In sixteen thirty, Puritan settlers from England established Boston in what would become the state of Massachusetts.

VOA: special.2010.04.04

Free State settlers gathered in the town of Lawrence and organized a defense force.

VOA: special.2009.05.07

At the same time,groups in the North helped free-state settlers move there,too.

VOA: special.2009.04.30

Noelle Nelson, the acting chief executive of Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto, which is backing the project, said the settlers' first-hand accounts at the State Library are "unrivalled".

BBC: Australian project hunts lost indigenous languages

Outside of the busy town centre, the Sauer-Beckmann farmstead in the Lyndon B Johnson State Park, 18 miles east of town, showcases how German settlers lived on the farm.

BBC: A German enclave in central Texas

Sparsely peopled by bedraggled settlers in the mid-18th century, it is today the fourth most populous state in the union, with more than 19 million polyglot citizens and 29 electoral votes, more than 10% of those needed to elect a president, as Al Gore can never forget.

WSJ: Book Review: Finding Florida