of the first two and a half centuries of European life on the continent
             The core part of any history book is obviously history. In the first
             three chapters of the book, Zinn presents the major historical facts of
             the first 250 years of American history starting from when Christopher
             Columbus's Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria landed in the Bahamas on October
             12, 1492. It was there that Europeans and Native Americans first came
             into contact; the Arawak natives came out to greet the whites, and the
             whites were only interested in finding the gold. From the Bahamas,
             Columbus sailed to Cuba and Hispañola, the present-day home of Haiti and
             the Dominican Republic. One-hundred fifteen years later and 1,500 miles
             to the north, the colony of Jamestown was founded by a group of English
             settlers led by John Smith; shortly after that the Massachusetts Bay
             Colony was founded by a group of Puritans known to us today as the
             Pilgrims. Because of uneasy and hostile relations with the nearby Pequot
             Indians, the Pequot War soon started between the colonists and the
             natives. Needless to say, the colonists won, but it was at the expense
             of several dozen of their own and thousands of Pequots. But despite
             Indian conflict, exposure, starvation, famine, disease, and other
             hardships, the English kept coming to America. In 1619 they were settled
             enough that they started bringing African slaves into the middle
             colonies. Before resorting to Africans, the colonists had tried to
             subdue the Indians, but that idea failed before it was created. Zinn
             "They couldn't force the Indians to work for them, as Columbus had
             done. They were outnumbered, and while, with superior firearms, they
             could massacre the Indians, they would face massacre in return. They
             could not capture them and keep them enslaved; the Indians were tough,
             resourceful, defiant, and at home in these woods, as the transplanted
             ...