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Nearly 20 years before Jamestown was settled, the English established one of the earliest colonies in North America around the Chesapeake Bay region, until the colony had over 100 inhabitants. Like other early settlements, Roanoke struggled to survive in its infancy, to the extent that the colony's leader, John White, sailed back to England in 1587 in an effort to bring more supplies and help. However, the attempts to bring back supplies were thwarted...
2) North-West Rebellion: The History and Legacy of the Native American Uprising against Canada in the
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The Métis people, later one of the three recognized aboriginal groups in Canada, were an indigenous group that came from marriages between French traders and native women, but Scotch and English cultures were also heavy influencers among the Métis. The term comes from a Latin word for "to mix" and originally referred to the children of these relationships, but the Métis would grow to become a major intermediary between the white settlers moving...
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During the 12th century, the people of Ireland came under the sway of the English, who had extended into their domain. With every subsequent century, English dominion in the land gradually expanded, leading to the exceedingly harsh treatment of native Irish populations at the hands of English settlers. The Tudor period was especially tumultuous, with Elizabeth I waging a notoriously expensive conquest against the Irish in the waning years of her reign.
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“Scotch-Irish” is an American term that became popular in the latter 1800s, referring to the largely Protestant immigrants to the United States originating in the northern Irish province of Ulster. The majority of Scotch-Irish were people intentionally settled in Ulster as a counter to the native Catholic Irish, who immigrated to Ulster from the lowlands of Scotland and the borderlands between England and Scotland.
The Ulster settlers were a...
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Throughout the 19th century, American settlers pushing across the Western frontier came into contact with diverse American tribes, producing a series of conflicts ranging from the Great Plains to the Southwest, from the Trail of Tears to the Pacific Northwest. Indian leaders like Geronimo became feared and dreaded men in America, and Sitting Bull's victory over George Custer's 7th Cavalry at Little Bighorn was one of the nation's most traumatic military...
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Explorers, soldiers, and settlers of African-American heritage comprise an unfamiliar story to most students of American history. However, in the push westward, they were present in sufficient enough numbers to exert great influence on the nation's development. Among the earliest accounts is that of Isabel de Olvera, who settled in New Mexico around the year of 1600, and it is estimated that by 1750, 25% of Albuquerque's population shared discernible...
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Most Americans have heard of the Little Bighorn, the 1876 battle in which a band of Lakota Sioux and their allies wiped out most of the 7th US Cavalry under the command of George Armstrong Custer. The movie images are of fierce warriors in long eagle feather headdresses flowing behind them as they gallop across the plains on nimble Indian ponies. In fact, many Americans know the names of the commanders who beat Custer, most notably Sitting Bull and...
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As settlers continued to encroach further west, the Shawnee, who were attempting to put together a confederacy of Native Americans to resist, stood firm and ready to fight them. Before America fought Britain in the War of 1812, they were engaged in Tecumseh's War around the Great Lakes. The fighting made him famous and made a military hero (and eventually a president) out of William Henry Harrison, whose victory at Tippecanoe is considered the end...
9) Cattle Kate: The Controversial Life and Legend of the Wyoming Territory's Most Famous Woman Outlaw
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In the span of scarcely more than a half century, the West developed from a handful of scattered fur trapping enterprises predominantly inhabited by males to a region full of burgeoning rustic communities, and before the government's official "closure" of the frontier as a lawless expanse, Western societies were essentially living apart from traditional American rule of law. What judicial structures were at work across the West were erratic, often...
10) Cantre'r Gwaelod: The Mysterious Legend of the Ancient Sunken Kingdom Known as the Welsh Atlantis
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Wales is a whimsical country with a powerful, complex, myth-filled and oft disputed history. In 2004, geneticists working with geographers and archaeological colleagues undertook a "People of the British Isle" study. They sought out thousands of volunteers, all four of whose grandparents had been born in the same place, and they analyzed their genetic make-up. "Modern genetic analysis can read the patterns of variation in our complete set of DNA...that...
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In response to Sioux raids along the Bozeman Trail, the United States Army closed the trail in 1865 to mount the Powder River Expedition against the Sioux alliance that kept ravaging settlers and the beleaguered Crows. With the Civil War nearing its end, spare men were hard to come by, but still the Powder River Expedition was prepared under the leadership of Brigadier General Patrick Connor. Charged with keeping the roads and trails of the plains...
12) Little Turtle's War: The History and Legacy of the 18th Century Conflict Between the United State
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When the American Revolution ended, the United States and Britain reached an impressively comprehensive peace in the Treaty of Paris. Among the important terms of the treaty, Britain recognized the colonies as free and relinquished territorial claims to them. The two sides then negotiated the boundaries that separated the United States from the British colonies in present-day Canada. Additionally, the British and Americans strove to share certain...
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The westward movement of Americans in the 19th century was one of the largest and most consequential migrations in history, and as it so happened, the paths were being formalized and coming into use right around the time gold was discovered in the lands that became California in January 1848. Located thousands of miles away from the country's power centers on the East Coast at the time, the announcement came a month before the Mexican-American War...
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For much of the 20th century, Latin American governments in large part lived under a system of military junta governments. The mixture of indigenous peoples, foreign settlers and European colonial superpowers produced cultural and social imbalances into which military forces intervened as a stabilizing influence. The proactive personalities of military heads and the rigid structures of such a hierarchy guaranteed the "strong man" commanding officer...
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The name "Iroquois", like many Native American tribal names, is not a name the people knew themselves by, but a word applied to them by their enemies the Huron, who called them "Iroquo" (rattlesnake) as an insult. The French later added the suffix "ois." Moreover, the Iroquois are not even a single tribe but a confederation of several different tribal nations that include the Seneca, Oneida, Onondaga, Mohawk, Cayuga and the Tuscarora, who didn't become...
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Along the sandy shores and ancient forests of crystal blue Lake Erie, a proud, brave, and confident people lived long ago, building homes, raising crops, hunting game, rearing children, and surviving through harsh winters and hot summers. None of their tribe remains today to tell their story, but their name lives on in the waters of a Great Lake. The Erie Tribe would have been completely lost to history if not for the archeological evidence and archival...
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The history of California is one that witnessed the rise and fall of several nations and peoples. From the first natives to settle the fertile lands to the encroaching foreigners from the south, east, west, and north, the land that eventually became the Golden State received them all. From across oceans, mountains, plains, and deserts, people came to take advantage of the region's natural resources.
In the mid-19th century, the battles would culminate...
18) The Fur Trade in North America: The History and Legacy of the Competition and Conflicts Over Furs
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Though the importance of hats is easy to overlook, it was deadly serious in more ways than one, impacting the beavers and birds used to make fashionable hats, the environment of the region, and the people fighting over the resources. Beaver hats put the Dutch, British, and French in conflict, and later the Americans and Canadians. Plumed women's hats were considerably less important historically, but they had a huge ecological impact. The beaver is...
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Among all the Native American tribes, the Spanish, Mexicans, and Americans learned the hard way that the warriors of the Apache were perhaps the fiercest in North America. Based in the Southwest, the Apache fought all three in Mexico and the American Southwest, engaging in seasonal raids for so many centuries that the Apache struck fear into the hearts of all their neighbors. What is reliably documented about Cochise is that the violence he participated...
20) America's Greatest Engineering Projects: The Construction History of the Transcontinental Railroad
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The Transcontinental Railroad, laid across the United States during the 1860s, remains the very epitome of contradiction. On the one hand, it was a triumph of engineering skills over thousands of miles of rough terrain, but on the other hand, it drained the natural resources in those places nearly dry. It "civilized" the American West by making it easier for women and children to travel there, but it dispossessed Native American civilizations that...
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