Early Modern
Mayflower Voyage and Plymouth Colony (1620): The Pilgrims
The Pilgrims founded Plymouth Colony, the second lasting English settlement in North America; about half died in the first winter.
Region
Americas
Early Modern
First Thanksgiving (1621): Pilgrims and Wampanoag at Plymouth
A three-day harvest gathering of about 50 colonists and some 90 Wampanoag men that was later reimagined as the origin of a national holiday.
Early Modern
New Amsterdam (1625–1664): Dutch Manhattan Before New York
The Dutch surrendered New Amsterdam to an English fleet in 1664, and it was renamed New York.
Early Modern
Massachusetts Bay Colony (1630): Winthrop and the Puritans
The Winthrop Fleet founded Boston and began the Great Migration that made Massachusetts the leading English colony in New England.
Early Modern
Roger Williams and the Founding of Providence (1636)
Williams founded Providence as a refuge for liberty of conscience; it became the core of the colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.
Early Modern
Pequot War (1636–1638): The Mystic Massacre and Its Aftermath
The Pequot were defeated and their nation formally dissolved by the Treaty of Hartford in 1638, opening their lands to English settlement.
Early Modern
Trial of Anne Hutchinson (1637): Dissent in Puritan Boston
Hutchinson was convicted and sentenced to banishment from the colony; after a church trial in March 1638 she was excommunicated and left for Rhode Island.
Early Modern
Maryland Toleration Act (1649): Early Religious Freedom Law
The act guaranteed free exercise of religion to Christians who accepted the Trinity; it was repealed in 1654, restored in 1658 and ended after the Protestant takeover of 1689.
Early Modern
Bunce Island: The British Slave Castle in Sierra Leone
Tens of thousands of Africans were shipped from the island into Atlantic slavery, many of them to the rice plantations of South Carolina and Georgia.
Early Modern
Hudson's Bay Company (1670): Fur Trade Empire in North America
A royal charter created a trading company with a monopoly over Rupert's Land, the Hudson Bay drainage basin, which it held until 1870.
Early Modern
Marquette and Jolliet Expedition (1673): Down the Mississippi
The expedition charted the upper and middle Mississippi and showed that the river flowed to the Gulf of Mexico, not the Pacific, opening the way for French claims in the interior.
Early Modern
King Philip's War (1675–1676): Metacom's War in New England
The colonies defeated the Native coalition; Metacom was killed in August 1676, and the Native peoples of southern New England lost much of their population, land and independence.