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No one knew, least of all Christopher Columbus himself, what would be the outcome of Columbus's voyages across the Atlantic Ocean. He thought he had reached Cathay (China) even though he saw or made landfall on Caribbean islands, Central America, and South America, and never even reached the Pacific Ocean. Norsemen reached the Newfoundland area, and Africans and Chinese may have reached South America and the western coast of the American continent, respectively, but their effect upon the native peoples was much more limited than that of subsequent explorers and settlers from Spain, France, and Britain.
When Columbus and the Tainos, people native to the Caribbean island of Guanahani, met in 1492, they unwittingly began a biological, cultural, and political encounter that would have profound and lasting global consequences. Thousands of Europeans would descend upon the Americas in search of wealth and a new life, and they would bring with them microbes, plants, and animals that would remake the Western Hemisphere. Native American foods would eventually make their way across Europe. The Columbian Exchange was in motion.
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The Viking Discovery of America: The Excavation of a Norse Settlement in L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland by Helge Ingstad and Anne Stine Ingstad (2001) focuses on the Norse settlement excavated by the authors over the course of several years.
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They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America by Ivan Van Sertima (1976) uses sculpture, dated skeletons, and original documents (diaries, letters, maps, etc.), among other items, to argue that Africans arrived in Central America long before Christopher Columbus.
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| 1421: The Year China Discovered America by Gavin Menzier
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Columbus in the Americas by William Least Heat-Moon (2002) provides a concise, balanced biography of Christopher Columbus, a man once widely heralded as a hero for discovering the Western Hemisphere but now often reviled as the ravager of the Americas. As the author shows, Columbus was no more than a man--neither pure hero nor pure demon, but as multi-faceted as any other individual: brilliant, driven, courageous, inflexible, brutal. Covering all four of Columbus's voyages, this narrative is both a remarkable story of adventure and triumph, and a cautionary tale of the dark side of discovery.
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| Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. 30th Anniversary Edition. |
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Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 by Elizabeth A. Fenn (2001) looks at the spread of this deadly disease across America. The virus Variola major that causes smallpox ravaged the greater part of the North American continent for nearly a decade beginning in 1775. It was not the first time the disease had appeared on American shores but it was the worst outbreak until that time. Disregarding human constructed boundaries of race, class, and nationality, the opportunistic microbe swept across thousands of miles of territory and left death in its wake, reshaping human destinies.
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| As the title says, The Great Encounter: Native Peoples and European Settlers in the Americas, 1492-1800 by Jayme A. Sokolow, looks at the interactions between Native Americans throughout the Western Hemisphere and the European arrivals. Although numerous books have been published on this subject over the last decade, Sokolow approaches the topic a little differently from these earlier books. Here, the native peoples and their interactions with Europeans are at the center of American history, and the narrative covers the entire Western Hemisphere and native peoples' contacts with the English, French, Spaniards, and Portuguese. Europeans, wanting to transplant their traditional way of life, would fail. The Americas were, indeed, a New World to them and the mix of native food, native resources, free and enslaved native labor, native political relations with the foreigners, and the incredible mixing of indigenous people, Europeans, and Africans over three centuries would change the Americas forever and force foreigners to make adjustments to their expectations.
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In Their Own Words: The Colonizers. Early European Settlers and the Shaping of North America, collected and edited by T. J. Stiles, and with an introduction by Daniel B. Botkin nicely bridges the gap between primary-source immediacy and narrative cohesion, and transforms volumes of first-person accounts into highly readable chronological histories. Although Stiles does tend to emphasize conflict and thus distort our understanding of day-to-day life, he does keep to the well-known stories of such people and incidents as Captain John Smith and his rivals, Anne Hutchinson's Antimonians in New England, Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia, the Salem witch trials, and the beginnings of slavery.
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Some of the primary sources that Stile drew upon have been reprinted and are available for those history buffs interested in reading more about a particular topic.
Bradford's
History 'Of Plimoth Plantation' from the Original Manuscript
Early Narratives of the Northwest: 1634-1699 by Louise Phelps Kellogg
Reminiscences of the French War with Robert Roger's Journal & Memoir of Gen. Stark by Luther Roby
Two books about Indian captive John Williams are available on CD-ROM
***The Rev. John Williams, Captive of the Indians from 17031706 by John Williams and George Sheldon (1908). John Williams, a Puritan minister in Deerfield, MA, became a victim when a French and Indian raiding party sacked Deerfield. He spent 2.5 years as a captive in Quebec.
***Heredity and Early Environment of John Williams “The Redeemed Captive” by George Sheldon (1905). Biographical details of John Williams’ youth, education and early adulthood as well as background on the Puritan faith.
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