Every city has a longer story.
Explore the histories of North American cities, from Indigenous histories through colonial times.
Look beyond familiar streets and skylines. Discover the communities, waterways and encounters that shaped the places where people live.
Mexico City today. Beneath the modern city lies the history of Tenochtitlan.
Start with a place. Follow a thread through time.
01 / Cities
The history beneath your feet
Begin in Mexico City, Montreal or New York. Trace how each place grew from its own geography, Indigenous histories and colonial encounters.
02 / Eras
Different places, different timelines
Explore Indigenous settlement, governance and exchange, then examine colonial expansion and the resistance it met. No single timeline fits an entire continent.
Reading the past
A city holds more than one history.
Indigenous peoples are living communities, not a chapter that ended with European arrival. Their histories continue through language, governance, relationships to land and urban life.
Dates mark particular events, not clean breaks. Colonial rule began and changed at different times across North America, and its consequences remain part of the present.
Read written records alongside archaeology, oral histories and knowledge shared by the communities concerned. Ask who created a source, whose perspective it preserves and whose experience may be missing.
Keep exploring the evidence
Useful starting points include Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), Pointe-à-Callière in Montreal, the National Museum of the American Indian and the New Netherland Institute. Seek out Indigenous-led sources alongside museum and archival collections.
The photographs on this site show contemporary places. They are illustrations, not evidence of how those places looked in earlier centuries.