Chapter 2 Thoughts

• Look up Theodore De Bry and you'll find he never actually came to the new world so his engravings are or are not primary sources?
• Listen to Terry Gross's interview with Charles Mann, author of 1493
• Remember the George P. Horsecapture, 1992 quotation from World History.
• Similarities between Africans and North Americans (p. 24-25)
• European context, Renaissance - "quivering with tension...glorifying order, hierarchy, and beauty.." "To Europeans of the era, democracy in practice meant mob rule and the destruction of social distinctions. Hierarchy implied subordination, strict rules, and the exercise of manly prowess." Sumptuary Laws mean that everyone has to know their place and dress and behave appropriately. This is evidence of fear and insecurity and goes with social reciprocity. BUT in social reciprocity, in addition to the lower classes deferring to the upper, the upper classes were obliged to act with restraint and not take unfair advantage of the poor. In the historical dialectic it looks like this:

social reciprocity v. market economy

• Enclosure. For centuries it was understood that peasants could farm and graze their few animals on land known as The Commons. With the invention of expensive farm equipment, the actual owners started to enclose these lands effectively kicking the peasants off leaving them with no livelihood and little option but to turn to cities to become new industrial labor.
• nuclear family "little commonwealth"
• Virtually all Europeans feared witches. "Indeed, the 16th-century European 'mentality' had more in common with Indian and African mind sets than any of these traditional belief systems have with the stereotypical 'modern' world view." (29)

What it means to be a Puritan

• Conversion Experience being born again and becoming a "saint" which made you eligible to join Puritan congregations. The radical transformation that "replaced doubt with certainty" (see warning quotation from the Bible above, just saying... ) and "produced the Puritans' strong sense of purpose, willingness to sacrifice, and ironclad discipline. The conversion experience molded individuals like Puritan military and political leader Oliver Cromwell, who felt that, because he had conquered himself, he could conquer any enemy." (32) And consider the witch trials and the certainty with which the Puritans could condemn others. How much of this Puritanical stuff is still in the American psyche? Watch this space anyway because guess what's going to happen when the next generation comes along and doesn't want to go to all that trouble just to be in the congregation. Ha!

• "Puritanism's primary appeal lay instead among the small but growing number of people between the extremes of English society - landowning gentry, university-educated clergymen and intellectuals, merchants, shopkeepers, artisans, and yeoman farmers. Self-discipline had become central to both the secular and spiritual dimensions of these people's lives." (33)

• Love Elizabeth. Isn't all that into it until the Pope declares her a heretic. Then it's like, well, I guess I am. Watch how Cuba comes to be a communist country. It wasn't their first choice.

The Age of Discovery and the Beginnings of European Dominance

• The Norse voyagers were the same Vikings who frightened the Europeans into developing feudalism (see Day 1 of World History) but in the Americas there's just too much push back from the native Americans. They give up and go home.

• Italian merchants rich from trade with the Middle East (via crusading armies) start building distinct nation states and projecting their power west. Add to this, the self-confidence that comes out of the Reformation. Add to this advances in navigation from Arabs.

• impetus means motivation

• lucrative means highly profitable

Differences between old and new world slavery

• Scale. New world slavery was much bigger

• Harshness. Old world slaves were recognized as human beings. (See Olaudah Equiano p 34) New world slaves were worked to death.

• Race. Race became the explicit basis of new world slavery. And this, by Renaissance Christians. Hmm.

• emaciated means looking like you're starving to death

Encomienda System

• almost like a feudal grant of land with permission to extract labor and payments from people living there

• Do we know a Spanish friar who observed this and wrote a scathing report on exploitation of the native people?

• When Hernan Cortes reached Mexico it was 1. Rich
  2. Exotic
  3. Highly organized
  a. elaborate engineering provided fresh water
  b. elaborate social class structure
  c. artistically diverse

• Mexican's impression of the Europeans' response to gold, "[t]heir bodies swelled with greed, and their hunger was ravenous. They hungered like pigs for that gold."

• Cortes' success due to 1. firearms and horses (brought from Spain, not indigenous to the Americas)
  2. fitting into an Aztec legend about returning white bearded gods
  3. Cortes' audacity (boldness)
  4. epidemics among the native people (plague?)
  5. revolts against the Aztecs by other native people who were tired of paying
  tribute to the Aztecs

• "When Cortes landed in 1519, central Mexico's population had been about 25 million. By 1600 it had shrunk to between 1 and 2 million. ....America had witness the greatest demographic disaster in world history." (38)
  1. War
  2. Starvation
  3. Mass slaughter
  * 4. disease
  

Columbian Exchange

• Alfred W. Crosby (1972) take just a few minutes to check out the very cool visualization on the Gilder Lehrman (excellent!!!!!) site linked above. Bookmark this site.

• Consequences
  1. diseases
  2. horses (what was the only large domesticated animal in the new world at the time of encounter?)
  3. foods
  4. mixing of peoples
  5. wealth for Spain (mixed blessing.... taxes, tax revolt, Armada much?)

• subjugation means putting someone under your yoke, like a beast of burden

• predicated means based

• pliant means cooperative or bendable (like to one's will)

"Only the ravaging of Indian populations owing to disease, and the rise of English, French, and Dutch power in the face of Spanish decline, finally made colonization possible"

Within less than 20 years of the initial successful settlements, each colony developed an

1. Economic orientation

2. pattern of Indian relations, and a

3. natural direction of geographic expansion
   
   that would endure throughout the 17th century.
   

• emulate means copy

• Spanish are only interested in short-term seizure of wealth

• Primogeniture, the inheritance of all the land by the first born son, made a lot of second and third born sons available for good adventure

• The French have a bad attitude and fail in the 16th century to make headway then wars of religion back in France got their attention and they left

• English also busy with killing each other over religion but because of primogeniture and poverty they had people willing to leave (remember the equation raw material + market for finished goods = $)

• Elizabeth is so clever. She supports the Calvinist (Huguenots) in France and in the Netherlands (secretly poking Spain and France) and send pirates out to interfere with and steal from Spain. And encouraged merchants to invest in Atlantic-oriented ventures (orient comes from "east" and they were actually going west but you get the idea).

• So then Spain and the Pope start aiding the Catholics in Ireland but Elizabeth drove the Irish out of the north and settled it with English and Scottish. So this is when the Protestant (North) and Catholic (South) thing started for serious. The brutal atrocities committed by the English they justified by calling the Irish savages they were civilizing. Sound familiar.

• England had two objectives in the Western Hemisphere: 1. northwest passage to Asia
  2. "singe the king of Spain's beard"

The Roanoke Reality Show (produced by John White and Thomas Harriot)

1. Even a large-scale, well-financed effort could fail if folks don't know what they're doing

2. Whites didn't bring enough food and were too fancy to learn how to grow stuff and just assumed the natives would do that for them. So they died of hunger or fought and were killed.

3. They had to be self-financing. They couldn't just write home for money

4. Spain. Conflict with the Spanish hung menacingly over every attempt to gain a foothold in North America.

5. England's government henceforth would leave colonization to the private initiative of individuals or business groups and would spend no substantial sums on any colonies with the exception of Georgia and Nova Scotia

On April 10, 1606 James I grants a charter authorizing overlapping grants of land in Virginia to two separate joint-stock companies and they sent colonists as employees in 1607.

1. Plymouth - left after meeting the Abenaki and Maine winter

2. London - settled Jamestown and after a rough start hired Patrick Swayze to play John Smith then he died and everyone ate each other. The End. Then tobacco happened. John Rolfe marries Pocahontas.

How did enterprising planters acquire vast tracts of land? Headrights.

1619

1. (Was not the) [b]eginning of representative government in North America (the Iroquois Confederacy was.)

2. And what else.....

Virginia has problems

1. local officials defrauded the shareholders by embezzling funds, etc so they profited by the company sank in debt

2. exceptionally high death rate

3. relations with the Indians steadily worsened after 1617 when Pocahontas died. Indians attack in 1622
   "By 1625 the English had won the war, and the Indians had lost their best chance of driving out the intruders." (46)
   

Meanwhile...the French

• recognize the need for reciprocity with the Indians and engage in great trade was critical to Champlain's success

• trading trade with the Hurons etc. for an alliance against the Iroquois Confederacy

• were challenged by the Dutch and the Iroquois

• 1614 Dutch settle New Netherlands (below is a picture of New Amsterdam. Can you find Wall Street? Can you find Battery Park? What does battery mean?)