re: #467 sagehen

1542?

The Mayflower was 1620.

The Mayflower was hardly the first Europeans to North America.

The Mayflower is used by the religious right as their start of American history, but that is because they want to promote the ideology of some of the religious leaders of that group.

As far as English colonists, Jamestown predates the Mayflower compact. But Jamestown was about wealth and spreading English dominion, and that doesn’t play well into the mythologized American history that is so often taught.

The Spanish were here first, and San Diego is the landing point for the discovery of California and the west. Mostly the natives were not brought under control until the greatly expanded Spanish mission movement that started in the early 1720’s, though.