American History in Credo: Pre-Columbian and Colonial Period

The eldest of the five children of a weaver, Columbus probably first entered his father’s trade, but before 1470 he went to sea and for some years voyaged and traded for various employers based in Genoa, his birthplace.

The original inhabitants of the American continent, who arrived during the last glacial period (according to some estimates, 14–40 000 years ago). Collectively, these original peoples have been called Native Americans, American Indians, or Amerindians. These terms are European American inventions that obscure the diversity of peoples indigenous to the Americas.

The Pilgrims were English settlers, members of a Separatist sect, who emigrated to New England in 1620 in search of the opportunity to practice their religion without persecution.

Daughter of Wahunsonacook, headman of the Algonquian-speaking Powhatan Confederacy of Tidewater Virginia; mythologized in American literature as an Indian princess and epitomized in Vachel Lindsay’s poem Our Mother Pocahontas as “the mother of us all.”

John Rolfe was responsible for the development of a cash crop in the Virginia colony; he cross-pollinated tobacco plants to create a mild blend highly desired in Europe.

John Smith was a central figure in establishing Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English colony in North America. His greatest influence, however, was as a writer of promotional literature about colonization and a wildly adventurous, albeit bewildering, autobiography.

One of America’s earliest cultural pluralists and advocates of the separation of church and state, Roger Williams founded Providence, Rhode Island, as a safe haven for early European settlers who had suffered religious persecution. He also believed in forging good relations with the Native peoples of New England.

Governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony, b. Edwardstone, near Groton, Suffolk, England. Of a landowning family, he studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, came into a family fortune, and became a government administrator with strong Puritan leanings.

Governor of Plymouth Colony, b. Austerfield, Yorkshire, England. As a young man he joined the separatist congregation at Scrooby and in 1609 emigrated with others to Holland, where, at Leiden, he acquired a wide acquaintance with theological literature.

Original North American colonies that signed the Declaration of Independence from Britain in 1776.

Begun as colonial muscling for control of the Ohio River valley, the French and Indian War (1754-1760) ignited the worldwide conflict between the British and French known as the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) and ended France’s North American empire. The French and Indian War was the last and largest North American conflict between Britain and France and their respective Native American allies.

Settlement made by the Pilgrims on the coast of Massachusetts in 1620.

Union for "mutual safety and welfare" formed in 1643 by representatives of the colonies of Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven.

Plan formulated by John Law for the colonization and commercial exploitation of the Mississippi valley and other French colonial areas.

Series of trials that took place near Salem, part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in 1692, in which more than 150 men and women were accused and 19 found guilty of practising witchcraft, then a crime punishable by death. In the summer of 1692 all of eastern Massachusetts trembled in fear as neighbors and kinfolk accused one another of practicing witchcraft. Hundreds were jailed, and in the first round of the ensuing trials from June 2 to September 21, 1692—the most extensive mass trials of suspected criminals in the colonial period of American history—all of the defendants were convicted.

Extension of political and economic control over an area by a state whose nationals have occupied the area and usually possess organizational or technological superiority over the native population.

Broadly, the extension of rule or influence by one government, nation, or society over another. Evidence of the existence of empires dates back to the dawn of written history in Egypt and in Mesopotamia, where local rulers extended their realms by conquering other states and holding them, when possible, in a state of subjection.

Economic system of the major trading nations during the 16th, 17th, and 18th cent., based on the premise that national wealth and power were best served by increasing exports and collecting precious metals in return. Theory that a nation’s interests were best served by development of overseas trade and restriction of imports.

Institution based on a relationship of dominance and submission, whereby one person owns another and can exact from that person labor or other services. The institution of slavery extends back beyond recorded history. The enforced servitude of one person (a slave) to another or one group to another. A slave has no personal rights and is considered the property of another person through birth, purchase, or capture. Slavery has been found among many groups of low material culture, as in the Malay Peninsula and among some Native Americans; it also has occurred in more highly developed societies, such as the southern United States.

Indentured servitude was an arrangement sealed by a contract between emigrants and merchants for temporary labor in exchange for the cost of passage and maintenance to British settlements in the Americas.

The Mayflower Compact was an agreement between the separatist Pilgrims emigrating from England, setting out the guidelines for the envisaged government of their settlement in the New World.

English chartered company that established the Massachusetts Bay colony in New England. Organized (1628) as the New England Company, it took over the Dorchester Company, which had established a short-lived fishing colony on Cape Ann in 1623.