Native nations and the English colonies
English settlers found Jamestown and Plymouth on land long home to hundreds of Native nations, beginning a contest for the continent that would last nearly three centuries.
- American Colonies: The Settling of North America — Alan Taylor, Viking Penguin (2001)
- Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America — Pekka Hämäläinen, Liveright (2022)
- American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492 — Russell Thornton, University of Oklahoma Press (1987)
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
When the English arrived, North America was not empty. Hundreds of Native nations, from the Powhatan confederacy in Virginia and the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) in New York to the Pueblos of the Southwest, lived in villages, farmed maize, beans and squash, traded across the continent and fought and allied with one another. Scholars’ estimates of the population north of Mexico before 1492 range widely, from around two million to seven million or more.
- American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492 — Russell Thornton, University of Oklahoma Press (1987)
- Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America — Pekka Hämäläinen, Liveright (2022)
Jamestown, Virginia, was founded in 1607 as a commercial venture and survived only by growing tobacco on Powhatan land; in 1620 the Pilgrims, religious separatists, landed at Plymouth in New England, helped by the Wampanoag, a meeting later remembered as the first Thanksgiving. Puritans, Quakers in Pennsylvania and Catholics in Maryland followed, alongside Dutch, Swedes, Germans and Scots-Irish.
- American Colonies: The Settling of North America — Alan Taylor, Viking Penguin (2001)
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
European diseases such as smallpox, to which Native people had no immunity, caused catastrophic losses, and wars such as King Philip’s War (1675–76) in New England broke the power of coastal nations. Further inland, though, powerful nations like the Haudenosaunee and later the Comanche held the balance of power for generations, playing European empires against each other.
- Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America — Pekka Hämäläinen, Liveright (2022)
- American Colonies: The Settling of North America — Alan Taylor, Viking Penguin (2001)
By the time Britain won the Seven Years’ War in 1763, thirteen colonies stretched along the Atlantic coast, with their own assemblies, churches and habits of self-rule, and an economy that in the South already rested on slavery.
- American Colonies: The Settling of North America — Alan Taylor, Viking Penguin (2001)
- Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America — Ira Berlin, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (1998)
Brave settlers crossed the ocean to build new lives and practise their faith freely; the Mayflower Compact of 1620 and colonial assemblies planted the seeds of self-government that became American democracy.
- American Colonies: The Settling of North America — Alan Taylor, Viking Penguin (2001)
- The Radicalism of the American Revolution — Gordon S. Wood, Alfred A. Knopf (1992)
The colonists arrived as invaders in a continent of sovereign nations with their own politics, trade and diplomacy. Epidemics, wars and land seizures devastated them, yet Native nations shaped colonial history as powerful actors, not just victims.
- Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America — Pekka Hämäläinen, Liveright (2022)
- American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492 — Russell Thornton, University of Oklahoma Press (1987)
Why it matters today
Americans still argue about which origin story to tell: Pilgrims seeking religious freedom at Thanksgiving, or Native nations losing their land. There are 574 federally recognised tribes today, and many Native Americans experience the national founding story as the start of their dispossession, not their freedom.