Program info

Year One: Colonization, Settlement, and Communities
(Summer Academy)

Click here to compare Academic Year with Summer Academy.

The establishment of the original Thirteen Colonies will be the focus of year one. Daily life, new ideas, and the creation of an American Identity will emerge through our examination.

Some of the Inquiry Questions to be addressed will include:

• What was daily life like in colonial America for yeoman farmers, merchants, artisans, planters, indentured servants, slaves and Native Americans?
• What roles did women play in colonial economies?
• How did Spanish colonization differ from English colonization?
• How did ideas about individual rights, popular sovereignty and law develop in different part of the British, Spanish, Dutch and French colonies?
• What were the roles of private property, communal landholding, the fur trade, the Protestant “work ethic,” the plantation system, merchants, small farmers, indentured servants and slaves in the economies that arose in the English colonies?
• What kinds of relationships, alliances and conflicts developed among Native American societies, European countries and settlers?
• What were the causes and results of the French and Indian War?

Below are the files from the Summer Academy. They are listed as "Histories" - which are all the PowerPoints from the lectures. "Stories" - contains the information from all the archivists, and "Pedagogies" that has some teacher tips, weblinks and such.