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.
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.
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.
Teotihuacan, in the highlands of central Mexico, was the largest city in the Americas around 450 C.E., home to roughly 100,000 people drawn from Oaxaca, the Gulf Coast, and the Maya region. Its planned grid, towering pyramids, and obsidian trade reached across Mesoamerica. Nearly a thousand years later, the Aztecs still made pilgrimages to its ruins.
In 426 C.E., a warrior-king named K’inich Yax K’uk Mo’ arrived in the Motagua River valley and founded the royal dynasty of Copán in what is now western Honduras. His line endured nearly four centuries, producing at least 16 rulers, a 2,200-glyph hieroglyphic stairway, and astronomical calculations of the Venus cycle that still astonish modern researchers.
The Thule Tradition took root along Alaska’s Bering Strait coastline around 200 B.C.E., when ancestors of today’s Inuit and Yupik peoples began crafting kayaks, umiaks, and harpoons sophisticated enough to hunt bowhead whales. From those windswept shores, their descendants would eventually spread across the entire Arctic, reaching Greenland by the 13th century.
