1600's-1763: Library of Congress:
When the London Company sent out its first expedition to begin colonizing Virginia on December 20, 1606, it was by no means the first European attempt to exploit North America. In 1564, for example, French Protestants (Huguenots) built a colony near what is now Jacksonville, Florida. This intrusion did not go unnoticed by the Spanish, who had previously claimed the region. The next year, the Spanish established a military post at St. Augustine; Spanish troops soon wiped out the French interlopers residing but 40 miles away.
Meanwhile, Basque, English, and French fishing fleets became regular visitors to the coasts from Newfoundland to Cape Cod. Some of these fishing fleets even set up semi-permanent camps on the coasts to dry their catches and to trade with local people, exchanging furs for manufactured goods. For the next two decades, Europeans' presence in North America was limited to these semi-permanent incursions. Then in the 1580s, the English tried to plant a permanent colony on Roanoke Island (on the outer banks of present-day North Carolina), but their effort was short-lived.
In the early 1600s, in rapid succession, the English began a colony (Jamestown) in Chesapeake Bay in 1607, the French built Quebec in 1608, and the Dutch began their interest in the region that became present-day New York. Within another generation, the Plymouth Company (1620), the Massachusetts Bay Company (1629), the Company of New France (1627), and the Dutch West India Company (1621) began to send thousands of colonists, including families, to North America. Successful colonization was not inevitable. Rather, interest in North America was a halting, yet global, contest among European powers to exploit these lands.
There is another very important point to keep in mind: European colonization and settlement of North America (and other areas of the so-called "new world") was an invasion of territory controlled and settled for centuries by Native Americans. To be sure, Native American control and settlement of that land looked different to European eyes. Nonetheless, Native American groups perceived the Europeans' arrival as an encroachment and they pursued any number of avenues to deal with that invasion. That the Native American were unsuccessful in the long run in resisting or in establishing a more favorable accommodation with the Europeans was as much the result of the impact of European diseases as superior force of arms. Moreover, to view the situation from Native American perspectives is essential in understanding the complex interaction of these very different peoples.
Finally, it is also important to keep in mind that yet a third group of people--in this case Africans--played an active role in the European invasion (or colonization) of the western hemisphere. From the very beginning, Europeans' attempts to establish colonies in the western hemisphere foundered on the lack of laborers to do the hard work of colony-building. The Spanish, for example, enslaved the Native American in regions under their control. The English struck upon the idea of indentured servitude to solve the labor problem in Virginia. Virtually all the European powers eventually turned to African slavery to provide labor on their islands in the West Indies. Slavery was eventually transferred to other colonies in both South and North America.
Because of the interactions of these very diverse peoples, the process of European colonization of the western hemisphere was a complex one, indeed. Individual members of each group confronted situations that were most often not of their own making or choosing. These individuals responded with the means available to them. For most, these means were not sufficient to prevail. Yet these people were not simply victims; they were active agents trying to shape their own destinies. That many of them failed should not detract from their efforts.
Jill Lepore writes of this period:
Over the course of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the English established more than two dozen colonies, founding a sea-born empire of coastal settlements that stretched from the fishing ports of Newfoundland to the rice fields of Georgia and, in the Caribbean, from Jamaica and Antigua to Bermuda and Barbados. Beginning with the Virginia charter, the idea of English liberties for English subjects was planted on American soil and, with it, the king’s claim to dominion, a claim that rested on the idea that people like Powhatan and his people lived in darkness and without government, no matter that the English called their leaders kings.
And yet England’s own political order was about to be toppled. At the beginning of English colonization, the king’s subjects on both sides of the ocean believed that men were created unequal and that God had granted to their king the right to rule over them. These were their old truths. At the end of the seventeenth century, John Locke, imagining an American genesis and borrowing from Christian theology, would argue that all men were born into a state “of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another,” each “equal to the greatest, and subject to no body.” By 1776, many of the king’s subjects in many of his colonies so wholly agreed with this point of view that they accepted Thomas Paine’s “plain truth,” that, “all men being originally equals,” nothing was more absurd than the idea that God had granted to one person and his heirs the right to rule over all others. “Nature disapproves it,” Paine insisted, “otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion.” These became their new truths.
[See These Truths, pg33-4]
....
ENGLAND’s AMERICA was disproportionately African. England came late to founding colonies and it came late to trafficking in slaves, but nearly as soon as it entered that trade, it dominated it. One million Europeans migrated to British America between 1600 and 1800 and two and a half million Africans were carried there by force over that same stretch of centuries, on ships that sailed past one another by day and by night.*? Africans died faster, but as a population of migrants, they outnumbered Europeans two and a half to one.
[See These Truths page 45-6]
....
The restoration of the monarchy, in 1660, with the coronation of Charles II, represented. not a lessening but a deepening commitment to religious toleration, the new king pledging “that no man shall be disquieted or called in question for differences of opinion in matter of religion.” This spirit extended across the ocean, especially in the six Restoration colonies, those that were founded or came under English rule during Charles II’s reign. New York and New Jersey became religious asylums for Quakers, Presbyterians, and Jews, as did Pennsylvania, granted by Charles II to the Quaker William Penn in 1681. Penn called Pennsylvania his “holy experiment” and hoped it would form “the seed of a nation.” In his 1682 Frame of Government, a constitution for the new colony, he provided for a popularly elected general assembly and for freedom of worship, decreeing “That all persons living in this province, who confess and acknowledge the one Almighty and eternal God, to be the Creator, Upholder and Ruler of the world; and that hold themselves obliged in conscience to live peaceably and justly in civil society, shall, in no ways, be molested or prejudiced for their religious persuasion or practice, in matters of faith and worship, nor shall they be compelled, at any time, to frequent or maintain any religious worship, place or ministry whatever.” Peace rested on tolerance.
[See These Truths, pg50-2]
From Wikipedia:
The colonial history of the United States covers the period of European colonization of North America from the early 16th century until the incorporation of the Thirteen Colonies into the United States in 1776 during the Revolutionary War. In the late 16th century, England, France, Spain, and the Dutch Republic launched major colonization expeditions in North America. The death rate was very high among early immigrants, and some early attempts disappeared altogether, such as the English Lost Colony of Roanoke. Nevertheless, successful colonies were established within several decades.
See The First Great Awakening, from Wikipedia:
The First Great Awakening, sometimes Great Awakening or the Evangelical Revival, was a series of Christian revivals that swept Britain and its thirteen North American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s. The revival movement permanently affected Protestantism as adherents strove to renew individual piety and religious devotion. The Great Awakening marked the emergence of Anglo-American evangelicalism as a trans-denominational movement within the Protestant churches. In the United States, the term Great Awakening is most often used, while in the United Kingdom, the movement is referred to as the Evangelical Revival.