Syllabus: HSTY2034

Week 2: Rival Empires in North America

Lecture 1: Spanish Exploration in the New World
Lecture 2: Comparative Empires in North America: French, Dutch and Swedish

Tutorial:   Initial Encounters

Essential Reading:

Thomas Hariot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590) http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/hariot/hariot.html

NOTE: Click down the page until you come to the report itself (which starts after the image of the title page). Read the transcription of the 1590 text (approx. 34 pages) and look at the illustrations. 

Questions:

What is Hariot's purpose in writing this report and how is this purpose reflected in the text?   How does Hariot depict the landscape and why does he describe the "nature and manners" of the native inhabitants in such depth? Look at the images that are listed below the text.   How would you categorize European attitudes toward native people at this time?

Further Reading: Rival Empires

J.R. Jones, The Anglo-Dutch Wars of the Seventeenth-Century (Palo Alto: Pendragon House, 1974).

Peter Moogk, La Nouvelle France: The Making of French Canada, a Cultural History (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2000).

David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001).

Charles R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600-1800 (London: Hutchinson, 1965).

W.J. Eccles, The French in North America (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998).

Optional Assignments

Watch the 1991 film Black Robe, directed by Bruce Beresford.   This film details the first contacts between the Huron Indians of Quebec and the Jesuit missionaries from France who came to convert them to Catholicism. It's arguably the most realistic film of this period ever made.  

You can also choose from a number of far less realistic movies about Christopher Columbus.   These include two 1992 films, Christopher Columbus: The Discovery directed by John Glen and starring Marlon Brando, Tom Selleck, and Rachel Ward; and 1492: Conquest of Paradise , directed by Ridley Scott and starring Gerard Depardieu.