History of Colonial North America

During the first age of globalization, when Europeans first arrived in the Americas, two worlds met: the old and the new. The Native Americans who had inhabited the land for millennia clashed with the Spanish, the French, the English and the Dutch as they arrived and founded their colonies. This course examines the period of contact and settlement, as well as the different conflicts and challenges facing the conquerors of the land as they discovered, settled, adapted and prospered in the different colonies of New Spain, New France, New England, the Middle Colonies and the Planter Colonies. The conquerors even forced Africans to settle in their colonies as slaves. This world gradually vanished when some of the colonies broke away from their mother-countries, and gained autonomy and self-determination.