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King James I approved the formation of the Virginia Company (named after Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen).
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Three ships—the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery—sailed forty miles up the James River (named for the English king) in present-day Virginia (named for Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen), and the colonists settled in an uninhabited peninsula.
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Santa Fe was established by Juan de Onate with four hundred Mexican settlers, soldiers, and missionaries. Santa Fe was the first European settlement in the Southwest.
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John Rolfe crossed tobacco strains from Trinidad and Guiana and planted the first tobacco crop in Virginia. The massive tobacco industry was born.
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The Virginia Company formed the House of Burgesses, which was a limited representative body composed of white landowners that first met in Jamestown.
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A Dutch slave ship sold twenty Africans to the settlers in Virginia. This was the first time there were slaves in America, thus starting America's centuries-long struggle with slavery.
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Pilgrims from England on the ship Mayflower started Plymouth Colony.
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Opechancanough, the successor of Powhatan for the Powhatan Confederacy, launched a surprise attack and in a single day killed over 350 colonists, or one third of all the colonists in Virginia.
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Approximately twenty thousand Puritans migrated to New England during these two decades.
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The Navigation Act of 1651 was an act passed by King Charles II. This act required merchants in every colony to ship goods directly to England in English ships. Through this act, Parliament sought to bind the colonies more closely to England and prevent other European nations, especially the Dutch, from interfering with its American possessions.
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King Philip's War was a pan-Indian uprising against the encroachments of the New England colonies, where a large number of Indian slaves were captured.
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Bacon's Rebellion, led by Nathaniel Bacon, grew out of tensions between Native Americans and English settlers as well as tensions between wealthy English landowners and the poor settlers who continually pushed west into Indian territory.
