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.
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.
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy united five northeastern nations—Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca—under a shared constitution sometime before European contact, with scholars placing its founding anywhere from 1142 to 1660 C.E. Guided by Deganawidah, Hiawatha, and Jigonsaseh, a Grand Council of 50 sachems governed by consensus, building one of the most sophisticated political systems in the pre-contact Americas.
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.
Classic Maya Belize, around 800 C.E., supported somewhere between 400,000 and one million people across a landscape of stone cities, terraced fields, and astronomical observatories. At Altun Ha, archaeologists recovered one of the finest jade carvings known from the entire Maya world. It’s a reminder of how much a society can build when given fertile land and time.
The Pyramid of Kukulcan rose at Chich’en Itza between 800 and 900 C.E., built by Maya hands as both temple and working calendar. Its four staircases hold 91 steps each, plus the top platform — 365 in all, one for every day of the solar year. A civilization writing mathematics into stone.
The Cueva of eastern Panama weren’t actually one people. When Spanish colonists arrived in the early 1500s, they flattened a mosaic of distinct Indigenous communities under a single name, likely linked by a shared trade language rather than a shared identity. Recognizing that label as a colonial invention is helping scholars ask better questions about who these peoples really were.
