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Finding The Real Jamestown

The archaeologist who discovered the real Jamestown debunks myths and answers long-puzzling mysteries about North America's first successful English colony

William M. Kelso
Winter 2008

Forget much of what you know about the Jamestown colony. For the past 200 years, many archaeologists and historians believed that the James River had largely eroded any traces of the original settlement over the intervening four centuries. Our excavations, ongoing since 1994, have proved otherwise...Read more »

Yankee Gunners At Louisbourg

Fairfax Downey
February 1955

Fortified towns are hard nuts to crack, and your teeth are not accustomed to it. Taking strong places is a particular trade, which you have taken up without serving an apprenticeship to it. Armies and veterans need skillful engineers to direct them in their attack. Have you any? But some seem to think that forts are as easy taken as snuff.

Benjamin Franklin : A letter to his brother in Boston before the siege of Louisbourg.

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Roanoke’s Lost Colony Found?

New ideas—and archaeological evidence—may provide answers to colonial North America’s longest-running mystery

James Horn
Spring 2010

One hot august day in 1590, the heavily armed privateer Hopewell dropped anchor off the Outer Banks of North Carolina. John White had returned to resupply the 118 men, women, and children whom he had left on Roanoke Island three long years earlier.Read more »

Taken By Indians

Kevin Sweeney
Fall 2008

Lancaster, Massachusetts Bay Colony, February 10, 1676 Read more »

Why Jamestown Matters

If the colony had collapsed the English might not have been established as the major colonial power in North America

James Horn
Winter 2008

If Jamestown, England’s first permanent colony in the New World, had failed 400 years ago—and it came within a whisker of being abandoned on any number of occasions—then North America as we know it today would probably not exist. Instead of English, we might be speaking French, Spanish, or even Dutch. If Jamestown collapsed, the emergence of British America and eventually the creation of the United States may never have happened. Read more »

The Deerfield Massacre

One terrible night came to symbolize the whole struggle for supremacy on the North American continent

John Demos
February/march 1993

Our traditional picture of colonial New England is essentially a still life. Peaceful little villages. Solid, strait-laced, steadily productive people. A landscape serene, if not bountiful. A history of purposeful, and largely successful, endeavor. Read more »

Private Flohr’s America

From Newport to Yorktown and the battle that won the war: A German foot soldier who fought for American independence tells all about it in a newly discovered memoir

Robert A. Selig
December 1992
 

“EwrĠe Pöbels in the Nord america bin the werĠe fein Leyds,” wrote Georg Daniel Flohr, composing in very broken English a preface to his memoir of his time as a soldier in the American Revolution. “All the people of North America are fine people.” Sometime in the summer of 1788, in Strasbourg, France, Georg Flohr put down his pen, having completed about 250 pages of script in his native German (except for the English prologue) and some thirty extraordinary illustrations.Read more »

The House Of Many Layers

The Colonial Revival was born in a time of late-nineteenth-century ferment, and from then on the style resurfaced every time Americans needed reassurance

Alexander O. Boulton
May/June 1992

What would you do if you owned a Rembrandt that had been painted over by Picasso? A similar problem confronted the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in 1969, when it came into possession of Carter’s Grove, a mansion on Virginia’s James River that had been built between 1750 and 1755 and extensively remodeled in the 1930s. Should the house be restored to its original condition to portray the life and society of Virginia’s colonial aristocracy, or should it be preserved as it was received, to illustrate a more contemporary social milieu?Read more »

The Parson’s Hearth

A rare survivor of New England’s earliest days testifies to the strength that forged a nation

Alexander O. Boulton
November 1991
 

When Joseph Capen moved to Topsfield, Massachusetts, in 1682 to become minister of the Congregational church there, his prospects did not seem bright. Two of the last three preachers had difficulties collecting their salaries, and another went on trial for intemperance. These conflicts degenerated into charges and countercharges of slander and drunkenness.Read more »

Behind The Federal Facade

An architecture for a new nation found its inspiration in ancient Rome

Alexander O. Boulton
May/June 1989
 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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