Impact of European Discoveries in the New World
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Generations of American schoolchildren have been taught that Christopher Columbus "discovered" the Americas, despite the fact that many diverse peoples had already created social systems and developed flourishing cultures throughout the region. Further, children have been taught that brave and noble explorers and settlers, ranging from the Spanish such as Castillo and Bartolome de las Casas to the French and the English Puritans and Cavaliers in Virginia, created a "New World (Bigelow and Peterson, 16û19). This brief essay, drawing upon the works of several key figures in the age of exploration and encounter between Europeans and Native American peoples, will argue that from "discovery" to encounter and on to permanent settlement, the combined effect of European activities in the Americas was inhuman û an example of man's inhumanity to man. Columbus, having "discovered" and then claimed "Hispaniola" for the Spanish Crown, wrote that the "natives" were generally peaceful and represented a great resource in terms of their labor û labor that could be used at will via slaver (Bigelow and Peterson, 19). Others, such as Castillo, did not hesitate to slaughter and enslave Native American peoples. De las Casas, a priest, did "peacefully" work as a missionary in what is now Nicaragua and Guatemala, but he was something of an exception among the Spanish in that he did not denigrate the peoples he encountered, though he did believe they required conversion to Roman Catholicism a
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thing more than a widespread attempt on the part of the Puritans to develop a way of living comfortably in the New World while maintaining a religious orthodoxy that they did not want to see threatened or changed by any external forces or by internal dissent.
Jonathan Edwards (in Baym, et al, 119) was also an influential member of the New England clerical aristocracy. However, as part of the Great Awakening of 1734, Edwards found that his own views were not accepted by many of his co-religionists. Edwards was a somewhat dissident strain in his society, a man who believed in a more emotional and experiential Christianity than that of the mainstream.
As the Puritans became more settled and comfortable in the New World, their concerns shifted in some key ways. Having sought religious freedom for themselves, they would later deny such freedom to others and even penalized quite harshly those who disagreed with their own extremely orthodox and somewhat rigid religious beliefs. Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of the Salem Witch Trials. In this seminal series of events, as Edwards (in Baym, et al, 146-147) suggests, fear and suspicion led many otherwise compassionate human beings to single out their friends and ne
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Approximate Word count = 1849
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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