New Empire in the Americas Primary Source Reading
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| 1. | First Impressions » Reading Guide
Showtime impressions are said to be lasting impressions, and indeed, information technology is remarkable how presently the New World "that was never before known to anyone" was viewed as a land of wealth, promise, and opportunity. And so we begin with three of the earliest European explorers to Northward America (subsequently the Norse whose settlements in Greenland died out in the 1300s) and the impressions conveyed to their monarchs, financiers, and soon, due to the printing press, the peoples of Europe:
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| 2. | Europe's Literary Response » Reading Guide
For Americans, history seems to pivot on the year 1492. The date inevitably points to the futurity. The Former World and its history fade as we contemplate the New World and its promise. Yet it is instructive to retrieve that 1492 vicious in what historians consider the late Eye Ages. The people who offset heard the news of Columbus's discoveries had more in mutual with the pilgrims who wended their mode to Canterbury than with those who fled to Plymouth. The texts we offering hither advise how Europeans responded to that news. Only two years after Columbus'southward first voyage, a German lawyer and poet, Sebastian Brandt, published an allegorical poem entitled Das Narrenschiff (The Ship of Fools) that satirized numerous "fools," including gluttons, drunkards, negligent fathers, and, in the excerpt offered here, explorers. Enormously popular in Germany and throughout Europe, Das Narrenschiff was widely translated. Our selection comes from Alexander Barclay'southward 1509 English language version. In typical medieval manner, Brandt'southward poem reminds us of homo imperfection and its antidote, devotion to and trust in God. For him the desire to "measure and compass" "diverse countries and regions" is folly born of pride that diverts humanity from cocky-understanding. This attitude contrasts sharply with those of John Rastell, Thomas More, and Albrecht Dürer. Rastell—a London lawyer, playwright, and trader—organized an aborted voyage to Newfoundland in 1517. Soon after his return he wrote the play Four Elements (partly to vent his frustration at failing to reach the New Globe). High school teachers should be able to identify with this play. In it the characters Studious Desire and Experience struggle to brainwash Humanity while Sensual Ambition and Ignorance try to lure him to the nearest party. The play is at once a moral apologue and something of a National Geographic in verse, for it instructs its audition on the new picture of the world that is emerging from the voyages of discovery. In the excerpted selection we run into a dawning empiricism every bit Studious Want embraces Experience equally a fit tutor for humankind. In the works of More and Dürer we run into how early images of the New Globe reflected European thought and desire. In More's fictional narrative Utopia ("no place"), the narrator Raphael Hythloday, a Portuguese crewman who claims to have voyaged with Amerigo Vespucci, describes an ideal customs he has visited. In fact, More may have fatigued the details of his utopia from Vespucci's accounts of his voyages to South America. Whatever his sources, he portrays Utopia as such a yielding and congenial identify that new, wealthy cities can almost be legislated into existence on "waste and unoccupied ground." That is, of grade, if the inhabitants of the "unoccupied" ground tin can agree on "1 way of living" with those who want to build the city. Otherwise, the newcomers have every correct to dispossess or even impale the natives. If New World riches led More to make a case for war, Mexica (Aztec) treasure led German language creative person Albrecht Dürer to imagine a place of wonder. In 1521 Male monarch Charles of Espana displayed Aztec gold and silver sent him by the conquistador Hernan Cortés in an showroom that traveled throughout Europe. When Dürer saw it in Brussels, it filled his heart with joy and moved him to curiosity "at the subtle Ingenia of men in foreign lands" where fifty-fifty humble bedding was the stuff of fairy tales. In the spirit of fairy tales and fables, nosotros conclude with the verse form "Les Îles Fortunées" ("The Fortunate Isles") by the sixteenth-century French poet Pierre de Ronsard. In ancient mythology the "Fortunate Islands" were the paradise of the gods, located somewhere in the west across the ocean. Later the name was given to the Canary and Madeira Islands as they were discovered by European explorers—and and then to points farther west every bit the discoveries enchanted the European imagination. (17 pages total.) |
| 3. | Illustrating the New Globe (Pt. I) » Reading Guide
The most familiar European illustrations of the New Earth come from a man who never left Europe himself—Theodore de Bry, the Flemish publisher and engraver who adjusted others' first-hand illustrations for his multi-volume Grands Voyages, which sold widely across Europe. Only what of those commencement-manus drawings and watercolors? Some were created past trained artists sent along on expeditions to document their discoveries. Others were created by amateur artists whose drawings remained in individual collections for centuries before being published. It is these original illustrations we highlight hither, leaving the adapted de Bry engravings for the next section.
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| 4. | Atlantic Coast » Reading Guide
After the peopling of North America at least 11,000 years ago, the continent was probably "discovered" by numerous explorers before Columbus. Just who? Did the Chinese monk Hwui Shan attain the west declension of Northward America around A.D. 500? Did Japanese sailors follow the Northwest Pacific Current down the west coast before A.D. 1000? What about adventurers who sailed west from Europe and Africa and were never heard from once more, such as Ugolino and Vadino Vivaldi from Genoa (1291) and a king whose flotilla left Mali in 1311? Intriguing grounds for speculation. For our purposes, though, we'll written report the earliest documented accounts of exploration on the N American mainland, those forth the Atlantic coast. We've read of John Cabot'due south and Gaspar Corte Existent's voyages to Newfoundland and the Grand Banks (#1: Get-go IMPRESSIONS), but we have no accounts of these expeditions. For Thorvald Erikson and Giovanni da Verrazzano, yet, nosotros do.
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| v. | Pacific Coast » Reading Guide
Not until the 1700s does the west coast of North America appear with whatsoever accurateness on a European map—with Baja California as a peninsula and not an isle, with Asia and America every bit split up continents, and with no depiction of a straight water road in the far north. Europeans had given up on the due west coast. The earliest Spanish expeditions returned with discouraging reports: no gold, no riches, no suitable sites for colonies = no value to the empire. Francis Drake delivered the aforementioned news to England afterward his littoral visit in 1579, and his voyage rated a wearisome response from Espana at the time for, after all, the state was useless. What spurred the Spanish to hightail it n once again was Russian federation's expansion into southwest asia and voyages to the far northwest of North America. Explorer Mikhail Gwosdev sailed e from Kamchatka in 1732 and sighted a "bolshya zemlya" ("new land"). Soon Vitus Bering was sent to explore this state, and, although he did not set human foot on North America himself and died of scurvy with many of his crewmen on the render voyage, his trek claimed the region for Russia whose fur-traders and missionaries defined the European presence there through the 1800s. Although the Russian arrival in North America places us beyond the chronological span of this Toolbox, we are reminded by historian Alan Taylor, when explaining his inclusion of Russian America in his American Colonies: The Settling of North America (2001) that "process, as much as place, defines the subject" of North American settlement (italics in original). It would be useful to keep this distinction in mind as you piece of work your fashion through this Toolbox. So think process every bit you read these two accounts of European-Native American encounters that are remarkably like despite their separation of 162 years.
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| 6. | Indians' Accounts » Reading Guide
What did the native inhabitants think of these sudden arrivals? How did they reply to the Europeans and their culture? And how did they later on describe the experience? The written accounts available to the states are primarily from two sources—Indians' oral histories equally recorded by non-Indians for publication, and statements to Europeans who recorded them later. The selections hither correspond both modes of transmission:
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| seven. | Spanish Conquest » Reading Guide
Many factors conditioned the ways Europeans responded to Native Americans and the means Native Americans responded to Europeans. Motivations, expectations, political and social structures, religious beliefs, concepts of culture, and perceptions of wealth and ability all played a role. Peradventure nowhere is the complex mingling of such forces more evident than in Hernan Cortés's come across with the Mexica (Aztecs). Cortés landed at what is now Veracruz in United mexican states on Good Friday, April 22, 1519. He set sail from the flourishing Spanish colony of Republic of cuba. His troops included many men who had arrived on the island too late to catch their own estates. Thus when they came to Mexico, their greed was alloyed with a desperate resolve to capitalize upon a second shot at riches. To illustrate their mindset, we offer the "Requerimiento," a annunciation in which the Castilian spelled out, quite bluntly, the deal they had in mind for the natives of the Americas: Convert to Christianity or be attacked. The traditional story of the Aztec human relationship with the Castilian, rooted in the Castilian perspective, describes how a "handful" of soldiers overwhelmed the Aztecs and wiped out their civilization. Much of that story comes from a series of messages Cortés sent to his majestic sponsor Rex Charles I, and hither we read an excerpt from his second letter, in which he expresses his awe at the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán (modern Mexico City). For over four hundred years the Indians' accounts of Mexico's conquest were not easily accessible, but in 1959 Mexican anthropologist Miguel Léon-Portilla published Visión de los Vencidos (Vision of the Vanquished, published in English language as The Cleaved Spears). It weaves together selections from a multifariousness of sixteenth-century ethnic accounts, some as early as 1528, into a narrative that describes amid other things, Cortés'southward landing, the battles he fought and alliances he fabricated on his march to Tenochtitlán, the Aztecs' defensive maneuvers, their almost successful retaliation, and finally their autumn. An engaging read translated from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, it reveals a world of omens, splendor, intrigue, diplomacy, and treachery (included besides in #6: INDIANS' ACCOUNTS).Not only did Indians recount the cruelty of the Castilian conquest, and so did a Spanish priest in Mexico, Bartolomé de las Casas. A human rights activist in today'south terms, he compiled his eyewitness accounts of Castilian atrocities with others' from beyond the Caribbean and Primal America, and presented them in 1542 to the Spanish king, imploring him to "extirpate the causes of and then many evils." The king responded equally las Casas hoped, issuing "New Laws" to moderate the treatment of the Indians, but they saw footling enforcement in the New World. Las Casas titled his compilation A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies; we present his introductory and concluding statements here, which y'all will notice sufficient to absorb his horror and moral anguish. Finally, the three images by European artists illuminate the mail-conquest fate of the Mexican Indians. The flick of the juggler lying on his back balancing a log dates from about 1529, merely a few years after the Aztec conquest in 1521. It was painted by Christoph Weiditz, a German artist who saw Aztec acrobats perform in Madrid at the court of Emperor Charles 5 (of the Holy Roman Empire; also Male monarch Charles I of Spain). The scenes depicting the making of feather fine art come from the Florentine Codex, a twelve-volume encyclopedia of Aztec civilization compiled in the late sixteenth century under the management of the Franciscan priest Bernardino de Sahagún. The unknown artist was probably trained by Franciscans in their effort to create a utopian Christian community amid the Indians. Finally, the painting depicting the burning of Aztec idols dates from the early 1580s. It is the piece of work of Diego Muñoz Camargo, a mestizo from an elite family in Tlaxcala, a urban center that allied itself with Cortés every bit he marched to Tenochtitlán. (28 pages, including the illustrations and their descriptions.) Epitome: Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, "Athore shows Laudonnière the Marker Column set upward by Ribault" [during the 1562 French expedition to the Florida Atlantic coast]. Watercolors and bodycolors with touches of gilt on vellum, and traces of blackness chalk outlines; mounted within a gold edge; pictorial surface 180 x 260 mm; seven x 10¼ in. New York Public Library. Reproduced by permission. |
Source: http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/amerbegin/contact/contact.htm
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