The British seize Manhattan from the Dutch—and alter the trajectory of North American history
Fashion once expressed America’s class distinctions. But it doesn’t any more.
A Soldier-Humanist Fights a War for Peace in North America
The archaeologist who discovered the real Jamestown debunks myths and answers long-puzzling mysteries about North America's first successful English colony
Gallant exploits against long odds helped the American militia capture the famous French citadel.
New ideas—and archaeological evidence—may provide answers to colonial North America’s longest-running mystery
A hurricane sank a fleet in Pensacola Bay 450 years ago, dooming the first major European attempt to colonize North America, a story that archaeologists are just now fleshing out
Mary Rowlandson, captured by Indians in 1676 and marched into the “vast and howling Wilderness”, survived to write the first and perhaps most powerful example of the captivity narrative
If the colony had collapsed the English might not have been established as the major colonial power in North America
More than two decades before the Revolution broke out, a group of Americans voted on a scheme to unite the colonies. For the rest of his life, Benjamin Franklin thought it could have prevented the war. It didn’t—but it did give us our Constitution.
One terrible night came to symbolize the whole struggle for supremacy on the North American continent
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
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
A rare survivor of New England’s earliest days testifies to the strength that forged a nation
Very. The legacy of British traits in America is deeper and more significant than we knew.
An architecture for a new nation found its inspiration in ancient Rome
On their weathered stone battlements can
be read the whole history of the three-century
struggle for supremacy in the New World
The first settlers marked the borders of their lives with simple fences that grew ever more elaborate over the centuries
Did the Indians have a special, almost noble, affinity with the American environment—or were they despoilers of it? Two historians of the environment explain the profound clash of cultures between Indians and whites that has made each group almost incomprehensible to the other.
Just before the Revolution, newly studied documents reveal, the flight of British subjects to the New World forced a panicky English government to wrestle with this question
Four hundred years ago the first English settlers reached America. What followed was a string of disasters ending with the complete disappearance of a colony.
The storm that wrecked the Virginia-bound ship Sea Venture in 1609 inspired a play by Shakespeare— and the survivors’ tribulations may well have sown the first seeds of democracy in the New World
How Hadley, Massachusetts, (incorporated 1661) coped with wolves, drunks, Indians, witches, and the laws of God and man.
A British Officer Portrays Colonial America
Why have Americans perceived nature as something to be conquered?
In 1639 an Englishman named Lion Gardiner singled out a piece of the New World and removed his family thereto—his very own island off the Connecticut coast. And despite invasions of pirates, treasure hunters, and British soldiers, Gardiners Island has remained in the hands of that family ever since. Because of Lion’s shrewd investment his descendants have indeed been
A visit to New York when it was little, not very old, and rather more attractive