National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: English Ii, American Beginnings: 1492 1690

Three seventeenth-century buildings, two portraits, and three original accounts from Virginia and the Carolinas about the qualities and conditions of life in these southern English colonies that led to success and growth.

Two eighteenth-century maps and four accounts of the mutual perceptions, suspicions, and observations between Spanish and French explorers on the Gulf Coast.

Three illustrations and five documents about slave codes, master-slave power dynamics, and free blacks within French and Spanish settlements of the Caribbean.

A Spanish, an English, and a French account of the enormous challenges in maintaining a colonial presence in North America and of the potential national loss-of pride, wealth, and possibility for expansion-if nations abandoned these...

Numerous visual images of artifacts from English settlements at Jamestown and at Plymouth, and from Spanish settlement in Hispaniola, and three original accounts of each of those early settlements that describe the possibilities and the...

Five documents representing the full range of Indian-European antagonisms, struggles for power, and outright warfare among the Spanish, Pueblo, Wampanoag, English, and French in New Spain, New France, New Mexico, and New England.

Four accounts of the complex power relationships between slaves and slave holders within English colonies in Barbados, Virginia and Pennsylvania, as well as documents about slave revolts and anti-slavery agitation.

Four maps examining the hunt for a Northwest Passage and three English accounts detailing the curiosity, greed and optimism that fueled English exploration of North America.

Two maps of English and French rivalries in North America, and two side-by-side accounts of the English and French perspectives on King William's war over power, trade, and economic dominance of the continent.

Four accounts by Native Americans of their complex responses to and reactions toward European explorers near present-day Canada and Mexico.