Yale historian David Blight opens the fourth session of his DeVane Lecture Series course by tracing Yale's founding back to its colonial roots. He examines the Puritan religious vision that animated the college's early charter and mission, then turns to the land itself, showing how Yale's establishment in New Haven was bound up with the dispossession of Native American communities in Connecticut. Blight situates these origins within the broader question driving the course, whether the American experiment's promises of pluralism and rule of law can survive its own founding contradictions. He draws on colonial records and institutional history to show how religious idealism, land seizure, and early American commerce were intertwined from Yale's first years. The lecture sets up later sessions on slavery, the Civil War, and their legacies by first establishing the less examined story of conquest and religious mission that preceded them.