PART ONE DISCOVERY AND COLONIZATION CHAPTER I THE BACKGROUNDS OF AMERICAN HISTORY In taking up the great drama of American history we must get, at the start, a clear vision of the two stages whereon its first important scenes were laid. One of these is in the Old World, the other is in the New World. Concerning the first of these, the European, we know a good deal; of the other, the American, we know very little because its strange peoples, whether Aztec or later “Indian,” left us no written records. In numerous ways the Old World peoples of the long ago were, as we shall see, truly background builders of our Republic. So, too, were the copper-colored aborigines of the New World. Through unnumbered generations they had lived, worked, loved, and died beside our rivers and lakes, along our coasts and in our mountains, plains, and valleys. The first Europeans who arrived on this continent were little trained for the work of continental conquest and mastery. To a considerable degree these so-called "Indians” supplied necessary tools and forest arts for this work. Failure to take into account either the Old World or the New World background of American history and their respective actors gives the student a one-sided view of earliest American history. On the other hand a clear conception of them both makes plainer not only what has happened in the past but some things which are happening in our own day. Section I. The Mother Continent Across the Atlantic You can never know a man so well that a knowledge of his ancestors will not throw new light on what he did, what he thought, and what he became. It is just the same with nations. We cannot understand the history of this country of ours properly unless we see the men and women who were at work in the far background of American history. These people may never have heard the name "America," but they surely laid foundations which made possible the discovery and occupation of our continent. Things seem to occur in a hit-or-miss way in this world and great events sometimes just appear "to happen", so to speak. This is not true; the reason we sometimes think it is true is because some events are of so much more seeming importance that they stand vividly out by themselves in our minds and we forget the building process which made them possible. The building process in history and their results Among those long-ago workers who must be reckoned builders of this Republic we should count the Crusaders, perhaps, first. There were seven great Crusades, or The Crusades armies led by European rulers, or others, for the capture of the Holy Land between A.D. 1096 and 1272. This crusading age ranks along with the Reformation and the French Revolution as one of the great awakening periods in human history. The Crusades (a) checked the advance of the Mohammedans upon Europe; (b) enriched Europe by promoting the growth of commerce; and (c) greatly broadened the minds of all thinking men by introducing to Europe the civilization and the culture of the Byzantines and Arabians. The returning Crusader who showed his neighbor how to put pepper in soup or nutmeg in ale was a factor in American history; all who bore back from the Holy Land a jewel or a gem and wore these and taught others to delight in their beauty were also factors in our history. Very quickly these luxuries some of which soon became necessaries—which were brought overland from the Spice Islands near the Malay Peninsula and from India to the Mediterranean by the caravans of the Turks, awoke Europe to new life. The people came to want new foods, new tools, new implements, new styles of dress, new money, new fads; men began to think new thoughts, sing new songs, devise new paintings and new types of architecture. To meet this need, a new conquest of the Mediterranean Sea, to which all trails led, became necessary (map p. 5). This conquest was made by those proud northern seacoast States, Venice, Pisa, and Genoa, whose venturesome mariners mastered that inland sea. The invention of new "tools" of navigation such as the compass and astrolabe, was hardly second in importance to the invention of the printing press, which sent broadcast the information which such tools helped men to secure. Trade rivalries soon led some pilots to throw away caution and they learned to strike straight across and "pick up" a desired port without "school" of following the shorelines. Thus was born the The Italian Italian "school" of navigation-out of Europe's navigation longing for the prized "gold, frankincense, and myrrh" of the East, and the ability of her people to provide goods for exchange, such as woolen fabrics, tin, copper, lead, and coral. Few men realized what this conquest of the Mediterranean |