What / or who are they: Delaware, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey
Why middle: These were the 4 of the 13 original colonies that were between the northern and southern colonies.
Religion: this is the sentence you really like to write. There were all sorts of religions present, but not one of them could dominate. These 4 colonies had Lutherans, Mennonites, Calvinists (mostly Dutch), and Presbyterians.
Commerce: mostly agriculture at the time, but not restricted to 1 crop as the south was. Had good ports and growing cities (New York, Philadelphia). I like to include the well respected intellectual hotbed of people there like Ben Franklin.
Answer:
Further, they made music and dance vital components of their worship practices. Enslaved men and women kept the rites, rituals, and cosmologies of Africa alive in America through stories, healing arts, song, and other forms of cultural expression, creating a spiritual space apart from the white European world.
Explanation:
This was the Mughal Empire - it was ruling the area from around 1520 and continued having power until 1857, when the British Crown took control of the land. Today the period after the Mughal Empire is refereed to as British Raj.
The Mughal Empire used Persian and Urdu as the main languages (althought many other languages were spoken too).
Disease flourished and fire was an ever-present danger.
They weren't expecting it and didn't have a big army.
