In the third “chapter” of a US History course offered in the Spring 2025 semester at Minnesota State Colleges and Universities, Assistant Professor of History Dan Allosso focuses mostly on the period before English colonization. Click here for a 49-minute video posted on February 19, 2025 on his YouTube channel.

Allosso begins with the first European settlers, the Spanish, before going on to cover exploration and settleent by the French, the Dutch, and the English. The first North American explorer Juan Ponce de León who claimed the area on the Atlantic coast of Florida for the Spanish in 1513, now celebrated as “Pasqua Florida“. France then claimed the Northeast portion of today’s Canada in 1535.

The English explorer Henry Hudson established trading posts in and around the Hudson River for the Dutch East India Company starting in 1609, while other Englishmen began a colony in Virginia in 1606 and later settled in Plymouth in 1620.

Allosso covers the Powhatan Wars and then goes into more detail about the English settlements in New England and Boston in particular before concluding with remarks about religious intolerance and trade with the Native People.