A veteran of many European military campaigns, Captain John Smith is best known for his presidency of the governing council of Jamestown in Virginia colony.
Read the full storyAlthough a man of many accomplishments, Sir Walter Raleigh is best known as an explorer and the founder of Roanoke colony (1585), England’s first colonial settlement in the Americas.
Read the full storyThe founder of the Pennsylvania colony, William Penn brought religious tolerance and cultural diversity to the English colonies in America.
Read the full storyThomas Douglas, fifth earl of Selkirk, was a Whig politician and philanthropist who was deeply concerned for the welfare of Scottish crofters (tenant farmers with very small holdings) being driven from the Highlands during the clearances—the removal of former tenant farmers by legislatively “enclosing” communal lands—after 1750.
Read the full storySamuel de Champlain was the principal founder of New France and the first European explorer of much of modern Quebec and Ontario.
Read the full storyOne of the chief architects of the Pilgrim migration from Holland to Plymouth in 1620, William Bradford served as Plymouth Colony’s governor between 1622 and 1656 (excepting 1633–34, 1636, 1638, and 1644).
Read the full storyAs Puritan leader and first governor of Massachusetts Bay, John Winthrop played a fundamental role in establishing both the Puritan cultural ethos that characterized the leading English colonists in America and England’s actual political control of the Atlantic seaboard.
Read the full story