Browse Items (99 total)

James Horn, author of numerous books on colonial America, and Douglas Foard, expert on Spanish history at George Mason University, describe the remarkable story of Virginia Indian Paquiquineo, also known by the Spanish as Don Luís de Velasco.…

Karen Kupperman (professor of history at New York University) vividly retells the creation story of the Powhatan Indians. This audio clip is an excerpt from an interview originally aired during week of September 30, 2006 on the radio program With…

Karen Kupperman (professor of history at New York University) Randy Shifflett (history professor at Virginia Tech) and Jim Whittenburg (history professor at the College of William and Mary) discuss interpreters like Henry Spelman, an Englishman who,…

English interpreter Thomas Savage, gesturing at center, negotiates with two of Pocahontas's brothers (at right) in this engraving from Theodor de Bry's Americae (1634). Pocahontas, a daughter of the paramount chief Powhatan, was captured by the…

This engraving, taken from life, shows an American Indian man wearing a necklace, earrings, and head ornaments. The inscription in the upper left reads, "Unus Americanus ex Virginia" (an American from Virginia), a place name that early in the…

When the British planted a cross and their flag on territory previously unclaimed by European nations, they were, Chief Justice John Marshall would later say, exercising a right of discovery that extended back to the fifteenth century colonization by…

When Robert and Lynn Ripley purchased a 300-acre farm in Gloucester County, they knew that archaeologists suspected it was once the home of Powhatan, the Indian chief who reigned when the first English settlers moved into Virginia. Researchers…

This engraved portrait of Captain John Smith, identified here as "Admirall of New England," is a detail from a map of New England that was included in Smith's bookThe Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles(1624). The same…

An early twentieth-century oil painting by Philadelphia artist Jean-Léon Gérôme Ferris presents a dramatic scene of the arrival of Pocahontas, daughter of Indian paramount chief Powhatan, in Jamestown following her abduction by…

An Indian woman and man pose under a banner that reads, "Ples de Virginie." The first word may be an abbreviation for "peuples" or (peoples), or, less likely, for "perles" (pearls), in reference to the figures' necklaces. Although the engraving…