Colonial America

England’s first permanent settlement, Jamestown, survived disease, famine, and war with the Powhatan to become the core of a tobacco colony. In 1619 Virginia held the first representative assembly in English America — and the first documented Africans arrived there. In 1620 the passengers of the Mayflower signed the Mayflower Compact and settled at Plymouth, surviving through an alliance with the Wampanoag.

Over the next century and a half, thirteen English colonies took shape, from Puritan New England to the diverse Middle Colonies and the plantation South. Enslaved Africans became the backbone of Southern agriculture, and slavery was legal in every colony. Colonial assemblies grew used to governing themselves. Religious revival in the Great Awakening swept through the colonies in the 1730s and 1740s.

Native nations resisted, negotiated, and adapted. In New Mexico, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 expelled the Spanish for twelve years. In the Northeast, the Haudenosaunee balanced between the French and British empires until the French and Indian War (1754–1763) left Britain dominant — and set the stage for revolution.