This archive covers progress stories from North and Central America, spanning the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and the nations of Central America. Readers will find reporting on health, environment, community resilience, and policy advances across the region.
Rights of Man hit British bookshops in March 1791, when Thomas Paine answered Edmund Burke’s defense of monarchy with a claim that rattled Europe’s rulers: rights belong to people by birth, not by royal grant. The book reportedly sold as many as a million copies and sketched an early vision of pensions, public schooling, and progressive taxation as matters of right.
The U.S. Constitution crossed its ratification threshold on June 21, 1788, when New Hampshire became the ninth state to approve it, meeting the bar set in Article VII. It replaced a crumbling framework under which the federal government couldn’t reliably collect taxes or pay its soldiers. More than two centuries later, it remains the oldest written national constitution still in force.
The U.S. Constitutional Convention opened in Philadelphia in May 1787, where 55 delegates arrived expecting to patch up the Articles of Confederation and ended up drafting something entirely new. Over a sweltering summer, they hammered out compromises on representation, slavery, and executive power. The result, ratified the following year, remains the world’s oldest written national constitution still in use.
Belize City traces its roots to 1638, when English loggers set up a trading post at the mouth of Haulover Creek to float logwood and mahogany out to the Caribbean. The site wasn’t empty — a Maya settlement called Holzuz was already there. Nearly four centuries on, it remains Belize’s largest city and a layered meeting point of Maya, African, Garifuna, and Mestizo histories.
Harvard College began in the autumn of 1636, when Massachusetts Bay lawmakers voted to found a school with no campus, no faculty, and not yet a name. Two years later, a young clergyman named John Harvard left it 320 books and his estate. It became the first institution of higher learning in colonial North America.
Eventually, Tenochtitlan came to be the capital of the vast Aztec Empire. At its peak, it was likely home to more than 200,000 people, making it one of the largest cities in the world at the time.
Around 1000 C.E., the Thule people began pushing east from the Bering Strait, and within roughly a century their descendants had reached Greenland. Traveling by dogsled and hunting bowhead whales from open boats, they carried a toolkit refined for the Arctic’s edge. Their journey seeded the Inuit world that stretches, unbroken, from Siberia to Greenland today.
A codex known as the “Yuta Tnoho” that belonged to the Mixtec culture in the 1500s B.C.E. is the earliest historical record of psilocybin use in human history.
Norse settlers reached southwestern Greenland in 986 C.E., when Erik the Red led roughly 14 ships from Iceland into a land of deep fjords and grasslands. Their farms at Brattahlíð raised cattle and barley, and served as the launch point for Leif Eriksson’s voyage to North America around the year 1000.
Erik the Red sailed west from Iceland around 985 C.E., leading 25 ships toward a coastline he’d shrewdly named Greenland to attract settlers. Only 14 ships completed the journey, but those who landed built farms, churches, and a legal assembly that endured nearly 500 years — and later became the launching point for Leif Erikson’s voyage to North America.
