Cape colony: Did you mean...?

The Parson's Cause was a legal and political controversy that arose in the British colony of Virginia in the early 1760s. In response to the royal veto of the Two Penny Act, a policy passed by Virginia's House of Burgesses, a young lawyer...

The discovery of diamonds in 1867 in Griqualand ultimately transformed the entire region of Southern Africa. Huge European financial investment and significant immigration followed. The diamonds led to Britain taking over Griqualand and the...

Vasco da Gama (c. 1469-1524) was a Portuguese navigator who, in 1497-9, sailed around the Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa and arrived at Calicut (now Kozhikode) on the south-west coast of India. This was the first direct voyage from...

Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643) was a religious dissident who was brought to trial by John Winthrop (1588-1649) and the other magistrates of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637 for spreading "erroneous opinions" regarding religious belief and...

17th-century Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC) navigators were the first Europeans to set foot on Australian soil. Although there is a strong theory that the Portuguese explorer, Cristóvão de Mendonça (1475-1532...

The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas (Tordesilhas) was an agreement between the monarchs of Spain and Portugal to divide the world between them into two spheres of influence. The imaginary dividing line ran down the centre of the Atlantic Ocean...

The Puritans were English Protestant Christians, primarily active in the 16th-18th centuries CE, who claimed the Anglican Church had not distanced itself sufficiently from Catholicism and sought to 'purify' it of Catholic practices. The term...

Metacomet (also known as King Philip and Metacom, l. 1638-1676) was chief of the Wampanoag Confederacy between 1662-1676, best known as the leader of Native American forces during the conflict known as King Philip’s War (1675-1678) during...

John Carver (l. 1584-1621 CE) was one of the leaders of the Mayflower expedition, first signer of the Mayflower Compact, and first governor of Plymouth Colony. He was a prominent member of the separatist congregation of Leiden, the Netherlands...

A bronze statue of Poseidon (or Zeus) from Cape Artemisium (460 BCE), National Archaeological Museum, Athens.