Sarah Hale, who made Thanksgiving a national holiday Thanksgiving in the 1700s In the 1700s, most of the thirteen colonies had public Thanksgiving feasts at least once a year. Sometimes people held them more than once a year. The governor of each colony decided when to celebrate Thanksgiving. But in 1817, the governor of New York State decided to [...]
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 [...]
Boston in the time of Anne Hutchinson Anne Hutchinson's backstory Anne Hutchinson was born in 1603, the same year that Queen Elizabeth died. Her father was a Puritan minister in England. Like Margaret Cavendish about the same time, Hutchinson was home-schooled with her brothers and sisters. She became a Puritan like her father. Who were the Puritans? More [...]
Sojourner Truth Sojourner Truth didn't know where her people came from, because she was born into slavery. But it was probably West Africa or the Congo. She may have been part Native American. Sojourner Truth was born Isabella Baumfree in New York State, in 1797, just after the Revolutionary War. She had about ten brothers and sisters; they [...]
Iroquois history: Trade beads made in Venice in the 1600s and traded in North America Iroquois trade for beads and knives When the first European traders came to the north Atlantic coast, about 1600 AD, the Iroquois were very interested in trading with them. People sold the Dutch traders lots and lots of beaver furs to make hats with, and [...]
The first English settlement at Jamestown in 1607 The first European people who came to the east coast of North America, in the 1600s and 1700s, came for many different reasons, so their settlements were very different from each other. The earliest successful settlement was in Florida, in 1565 AD, when Spanish explorers founded the [...]
Early Iroquois history: Mohawk pottery Haudenosaunee Early Iroquois history starts when the Iroquois originally came to America with the other Native Americans. They may have first settled around what's now Maryland around 1000 AD. The Iroquois didn't call themselves "Iroquois", which is an Algonquin insult meaning "snakes". They called themselves the "Haudenosaunee", meaning "people who live in [...]
Hopewell Mound in Ohio About 200 BC, people - including the Adena people - formed a culture called the Hopewell culture (named after a farm where archaeologists first dug it up). These people lived in the Northeast and Midwest of North America (from modern New York to Missouri and from Wisconsin to Mississippi). Nobody knows for [...]
