Native American History

There''s a mythology about the native Americans, that they were all peaceful and in harmony with nature - it''s easy to create narratives when there is no written record.

Bernard Bailyn, one of our greatest historians, shines his light on the nation's Dark Ages.

Names and summaries of notable Native Americans in American History.

By 1600, organized tribes such as the Delaware and Shawnee had moved into present-day West Virginia. In addition, the powerful Iroquois Confederacy began exerting its influence on the region. The Confederacy was an alliance of five Iroquois-speaking nations - Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca - formed in present-day New York in the late 1500s.

Find out more about the history of King Philip's War, including videos, interesting articles, pictures, historical features and more. Get all the facts on History.

By the time of early European colonization attempts, there were over 30,000 Native Americans in Massachusetts living amongst a variety of tribes belonging to the Algonquin language group. Some of the most well known tribes were the Wampanoag, Pequot, Nipmuck, and the Massachuset. They lived in small bands and had no supreme chief.

Native American cultures in the United States include a wide array of socially and geographically diverse groups, whose nomadic ancestors are believed to have traveled via a long-gone land bridge across the Bering Strait at least 13,000 years ago. Displaced and often persecuted by European explorers and the settlers that followed, Native Americans have struggled to maintain their ancestral practices, while increasing their representation in American political and cultural life.

During European colonization, how did the French, Spanish, and Dutch view the Native Americans and how did their interaction differ? What affect did their interaction have on colonization?

Early in the 19th century, the United States felt threatened by England and Spain, who held land in the western continent. At the same time, American settlers clamored for more land.

Migration from the original Cherokee Nation began in the early 1800's as Cherokees, wary of white encroachment, moved west and settled in other areas of the country.

The history of Native Americans in the United States began in the Pre-Columbian era with the settlement of the Americas by the Paleo-Indians. Anthropologists have identified and studied a wide variety of cultures that existed during this era. Their subsequent contact with Europeans profoundly impacted the history.

Many thousands of years before Christopher Columbus' ships landed in the Bahamas, a different group of people discovered America: the nomadic ancestors of modern Native Americans who hiked over a “land bridge” from Asia to what is now Alaska more than 12,000 years ago.