This lesson is part of a project-based, hands-on unit in which children discover the native cultures that existed in the Americas prior to the arrival of explorers. The students will "become" part of their assigned culture through...

Copper plate engravings offer one example of the racialization of colonized peoples. At the turn of the 17th century, most Europeans' visual conceptions of the Americas came from the engravings of the workshop of Flemish print-maker...

Consider these resources while illustrating the natives' response to Europeans settling into the Americas.

Columbus' arrival laid the basis for encounters between Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans. This unit examines how these contacts altered the way of life of peoples around the globe.

In this gallery you will encounter art of America in a completely new fashion. Taking a look at various paintings, sculpture, architecture, fine crafts, and photography provides an inside look at our nation's character and ideals. Learn...

Six poems written by navigators and included by George Peckham, and Richard Hakluyt's argument to promote British settlement in North America. Both documents were directed to Queen Elizabeth I in an effort to promote British involvement...

A lengthy lesson plan about the Norse encounters with indigenous people of North America by examining two sets of stories handed down through history by Vikings. [pdf]

These activities will allow students to become explorers and travel across the United States to encounter a variety of land forms. Students will create a story about their trek and then create choreography to match the sequence generated...

Photographs of Native Americans and an essay that notes just how assimilated Native Americans had become in Christian America.

Two Spanish accounts of enslaved Indians in the Caribbean and enslaved Africans in Mexico and statements of the difficulty of maintaining slavery and the lurking threat of a slave revolt.

A Spanish Franciscan and a French Jesuit report on the reciprocal relationship between natives and Catholic missionaries as Europeans settled New France and New Spain.

Thirty one primary sources including historical documents, literary texts, and visual images from which to explore European reactions to the land and the people of the New World and the Natives' responses to European contact and conquest.

Fifty seven primary sources-historical documents, literary texts, and visual images-and one secondary historical account that explore imperial conflict, European economic rivalry, and the impact of colonial rule on native peoples.

Poignant account of the decimation of indigenous peoples in both South and North America during the 16th and 17th Centuries.

Colonial House video segment in which Colonists and the Passamaquoddy people encounter each other for the first time in a reenactment of a New England settlement in 1628. [4:38]

Get up close to a variety of weather conditions, encounter local weather patterns through spectacular imagery, and learn how to observe and describe different weather conditions with the beloved characters from PEEP and the Big Wide...

A variety of paintings and drawings that display European images of their first encounters with the land, plants, animals, and native peoples of the western hemisphere. With questions for discussion.

Forty-two primary sources-historical documents, literary texts, and visual images-that explore the complex and interrelated factors that led to a permanent European presence in the New World.

One modern historical assessment and several original accounts of the mistrust, negotiations, alliances, trading, and disease transmission between European colonizers and native peoples in North America.

An exhibit by the Library of Congress supplies diverse facts on the famous 1492 voyage. The exhibition first examines the encounter between the European explorers and the native people. They explore five geographical areas: The Caribbean...

This lesson will be an interdisciplinary lesson that involves both English Language Arts and Social Studies (History). The lesson will be primarily technology-based and also project-based that will have the students performing historical...

Portraits of early New Englanders as well as four buildings from seventeenth-century New England that accompany accounts in those British colonies of struggles, Indian hostilities, and economic success.

Five literary responses to exploration and discovery-poems, fictional accounts, a play, and journal entries-that reflect European desire, frustration, and enchantment with the New World.

Three seventeenth-century buildings, two portraits, and three original accounts from Virginia and the Carolinas about the qualities and conditions of life in these southern English colonies that led to success and growth.