown, set off a minor public debate about just how rebellious women could be in the past.
Book cover of "Squanto: A Native Odyssey" by Andrew Lipman.

Squanto: A Native Odyssey

A new biography tells a far more complex, nuanced, and, frankly, interesting historical episode than that depicted in the typical grade-school pageant.

How America’s Rich Legacy of Fear and Hatred Fuels the Conspiracy Theories of Today

Panic about Catholics, Freemasons, and, later, Jews, is deeply woven into American history, and forms the basis of our fertile culture of conspiracy theorizing.

The Brutal Legacy of the Longleaf Pine

The carefully-tended longleaf pine forests of North America were plundered by European colonizers. They're still recovering.
Patricia Hearst in front of SLA flag, 1974; CSU Archives/Everett Collection/Alamy Stock Photo.

American Captivity

The captivity narrative as creation myth.
Estebanico

Black America’s Neglected Origin Stories

The history of Blackness on this continent is longer and more varied than the version I was taught in school.
Pocahontas characters overlaid onto a landscape.

Deconstructing Disney: Queer Coding and Masculinity in Pocahontas

Disney gets inventive when they need to circumvent white people’s historical responsibility for genocidal atrocities — and queerness is a useful scapegoat.

The English Were Relative Latecomers to the Americas, Despite the USA's Founding Myth

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

"City on a Hill" and the Making of an American Origin Story

A now-famous Puritan sermon was nothing special in its own day.
Travels through Virginia. From Theodor de Bry's 'America', Vol. I, 1590, after a drawing of John White. Depicting American Indians dancing.

The Construction of America, in the Eyes of the English

In Theodor de Bry’s illustrations for "True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia," the Algonquin are made to look like the Irish. Surprise.

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