9 lessons
History Bytes
Short, map-based lessons on early North American history, from the nations who lived here first to the founding of the United States and Canada.
History Bytes · EP01hNorth America in 1491
In 1491, the year before Columbus sailed, millions of people already lived in North America, in hundreds of nations that spoke hundreds of languages and lived in very different ways.
History Bytes · EP02hCanada before Europeans
People lived in what is now Canada for more than 10,000 years before any European ship arrived. Around 1500, many nations with their own languages, laws and ways of life lived across the land.
History Bytes · EP03hCahokia
Around 1100, Cahokia, near today's St. Louis, was home to 10,000 to 20,000 people and more than 100 earthen mounds. By about 1350 it was mostly empty, and historians still debate why.
History Bytes · EP04hThe Haudenosaunee Confederacy
Five Haudenosaunee nations in what is now upstate New York joined under the Great Law of Peace, with a shared council and clan mothers who choose the chiefs. The Tuscarora joined in 1722, and the Confederacy still exists today.
History Bytes · EP05hWhy Europe sailed west
In the 1400s, spices from India and Southeast Asia reached Europe through a long chain of middlemen, each adding a markup. Portugal and Spain, shut out of those profits, looked for their own sea routes to Asia: Portugal around Africa, Spain west across the Atlantic.
History Bytes · EP06hVikings in Canada
Norse sailors from Greenland reached North America about 500 years before Columbus. Their camp at L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, found in 1960, held eight sod-and-wood buildings and an iron forge, and tree rings prove they were there in 1021.
History Bytes · EP07hColumbus, 1492
In 1492, Columbus sailed west from Spain to reach Asia. His mistake wasn't a flat Earth but bad math: he thought the Earth was much smaller, so two continents he didn't expect stood in the way. He landed in the Bahamas, on an island its Taíno people called Guanahani.
History Bytes · EP08hJohn Cabot and the cod rush
In 1497, John Cabot sailed west from Bristol for England's king, looking for Asia. He reached land somewhere around Newfoundland and found no gold, but his crew's stories of seas thick with cod drew fishing fleets to the Grand Banks for centuries.
History Bytes · EP09h