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Hernando de Soto's Expedition to La Florida (1539-1542)
The Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto (c. 1500-1542) landed on the west coast of Florida on 30 May 1539, hoping to find wealthy kingdoms to conquer and plunder. His crew journeyed for over four years in southeastern North America, savaging...
Interview
Interview: Costa Rica's Jade Museum
The Jade Museum (Spanish: Museo del Jade y de la Cultura Precolombina) in San José, Costa Rica houses the world's largest collection of ancient jade from the Americas. With nearly 7,000 pieces in its collection, the artifacts at the Museum...
Definition
Portuguese Brazil
With a wealth of natural resources, Brazil was by far the most important colony in the Portuguese empire and was, at one time or another, the world’s leading producer of sugar, diamonds, and tobacco. Colonised from the 1530s, most settlements...
Definition
Picts
The Picts were a people of northern Scotland who are defined as a "confederation of tribal units whose political motivations derived from a need to ally against common enemies" (McHardy, 176). They were not a single tribe, nor necessarily...
Article
Buffalo and Eagle Wing & The American Indian Boarding School
Buffalo and Eagle Wing is a legend of the Plains Indians culture of North America, which is part origin myth and part cautionary tale on the importance of keeping one's promises. Although scholars agree on the general provenance of the tale...
Image
Portrait of Tenskwatawa
A c. 1831 oil-on-canvas portrait by Henry Inman of Tenskwatawa, a Shawnee political and religious leader (c. 1775-1837) and staunch defender of Indigenous American land rights. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington...
Definition
Philistines
The Philistines populated the coastal regions of Canaan from the 12th century BCE to their disappearance in 604 BCE. The word "Philistine" derives from the Hebrew ha-Plištim for the combination of several tribes of Syria and Judea with the...
Article
Slavery in Plantation Agriculture
The first plantations in the Americas of sugar cane, cocoa, tobacco, and cotton were maintained and harvested by African slaves controlled by European masters. When African slavery was largely abolished in the mid-1800s, the center of plantation...
Article
Native American Enslavement in Colonial America
Slavery was practiced by the Native Americans before any Europeans arrived in the region. People of one tribe could be taken by another for a variety of reasons but, whatever the reason, it was understood that the enslaved had done something...
Article
The Megalithic Funerary Art of San Agustín
Beginning approximately 2000 years ago, in a rugged stretch of southwestern Colombia where the Andes split into multiple ranges and the mighty Magdalena River is born, a people created a collection of magnificent ritual and burial monuments...
