The Virginia Company founded Jamestown beside the James River in Virginia. It became the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, surviving disease, famine and conflict with the Powhatan peoples. Tobacco cultivation eventually made the colony economically valuable to England.

Jamestown helped establish the colonial world later recorded in English-American histories, sermons, captivity narratives and poetry. Writers have repeatedly revisited the settlement to question national origins, Indigenous dispossession and myths of the American wilderness.