In this video, John Green teaches you about some of the colonies that were not in Virginia or Massachusetts. Before the English got to New York (formerly New Amsterdam), the colony was full of Dutch people who treated women pretty fairly, and allowed free black people to hold jobs. John Green also discusses Penn’s Woods, also known as Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania was (briefly) a haven of religious freedom, and William Penn dealt relatively fairly with the natives his colony displaced. As soon as Penn died, the colonist began abusing the natives.

In the Carolina colonies, the slave labor economy was taking shape. You’ll learn about how many Americans dreamt of an egalitarian paradise, but that there were actually elites who ruled the colonies. You’ll also learn about the Salem Witch Trials, the treatment of women in the colonies, and colonial economics.