Listen to a short interview with Karen Ordahl Kupperman Host: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane Captain John Smith's 1607 voyage to Jamestown was not his first trip abroad. He had traveled throughout Europe, been sold as a war captive in Turkey, escaped, and returned to England in time to join the Virginia Company's colonizing project. In Jamestown migrants, merchants, and soldiers who had also sailed to the distant shores of the Ottoman Empire, Africa, and Ireland in search of new beginnings encountered Indians who already possessed broad understanding of Europeans. Experience of foreign environments and cultures had sharpened survival instincts on all sides and aroused challenging questions about human nature and its potential for transformation. It is against this enlarged temporal and geographic background that Jamestown dramatically emerges in Karen Kupperman's breathtaking study. Reconfiguring the national myth of Jamestown's failure, she shows how the settlement's distinctly messy first decade actually represents a period of ferment in which individuals were learning how to make a colony work. Despite the settlers' dependence on the Chesapeake Algonquians and strained relations with their London backers, they forged a tenacious colony that survived where others had failed. Indeed, the structures and practices that evolved through trial and error in Virginia would become the model for all successful English colonies, including Plymouth. Capturing England's intoxication with a wider world through ballads, plays, and paintings, and the stark reality of Jamestown--for Indians and Europeans alike--through the words of its inhabitants as well as archeological and environmental evidence, Kupperman re-creates these formative years with astonishing detail.

Sam, Derek, and Caitlin travel to historic Jamestown as part of Field School. When a priceless artifact is labeled a fraud, they must work to uncover the mystery.

The essential history of the extraordinary year in which American democracy and American slavery emerged hand in hand in colonial Virginia. Along the banks of the James River, Virginia, during an oppressively hot spell in the middle of summer 1619, two events occurred within a few weeks of each other that would profoundly shape the course of history. In the newly built church at Jamestown, the General Assembly -- the first gathering of a representative governing body in America -- came together. A few weeks later, a battered privateer entered the Chesapeake Bay carrying the first African slaves to land on mainland English America. In 1619, historian James Horn sheds new light on the year that gave birth to the great paradox of our nation: slavery in the midst of freedom. This portentous year marked both the origin of the most important political development in American history, the rise of democracy, and the emergence of what would in time become one of the nation's greatest challenges: the corrosive legacy of racial inequality that has afflicted America since its beginning.

Draws on archaeological research to explore the lives and deaths of the first settlers at Jamestown and their interactions with the region's native peoples.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAACP IMAGE AWARD WINNER • A dramatic expansion of a groundbreaking work of journalism, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present. “[A] groundbreaking compendium . . . bracing and urgent . . . This collection is an extraordinary update to an ongoing project of vital truth-telling.”—Esquire NOW AN EMMY-NOMINATED HULU ORIGINAL DOCUSERIES • FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, NPR, Esquire, Marie Claire, Electric Lit, Ms. magazine, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist In late August 1619, a ship arrived in the British colony of Virginia bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival led to the barbaric and unprecedented system of American chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the source of so much that still defines the United States. The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning 1619 Project issue reframed our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. This book substantially expands on that work, weaving together eighteen essays that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America with thirty-six poems and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance. The essays show how the inheritance of 1619 reaches into every part of contemporary American society, from politics, music, diet, traffic, and citizenship to capitalism, religion, and our democracy itself. This book that speaks directly to our current moment, contextualizing the systems of race and caste within which we operate today. It reveals long-glossed-over truths around our nation’s founding and construction—and the way that the legacy of slavery did not end with emancipation, but continues to shape contemporary American life. Featuring contributions from: Leslie Alexander • Michelle Alexander • Carol Anderson • Joshua Bennett • Reginald Dwayne Betts • Jamelle Bouie • Anthea Butler • Matthew Desmond • Rita Dove • Camille T. Dungy • Cornelius Eady • Eve L. Ewing • Nikky Finney • Vievee Francis • Yaa Gyasi • Forrest Hamer • Terrance Hayes • Kimberly Annece Henderson • Jeneen Interlandi • Honorée Fanonne Jeffers • Barry Jenkins • Tyehimba Jess • Martha S. Jones • Robert Jones, Jr. • A. Van Jordan • Ibram X. Kendi • Eddie Kendricks • Yusef Komunyakaa • Kevin M. Kruse • Kiese Laymon • Trymaine Lee • Jasmine Mans • Terry McMillan • Tiya Miles • Wesley Morris • Khalil Gibran Muhammad • Lynn Nottage • ZZ Packer • Gregory Pardlo • Darryl Pinckney • Claudia Rankine • Jason Reynolds • Dorothy Roberts • Sonia Sanchez • Tim Seibles • Evie Shockley • Clint Smith • Danez Smith • Patricia Smith • Tracy K. Smith • Bryan Stevenson • Nafissa Thompson-Spires • Natasha Trethewey • Linda Villarosa • Jesmyn Ward

The American dream was built along the banks of the James River in Virginia. The settlers who established America's first permanent English colony at Jamestown were not seeking religious or personal freedom. They were comprised of gentlemen adventurers and common tradesmen who risked their lives and fortunes on the venture and stood to reap the rewards—the rewards of personal profit and the glory of mother England. If they could live long enough to see their dream come to life. The Jamestown Experiment is the dramatic, engaging, and tumultuous story of one of the most audacious business efforts in Western history. It is the story of well-known figures like John Smith setting out to create a source of wealth not bestowed by heritage. As they struggled to make this dream come true, they would face relentless calamities, including mutinies, shipwrecks, native attacks, and even cannibalism. And at every step of the way, the decisions they made to keep this business alive would not only affect their effort, but would shape the future of the land on which they had settled in ways they never could have expected. The Jamestown Experiment is the untold story of the unlikely and dramatic events that defined the "self-made man" and gave birth to the American dream. Tony Williams taught history and literature for ten years, and has a master's in American history from Ohio State University. He wrote Hurricane of Independence and The Pox and the Covenant, and is currently a full-time author who lives in Williamsburg, Virginia, with his wife and children.

Was America founded on the auction block in Jamestown in 1619 or aboard the Mayflower in 1620? The controversy erupted in August 2019 when the New York Times announced its 1619 Project. The Times set to transform history by asserting that all the laws, material gains, and cultural achievements of Americans are rooted in the exploitation of African-Americans. Historians have pushed back, saying that the 1619 Project conjures a false narrative out of racial grievance. This book sums up what the critics have said and argues that the traditional starting point for the American story--the signing of the Mayflower Compact aboard ship before the Pilgrims set foot in the Massachusetts wilderness--is right. A nation as complex as ours, of course, has many starting points, including the Declaration of Independence in 1776. But if we want to understand where the quintessential ideas of self-government and ordered liberty came from, the deliberate actions of the Mayflower immigrants in 1620 count much more than the near accidental arrival in Virginia fifteen months earlier of a Portuguese slave ship commandeered by English pirates. Schools across the country have already adopted The Times' radical revision of history as part of their curricula. The stakes are high. Should children be taught that our nation is, to its bone, a 400-year-old system of racist oppression? Or should we teach children that what has always made America exceptional is its pursuit of liberty and justice for all?

Two English children are told the story of their grandfather's experiences as one of the original Jamestown colonists of 1607.