Pilgrims, Puritans, and Early Settlers The area that is today the State of Massachusetts has a long and colorful history as part of the original thirteen colonies. Famous for the Pilgrims that sailed the Atlantic in the Mayflower, Massachusetts was also home to several of the first pioneering groups to cross the ocean. The Pilgrims […]
History of Maryland
The first European person to explore Maryland was John Cabot in 1498. At the time he found only Native American tribes within the area. Maryland was not settled by Europeans until the 1600s. At that time the main tribes included the Nanticoke on the Eastern Shore and the Shawnee inland. People of the Cherokee Tribe […]
History of Nevada
The state of Nevada has the nickname, “Silver State,” due to the vast silver deposits within the state. Today, 80% of all silver mining happens in Nevada. In 1864, Nevada became the 36th state to enter the Union of the United States of America. The state flag bears the term “Battle Born,” reflecting the state’s […]
History of Illinois
Louis Jolliet and Father Marquette arrived in Illinois in 1673 as explorers for the French empire. They claimed the region for France and it remained a French territory until 1763, when it passed to the British. The area was then ceded to the United States in 1783 and became part of the Northwest Territory acquisition. […]
History of Colorado
Before the Spanish arrived in New Spain in the 1500s, the area now known as Colorado was inhabited for many thousand of years by people local to the Rocky Mountains as shown by archeological finds. When the Spanish first visited the Rocky Mountains in 1598, they found Native American tribes such as Apache, Arapaho, Cheyenne, […]
History of California
By the early 1800s when Merriweather Lewis and William Clark reached the West Coast of the America, the Spanish had been in California for three hundred years. Spain had maintained a number of missions and presidios in New Spain since 1519 and laid claim to the north costal provinces of California in 1542. The royalty […]
History of Alaska
The land mass known today as Alaska was originally occupied only by Native peoples that had been in the area for thousands of years before European or Russian explorers arrived in the 1700s. The Inuit people inhabited much of the central to northern areas. The southern and Panhandle (See the circle on the map.) areas […]
History of Arizona
The written history of Arizona began when the Spaniards sent exploration parties north, from Mexico, into the territory that is now Arizona in 1539. In 1821 Mexico declared its independence from Spain and then went to war with the United States. This war ended in 1848, and the land north of the Gila River became […]