Lane - Millard

Our Colonial Heritage
In this unit, you will learn about the first Americans—the American Indian peoples who were here when the first Europeans arrived. You will also learn about the Europeans who colonized North America, claiming land around the continent. The British colonies that settled along the Atlantic coast would become the first 13 states of the United States.
Political divisions like colonies and states did not exist before the Europeans arrived since each American Indian group occupied a territory that had no formal boundaries. As the map Physical Features of North America shows, the continent's physical geography varies. American Indians lived in different environments, which each supported different ways of life.

Contact with European colonists changed those ways of life. The map North American Land Claims, 1750 indicates where European nations claimed land in North America. To satisfy French demand for furs, American Indians in regions claimed by France began to hunt more. The Spanish attempted to enslave Indians and, along with the English, wanted their land.

Increased hunting, flight from slavery, and loss of land pushed some Indian groups into territory occupied by other Indians. As the British colonies became a nation, and as that nation grew, this population shift continued. Eventually, almost no Indian lands remained, but the names of places in North America are reminders of those lands. The Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri rivers get their names from American Indian words, as do about half the states.

Henry VIII Beheaded Meghan Markle’s Ancestor
The family tree of Prince Harry's fiancé is getting a lot of attention.
BECKY LITTLEUPDATED:SEP 1, 2018ORIGINAL:NOV 27, 2017
The United States woke up on November 27, 2017, to some exciting news: American actress and humanitarian Meghan Markle is engaged to Prince Harry of Wales.

Yet not everyone is so pleased. When Kensington Palace announced their engagement, the conservative U.K. magazine The Spectator ran an article arguing that Markle is “unsuitable” for Harry, whose grandmother is the supreme governor of the Church of England, because she is divorced. It included this choice line: “seventy years ago, Meghan Markle would have been the kind of woman the Prince would have had for a mistress, not a wife.”

That’s a pretty strange thing to argue, considering that King Henry VIII only established the Church of England to “annul” his 24-year marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Even more bizarrely, this isn’t the only way that the stories of Markle and Henry VIII intersect. According to The Telegraph, Henry VIII also beheaded one of Markle’s relatives.

Henry VIII of England, reigned 1509-47. (Credit: Stock Montage/Getty Images)
Henry VIII of England, reigned 1509-47. (Credit: Stock Montage/Getty Images)

The Telegraph credits this discovery to Michael Reed, “a Australian teacher and amateur historian” who has studied the Royal Family’s ancestry. By his account, Markle is related to Lord Hussey, 1st Baron Hussey of Sleaford. This 15th- and 16th-century royal earned knighthood during the Cornish rebellion of 1497. But when he was unable to put down another rebellion four decades later, Henry VIII called for his land, his wealth, and his head.


Researchers have been scrutinizing Markle’s family tree since last year, when she and Harry revealed they were dating. Markle is a biracial woman with a black mother and a white, Jewish father, and the relation to Lord Hussey comes from her father, Thomas W. Markle. He is descended from Captain Christopher Hussey, the great-great-great-grandson of Lord Hussey, who is also one of the English colonists who founded Nantucket in the 1600s. The Telegraph suggests Markle and Prince Harry may actually be very distant cousins through a shared ancestor: High Sheriff of County Durham Ralph Bowes, born in the late 15th century.