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Captured Africans were sold to European slave traders.enslaved Africans were auctioned and forced to work under brutal conditions.
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The total slave trade to islands in the Caribbean, North & South America is estimated to have involved 12 million Africans. About 600,000 African slaves were imported into the U.S., or 5% of the 12 million slaves brought across from Africa.
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John Smith convinced the colonists of Jamestown, that searching for gold was not taking care of their immediate needs for food and shelter. They had an extremely high mortality rate.
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Roman Catholics were the first major religious group to immigrate to the New World. English and Dutch colonies tended to be more diversely religious
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During the 17th century, indentured servants constituted 75% of all European immigrants. Most of the indentured servants were teenagers from England. The main source of labor and a large portion of the immigrants were indentured servants looking for new life in the overseas colonies.
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In 1537, the papacy definitively recognized that Native Americans possessed souls, thus prohibiting their enslavement.
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Slavery existed in the Americas before the arrival of Europeans, American Indian groups often captured and held other tribes' members as slaves. Some captives would become human sacrifices.
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The large-scale contact with Europeans after 1492 introduced novel germs to the indigenous people of the Americas. Epidemics swept the Americas subsequent to European contact, killing between 10 million and 100 million people, up to 95% of the indigenous population of the Americas :
smallpox (1518, 1521, 1525, 1558, 1589, typhus. (1546), influenza, (1558), diphtheria, (1614) and measles (1618) -
Inspired by the Spanish riches from colonies founded upon the conquest of the Aztecs, Incas, etc. The first Englishmen settled permanently in America in hopes to find rich discoveries. The first permanent settlement was in Jamestown, VA in 1607
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Charles I, King of England and Scotland, persecuted religious dissenters. Waves of repression led to the migration of about 20,000 Puritans to New England between 1629 and 1642. They founded multiple colonies.
