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Jamestown and Roanoke Colonies: A Resource Guide

Primary and secondary sources and imaginative works on the earliest English settlements in North America: the colonies at Roanoke, North Carolina, and Jamestown, Virginia.

Introduction

Ferrar, John, 1590?-1657, and John Goddard. A mapp of Virginia discovered to ye hills, and in it's latt. from 35 deg. & 1/2 neer Florida to 41 deg. bounds of New England. [London: John Overton] . [1667]. Library of Congress Geography & Map Division.

Jamestown, Virginia, during its founding years under the Virginia Company of London (1607-1624), and Roanoke, North Carolina (1584-ante August 1590), were the earliest English colonies in North America. This guide offers information and access to a range of digital, print, and graphic resources from the Library of Congress and selected external sources, including materials for K-12 students. These resources document the history of these colonies, the Native peoples living in the region as they had for some 15,000 years before the English came, and the African captives whose arrival in Jamestown in 1619 marked the foundation of race-based slavery in English North America. They also shed some light on Jamestown and Virginia during the town's years as the royal colony's capital (1624-1699); and suggest how the Roanoke and Jamestown colonies have been remembered and imagined by later generations of Americans and studied by modern scholars.