The text that truly represents Exploration Literature is Chapter Two, Book Three of John Smith’s The General History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles. The first characteristic of Exploration Literature is that it was written by explorers and navigators. These are not professional writers. This connects to John Smith because he was an explorer who was given a charter by The Virginia Company to go to Jamestown. Smith’s claim that “whilst the ships stayed” they had a better chance of survival alludes to the fact that they were new to the land (83). Also, the chapter title What Happed Till the First Supply helps support the idea that they were explorers and inexperienced with the environment. The next characteristic is that the work is written to a specific …show more content…
This is ethnocentric because he believes that they are uncivilized simply because they are not like the Europeans. Later, Smith encounters a “strangely painted” Native American (88). The ethnocentricity shines through due to the fact that he does not understand their culture. They are strangely painted but only because people do not paint their face in Europe. In America, the natives consider it normal. The last characteristic of Exploration Literature is that the texts contain versions of the “American Dream” theme. The classic “American Dream” includes the opportunity of freedom and a better life. A better life could include a rise in social status. This is true for John Smith. The American dream is not shown in the chapter, but it is represented in his life story. As stated in class, Smith was born to a farmer. Farmers were not the lowest level in the social hierarchy, but close enough. When he was older he was apprenticed to a merchant, which was a social step up (Higgins-Harrell). By coming to America he would be able to explore these new opportunities and not be tied down by the social class of his parents in England. His parents later die before his
It seems that in the 21st century and even during the colonizing of America, the interpretation of Native Americans is and had been that they were savages and live a barbaric lifestyle. That they had no order or way of life. When presented with the topic of Native Americans and Colonists in the New World, it is easy to assume warfare and bloodshed amongst the two parties. That the Colonists were constantly in mini battles with the Native Americans. It is also easy to assume that the land in the New World was unsettling to the eyes. This is due to records from the colonist times, calling the lands “wild” or “wildlands”. In Robbie Ethridge’s book Creek Country, she tries to debunk these interpretations mentioned above. She does so by using an
Racism is a major theme that Calloway highlights in this time period. Calloway talks about how living in America in 1763 was very
The other reason for exploration was everyone wanted more land to expand their power. Both England and France got into multiple confrontations over land. With at least only 4 wars, England and France spent at least 32 years at war with each other (Document 7). Of those wars Britain mostly had the best outcomes of them. With Britain acquiring all this land, the slave trade then started appearing.Slaves were put on ships with horrible conditions (Document 4). Expansion of the new world was a major demand and also was a cause for the slave
The Exploration Era was a time period when countries and people made journeys overseas to find “the New World.” With the help of the printing press, the discoveries of the Americas were known globally making people curious to explore it themselves. In the map “Distribution of Columbus’ Letter” (Document D), it shows where the letter was published and where it was translated to different. This is due to the printing press. Along with the many documents, the news of Christopher Columbus’ discoveries of “India” or the New World had sparked the curiosity of people all over the world. People became more interested in geography and seeing what’s out there along with the different resources. The New World discovery opened up a new trade route and different trade items. This would create pros and cons like economic growth and slavery. In addition the exploration of the Europeans helped us gain knowledge and get a picture of the Americas. In the “Henricus Martellus’ World Map, 1489” (Document E), it shows the world as they knew it with Europe, Africa, and Asia. The “Martin Waldseemuller's World Map, 1507” was an updated, more correct version of the world we see today. Waldseemuller’s map includes the Americas and was much bigger than Martellus’. The printing press had helped Waldseemuller use this new knowledge to create a map that would depict something
Turner fails to realize the extent to which Native Americans existed in the ‘Wilderness’ of the Americas before the frontier began to advance. Turner’s thesis relies on the idea that “easterners … in moving to the wild unsettled lands of the frontier, shed the trappings of civilization … and by reinfused themselves with a vigor, an independence, and a creativity that the source of American democracy and national character.” (Cronon) While this idea seems like a satisfying theory of why Americans are unique, it relies on the notion that the Frontier was “an area of free land,” which is not the case, undermining the the...
The article “Navigating the Age of Exploration” by Ted Widmer explains how people view American history with only the assumptions pertaining to the present boundaries of the United States instead of seeing the world as explorers did during the Age of Exploration and expanding our boundaries to understand America’s history more fully. Widmer points out that many teachers of American history don’t teach a full continental perspective extending beyond American borders, which doesn’t give credit to the various cultures that contributed to the foundation of the United States. Today, people know little about the contributions of explorers during the Age of Exploration, and their impacts on America. During the Age of Exploration, the Europeans created
In this book, Kupperman is telling a well-known event in remarkable detail. She intentionally uses last three chapters of the nine to tell the Jamestown’s history. The first six are in relation to how Jamestown came to be. The first chapter deals with political, national and religious conflicts during this period and how it motivated the English to venture West. The second is titled,” Adventurers, Opportunities, and Improvisation.” The highlight of this chapter is the story of John Smith, and how his precious experience enabled him to save ”the Jamestown colony from certain ruin.” (51) He is just an example of the “many whose first experiences along these lines were Africa or the eastern Mediterranean later turned their acquired skills to American ventures.” (43) Chapter three discusses the European and Native American interaction before and during this period. “North America’s people had had extensive and intimate experience of Europeans long before colonies was thought of, and through this experience they had come to understand much about the different kind of people across the sea.” (73) This exchange of information happened because a lot of Europeans lived among the Natives (not as colonist or settlers), and Natives were brought back to Europe. The people in Europe were very fascinated with these new people and their culture. Chapter four analyzes this fascination. It starts off talking about Thomas Trevilian, an author of “an elaborate commonplace book,” that showed “the English public was keenly interested in the world and in understanding how to categorize the knowledge about all the new things, people, and cultures of which specimens and descriptions were now available to them.
In Horace Miner’s article, “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema”, he talks about a tribe and describes their odd behavior. He tells about how the tribe performs these strange daily rituals and how their peculiarity is extreme, but in fact he is actually speaking of Americans as a whole (Miner). Miner uses this style of writing to more effectively prove his point: that Americans are ethnocentric.
John Smith was born in Lincolnshire, England to a farmer and his wife in 1580. He only had a grammar school education, but with this education he was able to join the British volunteers fighting in the Dutch war of independence from Spain. While in the military, he was captured by the Turks and sold as a slave. He eventually escaped and came back to his mother land of Great Britain in 1605. He then became interested in settling Virginia in the new world. The following year, Smith sailed to Virginia with the Virginia Company’s first colonist as one of seven councilors. This was the first of many voyages to the new world for him. Smith spent much time exploring the land. By this time, the governor of Jamestown was executed for treason and Smith was then elected president of Jamestown colony. He then began building houses, churches, and fortifications. He also had a policy th...
“The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin.... Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick.... In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so . . . little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe.... The fact is, that here is a new product that is American....”
The first is that from the unlearned ahistorical view, the Indians lived and moved around America without hardly leaving a trace, they left it “natural”, a very European way at looking at it. But William Cronon and Richard White pointed out how this, in a way, demeans the Indians and makes them seem more like an animal species and thus, deprives them of their culture. And this also makes it seem that changes to nature are negative, and the “ideal” world is to not look live we were even there. Again, this is and was a very European way at looking at it. But the Indians did in fact affect their
Europeans explored continents and countries in the 1400’s to the 1700’s, this is know as the Age of Exploration. The impact of Europeans on global trade was disease, new crops, and slavery.
Throughout history, there have been turning points that have changed the course of society. The three most important turning points were the Age of Exploration, the Renaissance, and the Reformation. Each had many positive and negative effects on history. During the Age of Exploration, many explorers set out in their massive sailing ships to find another way to get to India, but what they discovered was a major turning point in the history of the world. During the Renaissance, many people in Europe began having new ideas and concepts about life and even started believing in humanism, which was emphasizing the value of humans in many forms (during this time it was art). And finally during the Reformation, it was a time of religious conflict was shaped Europe into what it was today.
According to our assigned text, Ethnocentrism is defined as a tendency to think that out own culture is superior to other cultures (Martin &Nakayama, 2013 p.5). We can observe this through various clips throughout the film. The African characters namely the father of the prince believe their culture is superior to that of the American characters and I understood this to be a representation of ethnocentrism. In addition, differences in economic classes are represented as well within the film. Just as our text explained, there is a disparity that exist among classes although they tend to go unacknowledged (Martin & Nakayama, 2013 p.14). In the film “Coming to America”, there are several observations I made that relate to both ethnocentrism and economic class disparities. For example, King Joffer blatantly states “our son cannot consort with such a girl” which can be viewed as ethnocentrism and economic class disparity. King Joffer offensively refers to the Americans as being beneath them in the following quote “The man is beneath me and so is his daughter” which suggests the economic disparity between the two and are unacceptable from his standpoint. Furthermore, King Jaffore attempts to buy off the Americans thereby insulting them in stating “I know you have been inconvenienced. I am prepared to compensate you. Shall we say one million American dollars”. The American father, Cleo is immediately insulted and infuriated replying to him that he did not care whether or not he was a king in his country and his money was not acceptable. Cleo stated angrily “you cannot buy my daughter”. Furthermore, Cleo stated “this is America” in an attempt to possibly make him aware that their standards were not necessarily welcomed or proper in America. Again these examples display ethnocentrism and economic disparity from what I gathered from the text. The
The Exploration age for the europeans was the way to get rich famous and make money for their mother country. With the new exploration tools that helped many explores sail to the new world and explore the land and to learn about the native people culture and how they lived. With the new knowledge of the new world introduces new threats to both the Europeans and the Natives such as disease, enslavement of people and the decimation of populations in the new world due to exploration. The age of exploration was started when christopher columbus went to the new world which he thought was india in 1492. After the first trip to the new world with Columbus there was a boom in Europe and the race to make it and explore, and colonize the new world was