In the 1620s, Thomas Morton founded a colony at Merrymount on the South Shore of Massachusetts, a rival to the Puritan and Pilgrim settlements. He set up a maypole, brewed beer and invited both settlers and local Algonquin people to join revels on May 1, 1627. Morton traded arms with Native Americans and was seen by neighbours as undermining Puritan morals. Plymouth's commander Myles Standish marched in, cut down the maypole and sent Morton back to England in fetters. Morton later published The New English Canaan in 1637, a mix of ethnography, geography and anti-Puritan satire, partly as propaganda to get the Massachusetts Bay charter revoked. It includes what is probably one of the earliest American poems in English.

Hampi is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Karnataka, India, with more than 1,600 surviving remains spread over 4,100 hectares. It was the capital of the Vijayanagara Empire from 1336 to 1565. Travellers from Persia and Portugal described it as a prosperous, wealthy and grand city with temples, markets and farms along the Tungabhadra River. By 1500 it was estimated to be the world's second-largest city after Beijing, and probably India's richest at the time. In 1565 a coalition of Muslim sultanates defeated the Vijayanagara Empire, its capital was conquered and destroyed, and the city was left in ruins. Hampi remains a religious centre, with the active Virupaksha Temple at its heart.