Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormons In 1820 AD, Joseph Smith was fourteen years old. The teenager lived in a small town in New York State. He was upset when he realized that different Protestant ministers in his town had different ideas about God and how to worship God. The Presbyterians thought one [...]
A Shawnee cooking pot (ca. 1500 AD) The Shawnee people probably first suffered from contact with European explorers and traders shortly after 1500 AD. That's when they caught measles from their Iroquois and Mississippian neighbors. Many Shawnee died. There were fewer Shawnee people than there had been before. Shawnee people kept on living in villages, but the villages seem to have [...]
A Mississippian warrior About 800 AD, the old Hopewell people seem to have developed what we call the Mississippian culture. People living near the Mississippi river got new kinds of corn about this time. Now, instead of just building burial mounds, people built mounds with flat tops and built buildings on top of the mounds, like a Mayan temple. Some [...]
