John White, a painter who traveled with several English exploration companies in North America, made many illustrations of the people, plants and animals that inhabited the area around the Jamestown colony. Theodor de Bry later made engravings based…

This engraving by Theodor de Bry, based on an earlier watercolor by explorer John White, shows the sophistication of the Algonquian civilization the English encountered in the New World. Although White and de Bry's illustrations cannot be assumed to…

This engraving of the Indian village of Pomeiooc was based on a 1585 watercolor drawing by John White, who spent a little over a year on Roanoke Island as part of an expedition led by Sir Walter Raleigh to settle the Virginia colony. The illustration…

This watercolor by English artist, cartographer, and expeditionary John White gives a sense not only of the diversity of marine wildlife in coastal Virginia and the Carolinas at the time of the Europeans' arrival, but also of the sophisticated means…

Contrary to many later European depictions of Native Americans, the engravings of Thomas De Bry, based on earlier watercolors by John White, show that the Algonquian peoples the English encountered in Virginia had developed a complex and diversified…

From 1835 to 1907, the Currier & Ives printmaking company produced over a million lithograph illustrations of events, portraits, and scenes from American life. In the era before photography and the widespread use of illustrations in newspapers,…

In 1786, while Gilbert Stuart was in London, the Duke of Northumberland commissioned him to paint this portrait of Joseph Brandt, a Mohawk military leader decorated by the British whose given name was Thayendanegea. As depicted by Stuart, Brandt…

Black Hawk was a Sauk Indian who lived in a village at the junction of the Rock and Mississippi Rivers in Illinois. After the Louisiana Purchase, Sauk and other tribal leaders signed a treaty that ceded Indian lands east of the Mississippi River to…

Mary Jemison, a white woman captured by Indians on the Pennsylvania frontier during the Seven Years' War and adopted into the Seneca tribe, recounts her experience of the American War for Independence from a Native American perspective. The Senecas,…

Powhatan (c. 1547-1618) was the head of a confederacy that spanned hundreds of miles and thirty-two tribes. (He is well known today because of his favorite daughter, Pocahontas, who rescued the English captain John Smith from execution in 1608.) In…