Challenges & Opportunities of Teaching Jamestown

Jamestown often gets a bad rap—it is usually treated as the dark side of English settlement in North America, its wealth-seeking settlers contrasted with the God-seeking Puritans of New England.  It's no accident that the Puritans get the honor of Thanksgiving every year, while the Jamestown settlers get... what again, exactly?

But as we emphasize here, a more complex vision prompted the founding of the Virginia colony than is usually acknowledged. And even though the colony did adopt some horrific practices, it also provided its hardscrabble immigrants, at least for a time, with the sort of opportunity and mobility that we have later come to celebrate as the “American Dream.”