National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Contact, American Beginnings: 1492 1690
Thirty one primary sources including historical documents, literary texts, and visual images from which to explore European reactions to the land and the people of the New World and the Natives' responses to European contact and conquest.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: New World: Part I: American Beginnings: 1492 1690
A variety of paintings and drawings that display European images of their first encounters with the land, plants, animals, and native peoples of the western hemisphere. With questions for discussion.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Pacific Coast, American Beginnings: 1492 1690
Primary resources for U.S. history and literature offer two excerpts from the explorations of the Pacific coast by Sir Francis Drake and Vitus Bering as well as maps drawn to reflect those journeys. Includes questions for discussion.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Indians' Accounts, American Beginnings: 1492 1690
Four accounts by Native Americans of their complex responses to and reactions toward European explorers near present-day Canada and Mexico.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: The French, American Beginnings: 1492 1690
Three maps reflecting French exploration along rivers in North America and three French explorers' accounts of the astonishing hardships they endured and the possibilities for trade with natives they opened.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Northwest Passage, American Beginnings: 1492 1690
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.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: New World: Part Ii, American Beginnings: 1492 1690
Two European maps of Florida and Roanoke, and a British and a French account-with associated engravings of these settlements-that promote a European interpretation of and claim over these areas.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: The English, American Beginnings: 1492 1690
Six poems written by navigators and included by George Peckham, and Richard Hakluyt's argument to promote British settlement in North America. Both documents were directed to Queen Elizabeth I in an effort to promote British involvement...
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Failed Colonies, American Beginnings: 1492 1690
Three European accounts of the disappointments, challenges, and outright failures to establish early successful colonial outposts in North America.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Settlement, American Beginnings: 1492 1690
Thirty primary sources-historical documents, literary texts, and visual images-that explore motivations, visions, patterns, goals, challenges, and relationships with indigenous peoples offered by Europeans in their settlement of the New...
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Questions & Answers, American Beginnings: 1492 1690
An online exhibition of images of European settlement to accompany two English, a French, and a Dutch set of promotional accounts that offer advice, encouragement, and occasional warning to prospective immigrants to newly settled areas...
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Instructions, American Beginnings: 1492 1690
Three maps of European settlement in Virginia, the Pacific Northwest, and the Spanish New World, and the accompanying official instructions from lenders and monarchs about the obligations, opportunities, and hopes that those...
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Enslaved Peoples, American Beginnings: 1492 1690
Two Spanish accounts of enslaved Indians in the Caribbean and enslaved Africans in Mexico and statements of the difficulty of maintaining slavery and the lurking threat of a slave revolt.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Go Ahead, American Beginnings: 1492 1690
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...
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Permanence, American Beginnings: 1492 1690
Forty-two primary sources-historical documents, literary texts, and visual images-that explore the complex and interrelated factors that led to a permanent European presence in the New World.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Prosperity, American Beginnings: 1492 1690
Four original source accounts, and four related maps, of successful English, French, and Spanish settlements in North America and the Caribbean that explain the qualities of these settlements and their reasons for permanence and prosperity.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Cities & Towns, American Beginnings: 1492 1690
Four accounts of the visits to and growth of colonial cities in Spanish, British, and French New World settlements that demonstrate why certain communities developed successfully.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: English I, American Beginnings: 1492 1690
Portraits of early New Englanders as well as four buildings from seventeenth-century New England that accompany accounts in those British colonies of struggles, Indian hostilities, and economic success.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: English Ii, American Beginnings: 1492 1690
Three seventeenth-century homes in Pennsylvania and New York and three accounts from those English colonies of the factors leading to prosperity and permanence.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: English Iii, 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.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Power, American Beginnings: 1492 1690
Fifty seven primary sources-historical documents, literary texts, and visual images-and one secondary historical account that explore imperial conflict, European economic rivalry, and the impact of colonial rule on native peoples.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Rivalry I, American Beginnings: 1492 1690
Eleven documents and two maps detailing the almost two hundred year struggle between England and Spain for hegemony in the Caribbean.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Rule, American Beginnings: 1492 1690
Three documents reflecting official views of how to rule and regulate a successful colony in New France, Jamaica, and the Spanish Indies. Includes teacher reasources for framing discussion.
Curated OER
Insula Hyspana, 1494
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...