Early Colonization and the Growth of Colonies

North America’s Indigenous Societies before 1500

As the year is launched, this opening to the unit centers Indigenous history with a trio of lessons that addresses the pre-encounter cultures and history of Indigenous North America. This cluster serves as a bridge (or review) of Grade 4 content; it also serves as an introduction to disciplinary vocabulary, practices and thinking routines that will be featured throughout the unit and the year. Students will think about the artifacts and material evidence that help historians interpret the continent’s history before 1500 and practice making observations about historical evidence. They will use maps and geographical information to connect objects to places they were made and used, and organize information about the diverse societies that created these materials. These lessons give all students a common starting point for Grade 5. They establish for students the important awareness that the lands that became the United States had millennia of history before the first Europeans arrived. The story of Indigenous societies, especially those on the Atlantic rim and the regions that later became the 13 British colonies, will be continued in the clusters that follow.

European Nations and Their “New World” Colonies

While Europeans saw the Americas as a “new world,” we know that it was not. Starting in the 16th century, European nations began to compete for territory, wealth, and the natural resources of the continent, establishing colonies that were shaped in part by their own lifeways, values, and beliefs and also by those of the people they encountered. Building on the previous cluster of lessons (1-3), Cluster 2 shows the drastic changes that Indigenous people experienced as a result. In this set of three lessons, students discuss the motives and colonizing strategies of several European powers and their relations with the original peoples of those regions. This is a panoramic view, to bring into focus the wider global history of the Americas before drilling down into the British North American strand in Cluster 3. It puts the Dutch, French and Spanish in the story of early America alongside the British. Cluster 2 gives students a chance to compare the different choices that various European powers made and some of the methods they utilized. In terms of historical thinking and practice standards, it introduces the definition of a primary source and initiates the process of question-generation about primary sources . The cluster addresses essential questions about the importance of places and the impact of beliefs and values.

Britain’s North American Colonies before 1750

Cluster 3 builds on themes and understandings from Cluster 2, but it puts a spotlight on British North America—the regions that became the thirteen colonies as well as the British Caribbean and the maritime British provinces of what is today Canada. The cluster is launched with a pair of overview lessons that introduces the 13 British colonies while cueing the cluster’s Supporting Question. Students then explore the diverse character of these colonies through the lens of economy and labor systems. Although the diversity of the colonies is a major learning objective for Cluster 3, the theme of interdependence is also developed, specifically in a closing lesson where students trace the interconnections across British North America using sugar as a thread. That final lesson sets the stage for Cluster 5, where the development of a slave-labor economy, and its myriad ramifications, is the centerpiece..

Conflict and Cooperation in the British Colonies

In Cluster 4, students explore the character of interactions between British colonists and Indigenous societies, considering how they developed across place and time. Students will distinguish forms of conflict and cooperation, identifying and writing about examples of each. Students then extend those themes with a biographical case study of Pocahontas as a leader, diplomat and cultural mediator. Cluster 4 provides continuing work with primary sources, but also introduces and provides ample practice with the close reading of secondary sources, helping students both distinguish and see the relationship between primary and secondary sources.

Slavery and the Struggle for Freedom in the Americas

Cluster 5 takes a step back to trace a central story in more detail: the emergence of race-based slavery in North America. It investigates the lives and survival strategies of African people forced into enslavement and migration to the Americas in general and the British colonies especially. Race-based slavery was a central feature of Britain’s North American colonies, and it was legal and present in all 13. By the eighteenth century, it was one of the most important foundations of wealth in those places. The topic of slavery was previously introduced in Cluster 3, but Cluster 5 gives fuller attention to such topics as forced migration and the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the West African origins of most enslaved African people, the legal structures that British colonial authorities devised to invent “legal enslavement,” and the cultural continuity and belief that sustained African people and their descendants in the ongoing struggle to resist oppression. In these lessons, students are introduced to the origins of enslavement in the Americas, interacting with video segments, maps, and primary sources to analyze how African people were forced migrants to the Americas, and were sold to other human beings through a slavery system that became birth- and race-based. They learn that African people resisted their enslavement through uprisings and the anti-slavery efforts of the earliest abolition activists historians know about.

The British American Colonies in 1750

Cluster 6 is an Inquiry Cycle built around the question, Did most people in the British colonies believe they were American in 1750? By focusing on a question of identity and belief, this cluster is another strong lens through which students can come to understand the unit’s essential questions. As the closing activity of the unit, this pair of inquiry-driven lessons is a bridge to Unit 2 and sets students up for the complicated content that follows in the “Road to Revolution.” But it also reaches back to synthesize and review many of the themes and content developed in Clusters 1-5, thereby activating knowledge that students will draw upon in the Summative Assessment.