Week 2 — Readings & Resources

Your primary reading is Chapter 2 (in this module). Everything below is the optional, go-deeper layer — pick what helps, skip the rest.

How to use this page

This page has 11 items (5 readings and 6 videos). Allow 81–94 minutes for everything. Each group points back to the matching chapter section and class-session segment, so use the full menu when you want more depth, or take the quick path below.

Every video here has captions: turn them on with the CC button in the player. The chapter covers the same ideas in text.

Pick-one quick path (15–20 min total)

• The Mayflower Compact — Pilgrim Hall Museum
• Opechancanough: People of the Past — JYF Museums
• The Wampanoag People — Pilgrim Hall Museum

① How did the empires differ?

Chapter 2, Section “Compare four empires: missions, furs, and farms” · Session 1, Segment 1, “Four empires compared” · Remember: a fur post needed Native partners, a mission needed Native labor and converts, and a farming colony needed Native land.

• The Fur Trade — New Netherland Institute — a short exhibit page on how the Dutch fur trade worked: furs trapped by Native hunters came to Fort Orange, much of it through Mohawk country, in exchange for axes, kettles, cloth, and beads. Read it for why a fur colony needed Native partners, and notice that most of its quoted voices are Dutch. This builds on Week 1's practice in sourcing a dated document: ask who wrote each quotation, and when. (reading, 3–5 min)
• Mission San Luis Video Tour: The Apalachee and The Council House — Mission San Luis — a costumed interpreter at a Florida mission site speaks in the first person as a farmer of mixed Apalachee and Spanish parents and tours the Apalachee council house, its tools, its ball game, and trade with the Spanish. Treat it as a museum's portrayal: it shows daily life at a mission and says little about the pressure the mission system put on Apalachee labor and belief. (video, 14 min) (captions: creator)

② Virginia: a charter, a colony, and Powhatan land

Chapter 2, Section “Follow the charter to Jamestown: Powhatan land and the Chesapeake” · Session 1, Segment 2, “The charter and Jamestown” · Remember: Jamestown was England's first permanent colony, built on Powhatan land, and St. Augustine is 42 years older.

• A Short History of Jamestown — National Park Service — the park's account of Jamestown from the 1607 landing, including the Virginia Company's aims, the fort on Powhatan hunting land, the Starving Time, tobacco, and the 1622 attack led by Opechancanough. Stop at the paragraphs on 1619 and the Africans brought to Virginia; next week takes up how colonial law built slavery. The page's tone is light in places, so read its claims, not its jokes. (reading, 8–12 min)
• Tobacco in 17th Century Virginia — Henricus Historical Park — an interpreter in a reconstructed planter's barn explains how colonists grew, topped, cured, and packed tobacco, the crop that began to take off in Virginia by about 1614, and why one acre took one man's labor through a whole season. Watch it beside the charter's money-making aims and ask whose labor the growing crop came to depend on, the question next week takes up. It shows farm work only and says nothing about the Powhatan land the tobacco farms spread across. (video, 4 min) (captions: automatic)
• Paramount Chief Powhatan: People of the Past — JYF Museums — a Virginia museum's short portrait of Wahunsenacawh, the paramount chief the English called Powhatan: the tribes he inherited and added, the tribute he collected, and his family. Listen for its own sourcing warning that the English descriptions it quotes carry English biases. (video, 6 min) (captions: automatic)
• The Virginia Indians: Meet the Tribes — Virginia Department of Education — made for younger students as a classroom story, but tribal members of the Pamunkey, Mattaponi, Chickahominy, Monacan, and other Virginia nations speak for themselves about their land, governments, languages, and traditions. Watch the first ten minutes for the Powhatan nations, and keep its closing line in mind: we are still here. (video, 25 min) (captions: creator)

③ Plymouth, the Compact, and the Wampanoag

Chapter 2, Section “Read the Mayflower Compact: a covenant at Cape Cod” · Session 2, Segment 3, “The Mayflower Compact” · Remember: the Compact is a covenant for local self-government, signed by one group of settlers on the Wampanoag homeland.

• The Mayflower Compact — Pilgrim Hall Museum — a Plymouth museum's page on why the Compact was written, with the full text in modern spelling. Compare its wording with the Avalon Project's, notice its second date marked New Style, and read its warning against treating the Compact as a forerunner of the Constitution. Use this example while completing the Week-2 module overview. (reading, 4–7 min)
• The Wampanoag People — Pilgrim Hall Museum — a short page on the Wampanoag, on whose homeland Plymouth was built: their communities, their sachems, and the Wampanoag nations that live in the region now, among them Aquinnah and Mashpee. (reading, 2–4 min)
• Celebrating 50 Years of the Wampanoag Indigenous Program — Plimoth Patuxet Museums — a short look at a large bark-covered Wampanoag winter house at a living museum, with Wampanoag staff describing the families it held, the gardens, and the dugout canoes. It is partly a museum's celebration of itself; watch it for the house and the people who still keep these ways. (video, 4 min) (captions: creator)

④ Trade, alliance, and war

Chapter 2, Section “Trace trade, alliance, and war — and order the week's years” · Session 2, Segment 4, “Trade, alliance, and war” · Remember: Native nations traded, allied, and fought on their own terms, and colonization took their land.

• Opechancanough: People of the Past — JYF Museums — a Virginia museum's portrait of the Powhatan leader who organized John Smith's capture, planned the attack of 1622 on the English settlements to push them back and reclaim land, survived an English poisoning at a peace meeting the next year, and led a last attack in 1644 before he was captured and killed in prison at Jamestown. It describes killings on both sides plainly and gives its own count of the English dead, a figure the course does not key; much of what it knows comes from English accounts, so ask whose records tell the story. (video, 9 min) (captions: automatic)

Optional one-stop reference (free online reference)

• Mayflower Compact (Agreement Between the Settlers at New Plymouth) — the Avalon Project — the week's workshop document in the text this course quotes, with its own date line and its signers' names; read the single paragraph of the agreement and skip the long list of signers if you like. The Avalon Project also keeps the First Charter of Virginia. (reading, 2–4 min)

Heads-up (links rot): these point to outside sites that occasionally move or rename pages. If a link ever fails, tell your instructor and use the reference above in the meantime.

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