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Showing results 1 – 7 of 7

Glossary Term – Organization

Dutch West India Company

The Dutch West India Company was formed in 1621 with a charter to establish colonies in North America in part to prevent the growth of rival empires. The company’s director, Peter Minuit, negotiated the acquisition of Manhattan from the Manhate Indians in 1626. Though it had essentially been granted a monopoly on trade with the Americas, the company’s attempts at attracting Dutch settlers were largly unsuccessful. The company also took part in the slave trade, moving slaves from the west coast of Africa to the West Indies and South America...

Glossary Term – Person

François-Joseph-Paul, count de Grasse

François-Joseph-Paul, count de Grasse (1722–1788) was a French naval commander during the American Revolution. De Grasse was instrumental in the successful siege of Yorktown in 1781, leading his fleet from the West Indies to the Chesapeake and blockading Cornwallis’s army while waiting for the arrival of Franco-American forces under Washington and Rochambeau.

Glossary Term – Person

Horatio Gates

English-born General Horatio Gates (1728–1806) served in North America and the West Indies during the French and Indian War before settling in Virginia. He was appointed a general in the Continental Army. After the fall of Fort Ticonderoga, Gates was placed in command of the Northern Department. Subsequently, he won a great victory at Saratoga, New York. In the wake of his victory, Gates found himself at the center of the Conway Cabal, a short-lived attempt to supplant George Washington as commander in chief. In July 1780, Congress...

Christopher Columbus' letter to Ferdinand and Isabella, 1493. Gilder Lehrman Col

Primary Source

Columbus reports on his first voyage, 1493

On August 3, 1492,...

John P. Zenger, New-York Weekly Journal, March 11, 1733[/4] (GLC08724p3)

Primary Source

Slave revolt in the West Indies, 1733

The prevalence of slavery in pre-Revolutionary...

Teaching Resource

Teaching the Revolution

For most Americans, young and old, the...

Teaching Resource

American Slavery in Comparative Perspective

Of the 10 to 16 million Africans who survived the voyage to the New World, over one-third landed in Brazil and between 60 and 70 percent ended up in Brazil or the sugar colonies of the Caribbean. Only 6 percent arrived in what is now the United States. Yet by 1860, approximately two thirds of all New World slaves lived in the American South.

For a long time it was widely assumed that southern slavery was harsher and crueler than slavery in Latin America, where the Catholic church insisted that slaves had a right to marry, to seek...