God of Israel is among us, and ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies. The Lord will make our name a praise and glory, so that men shall say of succeeding plantations: "The Lord make it like that of New England.

the Lord will surely break out in wrath against us and be revenged on such a perjured people, and He will make us know the price of the breach of such a covenant.

As a result of the enclosure of traditional common lands, which were increasingly used to raise sheep, many rural laborers were thrown off the land, producing a vast floating population.

the Puritan had made a covenant with God to establish a truly Christian community, in which the wealthy were to show charity and avoid exploiting their neighbors while the poor were to work diligently.

All social relationships--between 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.

may now by right of war, and law of nations, invade the country, and destroy them who sought to destroy us;

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....

they came unarmed into our houses, without bows or arrows, or other weapons, with deer, turkeys, fish, furs, and other provisions to sell and truck with us for glass, beads, and other trifles;

the colonists discovered that Virginia was an ideal place to cultivate tobacco, which had been recently introduced into Europe.

An island nation, England depended upon a robust navy for trade and territorial expansion.

Many cited spiritual concerns and argued that colonization would glorify God, England, and Protestantism by Christianizing the New World’s pagan peoples. Advocates such as Richard Hakluyt the Younger and John Dee, for instance, drew upon The History of the Kings of Britain, written by the twelfth century monk Geoffrey of Monmouth, and its mythical account of King Arthur’s conquest and Christianization of pagan lands to justify American conquest.

The island’s population increased from fewer than three million in 1500 to over five million by the middle of the seventeenth century.

Spain had a one-hundred year head start on New World colonization and a jealous England eyed the enormous wealth that Spain gleaned from the new World.

The Spanish not only built Mexico City atop Tenochtitlán, but food, language, and families spilled across racial barriers. In 1531, a poor Indian named Juan Diego reported that he was visited by the Virgin Mary, who came as a dark-skinned Nahuatl-speaking Indian. Reports of miracles spread across Mexico and the Virgen de Guadalupe became a national icon for a new mestizo society.

Militaristic migrants from northern Mexico, the Aztecs moved south into the Valley of Mexico, conquered their way to dominance, and built the largest empire in the New World. When the Spaniards arrived in Mexico they found a sprawling civilization centered around Tenochtitlan, an awe-inspiring city built on a series of natural and man-made islands in the middle of Lake Texcoco, located today within modern-day Mexico City.

Mercenaries joined the conquest and raced to capture the human and material wealth of the New World.

As news of the Spanish conquest spread, wealth-hungry Spaniards poured into the New World seeking land and gold and titles

Eshu demanded sacrifice be made to Obatala and himself before he would deliver the message. The people sacrificed some goats, and Eshu returned to the sky.  

The next day he realized what he had done, and swore never to drink again, and to take care of those who were deformed, thus becoming Protector of the Deformed.  

Wherever the sand landed it formed dry land, the bigger piles becoming hills and the smaller piles valleys. Obatala jumped to a hill and named the place Ife. The dry land now extended as far as he could see.

He did as he was told, whereupon the hen landing on the sand began scratching and scattering it about

In the beginning, there was only the sky above, water and marshland below. The chief god Olorun ruled the sky, and the goddess Olokun ruled what was below. Obatala, another god, reflected upon this situation, then went to Olorun for permission to create dry land for all kinds of living creatures to inhabit

So he shook violently the various animals – the bears, deer, and turkeys – causing them to become small at once, a characteristic which attached itself to their descendants

When the boys had grown to man’s estate, they decided that it was necessary for them to increase the size of their island, so they agreed to start out together, afterward separating to create forests and lakes and other things.

When these were wearied they asked, "Who will volunteer to care for this woman?" The great Turtle then took her, and when he got tired of holding her, he in turn asked who would take his place. At last the question arose as to what they should do to provide her with a permanent resting place in this world.

It so happened that this chief’s daughter was taken very ill with a strange affection. All the people were very anxious as to the outcome of her illness. Every known remedy was tried in an attempt to cure her, but none had any effect.

And God said, Let us make man in our image, 1 Cor. 11.7 after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. 27  So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them

And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, 18  and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth

In the Pacific Northwest, Indian peoples including the Kwakwaka’wakw, Tlingits, and Haidas took advantage of the lush forests and many rivers. The abundance of large forest mammals including deer, elk, moose, and caribou, as well as waters filled with salmon, halibut, sturgeon and others created a tremendous surplus of food

In the American Southwest sometime between the years 900 and 1300 ancient Puebloan peoples built a large civilization sustained by advanced irrigation and a vast trading network linking goods from as far as Central Mexico and the Mississippi River

Several expansive civilizations in the Midwest and Southwest demonstrated the potential for large-scale Indian civilizations.

But native populations adapted: they fished, hunted small mammals, and gathered nuts and berries.

Agriculture arose sometime between nine- and five-thousand years ago, almost simultaneously in the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. Mesoamericans in modern-day Mexico and Central America first domesticated maize and and developed perhaps the hemisphere’s first settled population around 1,200 BCE.

Nomadic hunter-gatherers, they traveled in small bands following megafauna–enormous mammals that included mastodons and giant horses and bison–into the frozen Beringian tundra at the edge of North America.

Hunters across the hemisphere preyed on plentiful game and natural foods and the population boomed