On July 30, 1619, the first representative assembly in the Americas, the House of Burgesses, convened for the first time in Jamestown, Virginia.
About a month later, a group of “twenty and odd” captives from what is now Angola landed in Hampton; this is what most Americans, today, refer to as the significant event in American history for the year “1619.”
On the same late day in July, 1676, Nathaniel Bacon issued the “Declaration of the People of Virginia,” beginning Bacon’s Rebellion against the rule of Governor William Berkeley.