Jamestown Settlement and the American Revolution Museum at Yorktown explore the shared stories of diverse cultures who helped shape America’s beginnings in the 17th and 18th centuries. Discover these stories in gallery exhibits, films, living-history experiences and educational programs.

The Founding of Jamestown

In the 17th century, three distinct and long-established cultures converged at Jamestown with interactions that would establish one new country.

The Indigenous people of Tsenacommacah had been here for over 16,000 years before the English arrived in 1607 to establish the first permanent English colony as a business venture and seize a foothold in Virginia. The cultures of West Central Africans were brought to Virginia forcibly with the first documentation of their arrival in 1619. The coming together of the Indigenous, English and West Central African cultures forged the beginnings of a new country.

The 1607 founding of Jamestown set in motion vast changes that affected many people, as some had greater opportunities and freedoms while others faced oppression.

Eve of the American Revolution & beyond

By 1750, 26 years before the Declaration of Independence, more than two million people lived in the 13 Colonies and represented several dozen cultural and religious traditions. The greatest single ethnic and cultural change in the colonies was the forced immigration of hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans. Africans and African Americans constituted 25 percent of the people living in the colonies, free and enslaved. (The displacement of Indigenous communities was also a pretty significant ethnic and cultural change).

With the onset of the Declaration of Independence, diverse groups of Americans – Patriots and Loyalists, women, Indigenous communities, and enslaved and free African Americans – questioned, defied and contributed to the Revolutionary War effort. After the momentous victory at Yorktown in 1781 that effectively ended the war, the new nation’s rights of freedom and liberty did not yet apply to all groups of people.

A new national identity emerged following the Revolution, influenced by immigration, internal migration, and demographic, political and social changes. The nation’s struggle for independence impacted not just America, but the world.