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Amerikaanse: WK1: The 1
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US: sem1: Lesson 1: Notes
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Amerikaanse Literatuur I (FOAD3a)inleiding & H1: De Engelse koloniën in
Amerika: 1607-1750
Powerpoint:
We want you ! : poster used on and off during American history to attract/ recruit soldiers.
In the US one of the things one has to be aware of is a contradiction between the concept of
American literature and the reality of American history.
Christopher Columbus: 1492 : in service of the Catholic Kings of Spain he went on a mission. But the
Portuguese thought that his idea was ridiculous. Anna of Castilia was one of the only people to
sponsor him.
300 people on board, no toilets, no beds… lots of goats… on a ship as big as this room.
Voyages of Columbus: he has made more than one trip. Until the end of his life he kept on claiming
that he had found India, the sea route to the East. But this is of course not true.
Waldseemuller 1507: he worked on the basis of reports that came back from sailors. but this is the
first known map in which the left part gives you the sea board of both North and South America.
Spanish Explorers of North America: there is no such thing as the United States before 1782. And the
English were not the first explorers of North America! The first ones were the Spanish. Here you have
3 Spanish explorers: Juan P De Leòn, Hernando de Soto and Francisco Vázquez de Coronado.
Here you can see it better. The Spanish had been up all the way the West Coast long before the
English had been there. So, the Spanish territories covered almost everything up to Canada.
Spanish Empire in NA: gives you an idea of the extension of the Spanish Empire in North America, up
to Canada.
Spanish Empire in South America: the green part became Portuguese and the red part Spanish
because the Pope had drawn a line to divide the world into two parts to avoid a war between Spain
and Portugal. This was done with the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494.
John Cabot: discovered the Newfoundland : of the coast of Canada; he’s quite early.
Martin Frobisher
Walter Raleigh: 100 years after Columbus
Green map: Cabot tried to go over the North and around the South to reach India and China.
,Roanoke Island: the first British settlement in America, North America. Virginia is in the middle of the
Eastern Seaboard of the United States and the Jamestown Colony is not far away from the present
day Washington.
The first settlement was Roanoke Island (the lost Colony) but all the people living there died. Nobody
knows what happened to them.
Jamestown Colony: the first surviving British Colony on American soil.
Henry Hudson was sailing in the service of the Dutch, but he was an Englishman. He discovered a
river and there came the foundation of the Dutch Empire in North America. The whole yellow bit
and the green and red bit, was Dutch. The name they gave to it was Nova Belgica.
A lot of the present day state of New York (was New Amsterdam), Connecticut, Princeton (was the
college of Nasau) etc… was Dutch. You see it was pretty extensive.
The French were there too before the English. Their main explorer was Samuel Champlain (1608).
Why did people discover North America that late? Because there was nothing to be found. People
were interested in the Caribbean because there was lots of sugar (in Europe they only had honey),
gold and other riches. Later on America became more interesting, there were lots of beavers which
could be used to create big hats which were a sign of wealth in Europe.
Settlement only happens when it becomes economically interesting.
You can see that the French covered the entire back of the British settlement.
This is the situation shortly before the war of independence (1776). The red part is British. The whole
blue thing is French and the orange things are Spanish. So you see that the British presence in North
America was relatively minor compared to the others.
Lots of people wrote about this situation. For example Richard Hakluyt. There were series of books
published and everyone said they were the first. Next: title page of the book.
Samual Purchas is a follower of Hakluyt who continued his work.
Montaigne wrote about it in another way. He was the first one the write an essay (he invented the
genre) in which he talks about civilization and the Indians in his essay “Des Cannibales”. He compares
them to the Europeans and says that those Indians too are human.
Montaigne was translated into English by John Florio in 1505 and that’s probably where
Shakespeare got some of his ideas about the Americans. In Shakespeare’s last play (= the
Tempest) the setting was inspired by the Bermudas, he read some reports of sailors. There is
a character in the play also inspired by Native Americans.
John Donne has this poem “to his mistress going to bed” in which he mentions something about
America. Here is where he compares his Mistress to taking possession of America just as Britain was
taking possession of America. He compares taking possession of his mistress (in bed) whit the British
taking possession of America.
American Indian Tribes: There were many European nations in North America; so there were also lots
of languages present (langue of the Native Americans, English, Spanish, French…). The Brits were just
, ‘one among the many’. The only thing we know is that there were really Indians everywhere (not
how many). There were lots of tribes. Massachusetts is for example named after a tribe living there.
It’s generally assumed that most of the Native Americans died of diseases imported by the
conquerors/ the white men, who were immune to them. They had lived for many years ‘untouched’
and weren’t used to our diseases. In North America Indians were never used as slaves so that
couldn’t have been a cause of death.
The Indians had a literature of their own. It was an oral literature. They had myths about how the
world was created and animal stories. Most of that at the time was not recorded. It’s a very rich
literature. But it was soon touched by European influences.
1775: Florida is still Spanish at the time. It doesn’t belong to the original 13 colonies. In 1755 - 1763
there had been a war between the French and British colonies: it was fought all over the world (so
also in their colonies) result: the British had won overseas which meant that the British had taken
over a lot of the colonies. On the continent it was the French who won.
1800: you can see the red (states) moving to the left. these are legitimate parts of the US. They sent
representatives to the Senate. (Territories do not sent representatives.) Originally, there were 13
colonies. And then it goes fast. This is the time of the Continental Blockade. The British blockaded
the whole continent, so the French couldn’t get to their colonies anymore. Napoleon had to sell large
parts to the Americans. Otherwise the British would have conquered these parts. The whole yellow
part is still Spanish. You can see the red growing all the time. More and more territories become
corporate states. In 1900 you can see that there are still 3 parts that are no states but ‘territories’. It
is only in 1920 that the whole of North America exists of States.
American Literature
You can see the history is both multicultural (and multinational) and multilingual ! But a lot of myths
have grown up around that history and especially as that history is embodied in the literature.
American Literature:
It took a long time for the American literature to flower/ to come into life (19th century). This because
of the concept of Nation Building: in the spirit of Romanticism. histories had to be invented of the
origin of countries, of entities that only had taken shape in the 19th century. But those stories were
necessary to create national myths and to keep the nations together.
A large part of the population were new immigrants who were afraid to lose their own identity.
Henry Nash Smith - Virgin Land
R.W.B. Lewis - American Adam: the whole idea of American Adam is the idea that the Americans
could rename everything. It’s a form of claiming everything, to make it yours by naming or renaming
it.
Perry Miller - Errand into the Wilderness: is the same thing. The whole idea that America was a
wilderness and it was the task of the conquerors to civilize the wilderness.
It is only recently that there has been some change at this (the idea of multiculturism).
Your anthology doesn’t start anymore with Columbus. It contains also Native stories etc. Amerigo
Vespuci is the name of a book written by someone who, after Columbus visited America. But because
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