all future Confederate states, with the exception of Virginia, excluded Lincoln’s name from their ballots.2

The vast majority of northerners went to war to preserve the Union, but the war ultimately transformed into a struggle to eradicate slavery

Women’s Rights Convention

she dedicated her life to abolition and equal rights for women and men.

He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns

He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice

but they had souls large enough to feel the wrongs of others

color phobia.”

As alcoholism became an increasingly visible issue in towns and cities,

fallen women.

perfectionism.

Music

Africans brought to the Americas the greatly varied cultures of their homelands, including folklore, language, music, and foodways

So, whether he has two little or too much, his approach to the gin- house is always with fear and trembling.

The hands are required to be in the cotton field as soon as it is light in the morning

Some even sent their own agents to purchase cheap land at auction for the express purpose of selling it, sometimes the very next day, at double and triple the original value—a process known as “speculation.”

Few knew that the seven bales sitting in Liverpool that winter of 1785 would change the world.

He is unwilling to submit to the laws of the States and mingle with their population.

have melted away to make room for the whites. The waves of population and civilization are rolling to the westward, and we now propose to acquire the countries occupied by the red men of the South and West by a fair exchange, and, at the expense of the United States, to send them to land where their existence may be prolonged and perhaps made perpetual. Doubtless it will be painful to leave the graves of their fathers; but what do they more than our ancestors did or than our children are now doing? To better their condition in an unknown land our forefathers left all that was dea

enable those States to advance rapidly in population, wealth, and power. It will separate the Indians from immediate contact with settlements of whites; free them from the power of the States; enable them to pursue happiness in their own way

egislative or supreme authority cannot assume to itself a power to rule by extemporary arbitrary decrees

men when they enter into society give up the equality, liberty, and executive power they had in the state of Nature into the hands of the society,

Thirdly, in the state of Nature there often wants power to back and support the sentence when right, and to give it due execution.

Defiant slaves could legally be beaten, branded, mutilated, even castrated.

By 1750, slavery was legal in every North American English colony, b

and cut one of his legs so round the bone, that he could not move, the nerves being cut through; others cut our cooks throat to the pipe, and others wounded three of the sailors, and threw one of them overboard in that condition, from the forecastle into the sea.

I have seen some of these poor African prisoners most severely cut for attempting to do so, and hourly whipped for not eating.

South Carolina also banned the freeing of slaves unless the freed slave left the colony.

Virginia planters used the law to maximize the profitability of their slaves and closely regulate every aspect of their daily lives.

By 1750, slavery was legal in every North American English colony,

Events across the ocean continued to influence the lives of American colonists. Civil war, religious conflict, and nation building transformed seventeenth-century Britain and remade societies on both sides of the ocean

Native Americans saw fledgling settlements turned into unstoppable beachheads of vast new populations that increasingly monopolized resources and remade the land into something else entirely. 

housands of other Indians fled the region or were sold into slavery

Native American slaves died quickly, mostly from disease, but others were murdered or died from starvation. The demands of growing plantation economies required a more reliable labor force

three years ago we were all in peace.

divide and separate us who have suffered by their oppressions.

That in whatsoever place, house, or ship, any of the said persons shall reside, be hid, or protected, we declare the owners, masters, or inhabitants of the said places to be confederates and traitors

When God gives us a special commission He wants it strictly observed in every article....

etween God and man, ministers and congregations, magistrates and members of their community, and men and their families--were envisioned in terms of a covenant or contract which rested on consent and mutual responsibilities.

not sparing either age or sex, man, women or child; so sudden in their cruel execution that few or none discerned the weapon or blow that brought them to destruction....

the colonists discovered that Virginia was an ideal place to cultivate tobacco,

The milk in the breasts of the women with infants dried up and thus in a short while the infants perished.

Spaniards who immediately behaved like ravening wild beasts, wolves, tigers, or lions that had been starved for many days.

Dutch women maintained separate legal identities from their husbands and could therefore hold property and inherit full estates

The French preference for trade over permanent settlement fostered more cooperative and mutually beneficial relationships with Native Americans than was typical among the Spanish and English

three crops in particular–corn, beans, and squash, the so-called “three sisters”–provided nutritional needs necessary to sustain cities and civilizations.

. But native populations adapted: they fished, hunted small mammals, and gathered nuts and berries. Native peoples spread across North America

The new people built huts as Obatala had done, and soon Ife prospered and became a city

they flew underneath her and sure enough they caught her

Men typically hunted and women typically gathered and prepared wild foods. Rich and diverse diets fueled massive population growth across the continent.

When crop yields began to decline, farmers would simply move to another field and allow the land to recover and the forest to regrow before they would again cut the forest, burn the undergrowth, and restart the cycle

Portuguese established forts along the Atlantic coast of Africa during the fifteenth century, inaugurating centuries of European colonization there

Native Americans lacked the immunities that Europeans and Africans had developed over centuries of deadly epidemics and so when Europeans arrived, carrying smallpox, typhus, influenza, diphtheria, measles, and hepatitis, plagues decimated native communities. Death rates tended to be highest near European communities who traveled with children, as children tended to carry the deadliest diseases.9 Many died in war and slavery, but millions died in epidemics. All told, in fact, some scholars estimate that as much as 90 percent of the population of the Americas perished within the first century and a half of European contact

And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.