Colonial Times (1585 - 1776) - More American History on the Learning Videos Channel

come along take a trip to the past we've got places to explore come along take a trip to the past to learn about things you never knew before feel chips to yesterday feel chips to yesterday feel chips to yesterday come along we're on our way [Music] in this program we're going to visit a time in history before the United States was even called the United States it's known as the colonial period we'll visit different places that have been rebuilt to look just like they did in colonial times we'll talk to people who dressed like people did that and listen to them explain about life in colonial times the word colonial comes from the word colony a colonies of Solomon in one country that's ruled by country far away the thirteen colonies that would become the United States of America were ruled by England you might be surprised to learn that the first attempts to set up an English colony weren't very successful [Music] in 1585 Sir Walter Raleigh a British explorer tried to establish a colony on Roanoke Island off the coast of North Carolina it didn't last long after one year all the settlers went back to England a second group tried again in 1587 because the hundred settlers needed more supplies the governor of the colony sailed back to England when he returned to Roanoke the colony had disappeared nothing was left except the letters CRO cut into a tree and the word Croatoan carved into a doorpost Croatoan was a name of a nearby island inhabited by friendly Native Americans what happened to the colony where were the settlers no one knows to this day the mystery of the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island remains unsolved still the English didn't give up and finally they succeeded so let's take a look at the 13 colonies that would become the United States of America we'll start in the southern colonies at the first permanent English settlement in North America Jamestown Virginia [Music] in 1606 some merchants in England formed a private business called the Virginia Company their goal was to set up a trading post in the new world they agreed to pay all the travel costs for any settlers willing to go more than 120 people set sail for Virginia in the spring of 1607 they arrived and established a colony they called Jamestown but the settlers made one big mistake instead of planting crops and building houses they went off looking for gold they didn't find any without crops food started to run low fortunately Native Americans came to the rescue then Captain John Smith one of the leaders of the colony took charge and told the settlers that if they did work they couldn't eat under his leadership the settlers began to build Jamestown even so Jamestown fell on hard times and in 1610 the surviving settlers decided to go back to England just as they were ready to leave three ships loaded with supplies arrived from England and saved the small colony five miles from Jamestown is one of the most famous settlements in colonial America williamsburg williamsburg was founded in 1633 and called middle plantation the name was changed to honor the English King William the third when the settlement became the capital of Virginia Virginia was an important English colony and the colonial governor designed the new capital city to be a center of learning religion and government to keep pace with the growing community brick makers worked tirelessly to make bricks for the new building construction and carpenters made shingles for the roofs and Williamsburg quickly developed into an important commercial city with manufacturing businesses and many retail shops [Music] now let's move to New England and visit some of the most famous settlers in colonial America we know them today as the pilgrims the pilgrims sail to a new world in 1620 on a small ship called The Mayflower after voyage of 66 days they landed on Cape Cod in Massachusetts you might wonder why people would leave their families and homes and come to strange new land where there were no houses or communities or anything just wilderness well people came to the new world for all different reasons to find gold to find religious freedom to find a better way of life they came to the new world because I thought that I could prosper here I had heard stories of the great wealth of the new world and I thought as I lived a poor life in London I could come to this place and marry a man who owned land and prosper more better here than if I had stayed behind years before they sailed on the Mayflower many of the pilgrims had left England and gone to Holland but they wanted a new life in a new land where they could be free to worship the way they wanted and so they came to New England one such person was Susanna Winslow well my husband brought me here we had gone into Holland to live for a few years to join a congregation there that he desired we should join indeed in time I was brought into the congregation myself and saw that as my husband said we might come to a place where we could worship that was not foreign that was English but where we might worship as we desired which was impossible unlawful and England so my husband desired we should be amongst the first part of our congregation to come out here the pilgrims made their settlement on the site of an abandoned Indian bill the settlement they established was called Plymouth Plantation using the raw materials they found around them and with plenty of hard work Plymouth Plantation slowly grew into a thriving community then just nine years later another group of English settlers came to Massachusetts also looking for religious freedom they were known as the Puritans the Puritans settled on the Charles River in Massachusetts Bay they called their first settlement Boston Connecticut in Rhode Island were also settled by people looking for religious freedom but they didn't come from England they came from Massachusetts usually it was because of disagreement with the ways of the Puritans in 1636 after a dispute with other Puritan ministers Thomas Hooker set up a colony in Hartford Connecticut the same year Roger Williams another minister was banished from Massachusetts he established a settlement in Providence Rhode Island Anne Hutchinson who was also banished for disagreeing with church leaders founded her own colony in Portsmouth Rhode Island the next year [Music] even though the middle colonies were English settlements the colonists came from many different countries Pennsylvania was founded by William Penn as a place where he and other Quakers could have religious freedom many of the settlers who came to Pennsylvania which by the way means pens woods were Quakers from Germany and Holland New York was originally a Dutch colony called New Netherlands one Dutchman named Frederick Lipson arrived in the mid 1600s in 1664 when the English took over the colony he and other Dutch settlers decided to stay flipz in' a carpenter and shrewd businessman changed his name to Phillips so he would sound more English he went on to establish a farm and trading center known as Phillipsburg manner at Phillipsburg manor all the agricultural land was farmed by tenant farmers the tenant farmers and their families lived in small dwellings on the 52,000 acres of Phillipsburg manor where they kept cows oxen chickens and sheep [Music] men worked in the fields while women worked the farm and did other housekeeping chores such as cooking and spinning thread farmers brought their grain to the grist mill which was powered by the POE canticle River there it was ground into flour from there it was shipped down the Hudson River and loaded onto ships for trade overseas a community of enslaved Africans also occupied many of the positions at Phillipsburg and kept the manor operating from inside the large stone manor home sea voyages were planned for trade purposes all over the world [Music] to find out what home life was like in colonial times we visited the Emerson family who lived in York Maine Maine was a part of Massachusetts then mrs. Emerson Eunice was the wife of a deputy sheriff and a jailer in York her home was also the town jail we asked her what a typical day was like and our first duties are to come down and stir up the fire and begin to cook the breakfast and then my children are sent on errands to get water to bring in firewood if mr. Emerson has to travel we must make him something to take with him you see his sheriff deputy sheriff he has to travel a good deal so our first thoughts usually are making the food and then Mary page begins to clean a bit later when the breakfast has been prepared of course as we happen to have a prisoner here since you know our duties include taking care of their domestic needs we provide them with some kind of simple breakfast so that is how the day begins here well our breakfast will consist sometimes of pie left over from the day before sometimes of fish balls since we're a seaport we have a good deal of dried Cod sometimes the simple matter of Hasty Pudding stirred about served with some molasses and milk occasionally a perhaps a little bit of fried pork and apple it depends on the season you see oh well the largest meal of the day is always the noon meal and that of course is prepared on the hearth you see the large kettle hanging there now and it would often be Oh some kind of boiled meat off an assault meat of course and some garden sauce it must have been strange living in a jail and having to take care of the prisoners we asked what the prisoners were put in jail for what crimes did they commit oh well there are many many offenses are most common cause right now seems to be a debt about half the people who have been incarcerated here this year have been debtors then of course there's theft occasionally blasphemy or profane cursing and swearing I'm not a gossip of course so I don't like to talk about local people but there was Lydia Abbott who uttered ten profane curses and then we do occasionally have someone for assault public drunkenness [Music] we talk to the schoolmaster who told us what school was like in colonial times yes a typical school day is that children would come into school around 8 o'clock in the morning and at which time they would come in to the school and get out their books very quietly get out their materials and they would study their ciphering for the smaller children alphabet reading and whatever lessons were appropriate for the age groups going from the front to the back of the room they would do that two or three hours take a 10-minute break maybe outside for recess and then come back and do more of the same studying mostly by themselves arithmetic reading and writing when the main subjects and they would do that until noon time at which time they would go home for an hour till one o'clock to do chores and lunch and they'd come back and they would repeat the process and of course they were studying mostly by themselves because the teacher had to deal with children from first grade right through high school it's just one teacher so and around 4 o'clock they'd go home 4 or 5 depending on the season education was very important for one thing the leaders why children to be able to read the Bible and the schools were much different than they are today paper was very expensive so kids wrote on slate using chalk pencils they also had to learn to write by dipping a feather into ink most students in New England used one book it was called the New England primer the primer taught the alphabet and was filled with Bible stories prayers and sayings thy life to mend God's book attend the cat doth play and after slay a dog will bite a thief at night the Eagles flight is out of sight the idle fool is whipped at school in a colonial school the students help to do chores in the school the daily chores are assisting the teacher any way that he asks but children will be assigned to take care of the firewood if it's necessary of depending on the season to fetch water to do cleaning older children would be expected to assist in the studies for some of the smaller children [Music] there were a lot of differences between the New England colonies the middle colonies and the southern colonies in the middle colonies the rich soil in good farmland produced food crops in the hot humid South conditions were good for growing crops like tobacco and cotton there was less farming in New England but lots of fishing and shipbuilding and in every region crops and other goods were shipped back to England to be sold that's called exporting exporting is sending products from one country to another country for sale or trade one of the most profitable trade routes in colonial times was the triangle trade it was called that because it formed a big triangle between Africa the West Indies and the American colonies ships loaded with rum and guns sailed from Boston and New York to Africa there the rum and guns were traded for ivory and gold and also for Africans who had been kidnapped from their villages from Africa the ship sailed for about seven weeks to the West Indies where the Africans were soulless slaves this part of the trip was called the Middle Passage in the West Indies the ships were loaded up with molasses and sent to the colonies where the molasses was made into rum and the whole triangle started all over again the kidnapped Africans who came across the Atlantic on the Middle Passage eventually were sold as slaves in American colonies by 1750 the slave population of the colonies was more than 250 thousand some slaves lived in cities like Williamsburg most worked on the big plantations in the south where the population was just about equally divided half black half white by the middle of the 1770s the American colonies had prospered and changed and the population had grown from the 120 people who came ashore at Jamestown to over 2 and a half million people in 13 colonies but things were about to change even more [Music] the American colonists began to resent being ruled by a country on the other side of the ocean England didn't want them to be independent so they sent troops to keep order in the colonies but the situation continued to go more and more hostile in 1770 British troops fired into a crowd of protesters five people were killed including Crispus Attucks a black sailor he is considered among the first people to die in the fight for liberty in 1773 the people of Boston got so angry they dumped 342 chests of tea into the harbor finally in April 1775 a small band of colonial militiamen faced an army of British redcoats at Lexington Massachusetts the British advanced and someone fired it became known as the shot heard round the world less than two months later George Washington was named commander of the Continental Army the revolution wasn't far away underlie 4th 1776 the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia the 13 colonies were on their way to becoming the United States of America [Music] come along take a trip to the past we've got places to explore come along take a trip to the past to learn about things you never knew before feel chips to yesterday feel chips to yesterday feel chips to yesterday come along we're on our way [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Harmony Square

Views: 35,848

Rating: 3.9047618 out of 5

Keywords: colonies, American Colonies, legal models, Royal, Charter, Proprietary, government, democracy, governor, colonial government, colony

Id: 1j7lovGzYL4

Length: 20min 54sec (1254 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 23 2019