Most of the Dutch people (as well as the Belgian Flemings and Walloons, French Huguenots, Scandinavians and Germans) who were living there stayed put. This made New York one of the most diverse and prosperous colonies in the New World.

These 13 original colonies (New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia) were established by British colonists for a range of reasons, from the pursuit of fortunes, to escape from religious prosecution to the desire to create new forms of government.

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From the early sixteenth century to 1843, the de facto national flag of Spain was white with the Cross of Burgundy in red. This flag was used primarily in Spain's overseas colonial empire. The Cross of Burgandy was a symbol associated with the House of Habsburg, whose monarchs ruled Spain from 1516 to 1700. It was replaced in 1843 by the 1785 war ensign, which was additionally designated as Spain's state flag and ensign in that year. This red-yellow-red triband with the lesser arms of Spain on the yellow stripe, became the model for all subsequent Spanish flags. In 1928 a variant without the arms replaced the 1785 merchant ensign. During the brief existence of the First Spanish Republic, the state flag displayed the lesser arms without the crown.

In 1632, the English crown granted about 12 million acres of land at the top of the Chesapeake Bay to Cecilius Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore. This colony, named Maryland after the queen, was similar to Virginia in many ways. Its landowners produced tobacco on large plantations that depended on the labor of indentured servants and (later) enslaved workers.

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During the Revolutionary War, a flag featuring thirteen alternating red and white stripes and thirteen five-pointed stars arranged in a circle was adopted. This variant is also known as the "Betsy Ross Flag," as she was believed to have designed it. The stars and stripes represent the 13 colonies.

William Penn acquires a charter to establish the Pennsylvania colony for Quakers. He sends his cousin to the Americas to found this colony, which includes the Delaware territory that was part of New York.

Lured by the fertile soil and the religious toleration that Penn promised, people migrated there from all over Europe. Like their Puritan counterparts in New England, most of these emigrants paid their own way to the colonies and had enough money to establish themselves when they arrived. As a result, Pennsylvania soon became a prosperous and relatively egalitarian place.

The Jamestown colonists had a rough time of it: They were so busy looking for gold and other exportable resources that they could barely feed themselves. It was not until 1616, when Virginia’s settlers learned how to grow tobacco, that it seemed the colony might survive. The first enslaved African arrived in Virginia in 1619.

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In 1732, inspired by the need to build a buffer between South Carolina and the Spanish settlements in Florida, the Englishman James Oglethorpe established the Georgia colony. In many ways, Georgia’s development mirrored South Carolina’s.

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There were two presidents of the Spanish Republic between 1931 and 1939, and their standards displayed the arms of national character on a red field, flanked by their initials. Shown is the standard of the second president, Manuel Azaña; the standard of his predecessor, Niceto Alcalá, bore the initials N-A. As Head of State and Regent from 1940 to 1975, Francisco Franco had a standard based on the military guidons of Spain's sixteenth-century monarchs. It depicts the heraldic charge known as the Bend of Castile flanked by the Pillars of Hercules.

The first English settlement in North America had actually been established some 20 years before, in 1587, when a group of colonists (91 men, 17 women and nine children) led by Sir Walter Raleigh settled on the island of Roanoke. Mysteriously, by 1590 the Roanoke colony had vanished entirely. Historians still do not know what became of its inhabitants.

In 1680, the king granted 45,000 square miles of land west of the Delaware River to William Penn, a Quaker who owned large swaths of land in Ireland. Penn’s North American holdings became the colony of “Penn’s Woods,” or Pennsylvania.

During the Civil War and for some time thereafter, the Nationalist faction used the red-yellow-red triband with the arms of national character centered on the yellow stripe.

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As the Massachusetts settlements expanded, they formed new colonies in New England. Puritans who thought that Massachusetts was not pious enough formed the colonies of Connecticut and New Haven (the two combined in 1665). Meanwhile, Puritans who thought that Massachusetts was too restrictive formed the colony of Rhode Island, where everyone–including Jewish people–enjoyed complete “liberty in religious concernments.” To the north of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a handful of adventurous settlers formed the colony of New Hampshire.

English settlers seize the Dutch colony of New Netherland and divide in into the colonies of New York and New Jersey. The New York colony includes territory that will later become Delaware.

In 1630, Puritans arrive in Salem to found a colony for the Massachusetts Bay Company. The Massachusetts Bay colony later absorbs the Plymouth Colony, which Pilgrims established in 1620.

English colonists led by Cecilius Calvert, Second Baron of Baltimore, establish St. Mary’s City under the Charter of Maryland. The settlement is the first capital of the Maryland colony.

France joined the war on the side of the colonists in 1778, helping the Continental Army conquer the British at the Battle of Yorktown in 1781. The Treaty of Paris ending the American Revolution and granting the 13 original colonies independence was signed on September 3, 1783.

The victory of the Nationalist rebels under General Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) led to the abolition of the Republic and the establishment of a fascist/authoritarian state with Franco at its head. The new polity, officially established in 1940, was called the Spanish State until 1947, when Franco decreed a restoration of the monarchy with himself as Regent vested with the power to designate a royal successor. The republican coat of arms was deleted from the wartime Nationalist flag and replaced by new arms based on the Eagle of St. John, which had appeared on the royal banners of the Catholic Monarchs in the late fourteenth to early fifteenth centuries. The artistic rendition of the arms was revised twice before this flag was replaced in 1981 by the current national and state flag, which bears the crowned royal arms. These arms are similar to those of the 1931-39 Republic, with a royal crown replacing the mural crown and an escutcheon of the arms of Bourbon-Anjou, which is the proper name of the current Spanish royal house. A square version of the national flag with the arms centered is used by high civil authorities, such as government ministers.

But unlike Virginia’s founders, Lord Baltimore was a Catholic, and he hoped that his colony would be a refuge for his persecuted coreligionists. Maryland became known for its policy of religious toleration for all.

In 1606, King James I divided the Atlantic seaboard in two, giving the southern half to the London Company (later the Virginia Company) and the northern half to the Plymouth Company.

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The 13 colonies founded along the Eastern seaboard in the 17th and 18th centuries weren't the first colonial outposts on the American continent, but they are the ones where colonists eventually pushed back against British rule and designed their own version of government to form the United States.

These Carolinians had close ties to the English planter colony on the Caribbean island of Barbados, which relied heavily on African slave labor, and many were involved in the slave trade themselves. As a result, slavery played an important role in the development of the Carolina colony. (It split into North Carolina and South Carolina in 1729.)

Puritans led by Thomas Hooker establish a settlement called Hartford, which becomes the first capital of the Connecticut colony.

In 1732, James Oglethorpe obtains a charter to found a new colony. In 1733, he establishes the Savannah settlement, which becomes the capital of the Georgia colony.

The American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) was sparked after American colonists chafed over issues like taxation without representation, embodied by laws like The Stamp Act and The Townshend Acts. Mounting tensions came to a head during the Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, when the “shot heard round the world” was fired.

The first English emigrants to what would become the New England colonies were a small group of Puritan separatists, later called the Pilgrims, who arrived in Plymouth in 1620 to found Plymouth Colony. Ten years later, a wealthy syndicate known as the Massachusetts Bay Company sent a much larger (and more liberal) group of Puritans to establish another Massachusetts settlement. With the help of local natives, the colonists soon got the hang of farming, fishing and hunting, and Massachusetts prospered.

In 1700, there were about 250,000 European settlers and enslaved Africans in North America’s English colonies. By 1775, on the eve of revolution, there were an estimated 2.5 million. The colonists did not have much in common, but they were able to band together and fight for their independence.

By contrast, the Carolina colony, a territory that stretched south from Virginia to Florida and west to the Pacific Ocean, was much less cosmopolitan. In its northern half, hardscrabble farmers eked out a living. In its southern half, planters presided over vast estates that produced corn, lumber, beef and pork, and–starting in the 1690s–rice.

Both sought a different religious practice than what the Church of England dictated, but they were otherwise distinct groups of people.

The Declaration of Independence, issued on July 4, 1776, enumerated the reasons the Founding Fathers felt compelled to break from the rule of King George III and parliament to start a new nation. In September of that year, the Continental Congress declared the “United Colonies” of America to be the “United States of America.”

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In 1664, King Charles II gave the territory between New England and Virginia, much of which was already occupied by Dutch traders and landowners called patroons, to his brother James, the Duke of York. The English soon absorbed Dutch New Netherland and renamed it New York.

The 13 British colonies eventually joined to form the United States—but as colonies, they were often more different than they were alike.

Sixteenth-century England was a tumultuous place. Because they could make more money from selling wool than from selling food, many of the nation’s landowners were converting farmers’ fields into pastures for sheep. This led to a food shortage; at the same time, many agricultural workers lost their jobs.

In 1623, English colonists establish a settlement in present-day Dover. It is the first permanent English settlement in the New Hampshire colony, which England authorizes in a 1629 land grant.

After the Massachusetts Bay colony banishes Roger Williams, he purchases land from the Narragansett and establishes a settlement called Providence in what becomes the Rhode Island colony.

In 1931 the fall of the monarchy resulted in the establishment of the Second Spanish Republic, and this time the Spanish flag was substantially modified. It became a horizontal tricolor with red, yellow and purple stripes. Such flags had been used for many years by republican organizations and political parties. The state flag bore the coat of arms of the Republic, called the "arms of national character," which were identical to those of the short-lived nineteenth century republic. They quartered the arms of Castile, León, Aragon and Navarre, with Granada at the point. The shield was flanked by the Pillars of Hercules, representing the Strait of Gibraltar. The scarlet scroll bore the motto PLUS ULTRA (More Beyond). A mural crown, a republican symbol, replaced the royal crown.The proportions of these republican flags were altered from 2:3 to 3:5.

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In 1606, just a few months after James I issued its charter, the London Company sent 144 men to Virginia on three ships: the Godspeed, the Discovery and the Susan Constant. They reached the Chesapeake Bay in the spring of 1607 and headed about 60 miles up the James River, where they built a settlement they called Jamestown.

Delaware declares independence from Pennsylvania and Great Britain, and joins the American Revolution as its own colony.

The 16th century was also the age of mercantilism, an extremely competitive economic philosophy that pushed European nations to acquire as many colonies as they could. As a result, for the most part, the English colonies in North America were business ventures. They provided an outlet for England’s surplus population and (in some cases) more religious freedom than England did, but their primary purpose was to make money for their sponsors.

On May 14, 1607, the Virginia Company establishes Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. The settlement is the first capital of the Virginia colony.

It was not without warning; the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770 and the Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773 showed the colonists’ increasing dissatisfaction with British rule in the colonies.

British settlers divide the Carolina province into two colonies: North Carolina and South Carolina. King Charles II had previously established the Carolina province in a 1663 charter.