Jamestown

<p>The Jamestown founder is one of those early American heroes about whom historians are apt to lose their tempers</p>

<p>Where the written word leaves off, the spade must often take over. A well-known archaeologist relates what the earth has revealed about the first permanent British colony in America</p>

<p><span class="deck"> It saved the early Colonists from starvation, it has caused men to murder each other, it used to be our most democratic food—in short, an extraordinary bivalve</span> </p>

<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> The storm that wrecked the Virginia-bound ship Sea Venture in 1609 inspired a play by Shakespeare— and the survivors’ tribulations may well have sown the first seeds of democracy in the New World</span> </span></p>

<p><span class="deck">400 years ago, the first English settlers reached America. What followed was a string of disasters ending with the complete disappearance of a colony.</span></p>

<p>The challenges of engaging visitors to historical theme parks</p>

<p><span class="deck">How Jamestown got us started</span></p>

<p>The archaeologist who discovered the real Jamestown debunks myths, and answers age-old mysteries about North America's first successful English colony.</p>

<p>Only by luck and happenstance did Britain’s first permanent settlement in the New World survive.</p>

<p>Four hundred years ago this year, two momentous events happened in Britain’s fledgling colony in Virginia: the New World’s first democratic assembly convened, and an English privateer brought kidnapped Africans to sell as slaves. Such were the conflicted origins of modern America.</p>

<p>The first votes of the fledgling Virginia Assembly in 1619 marked the inception of the most important political development in American history — the rise of democracy.</p>