Age of Exploration
Course Description
The period from the end of the fifteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century was a period of exploration and colonization. As J. H. Parry has noted, in 1480 the people of the Old World had a general sense about what their hemisphere looked like, but no clue as to what lay beyond the horizon. By 1700 every continent except Antarctica had been seen, its coastlines charted, and its potential for settlement at least realized if not fully exploited. This was, perhaps, the greatest single achievement of the early modern period.
At the same time, numerous myths, half-truths, and deceptions have tended to color our understanding of the period. The most pernicious is the "flat-earth" myth, the idea that until Columbus came along, all Europeans, under the influence of the Catholic church, believed that the world was flat. Such stories are not only demonstrably false but arose fairly recently in the context of a general attack by American Progressives on religion and superstition. Closely tied to the flat-earth myth is the "black legend," a set of tales about the Spanish that has, in the English-speaking world, obscured the contribution of Iberians -- indeed their absolutely preeminent role -- in the process of exploration and discovery. A third myth, what I call the "log cabin" myth, concerns the nature of early settlements. We’ve all seen the pictures of Pilgrims dressed in black shouldering blunderbusses and living in log houses. In truth, log cabins were introduced nearly a century after the first English settlements and only became common after 1700. Pilgrims rarely wore black and likely never saw a blunderbuss. Recent archaeological discoveries have done much to clarify our views of the nature of life in the newly settled colonies, as well as their place in an emerging world economy.
Despite the fact that scholarship had done much to dispel these myths, they are pervasive. Disturbing number of textbooks at all levels perpetuate these tales, while popular media reinforce them through "docu-dramas," children’s "educational programming," and even cartoons. Our task in this course is twofold. First of all, we will look at good, solid, reliable scholarship, most of it very recent, as well as some web resources, in order to once and for all dispel any of the above cited myths from your mind. Second, we will play with some project ideas designed to help students (of all ages) gain a greater appreciation of the technology of discovery, that is to say, the solutions that people came up with to the problems that exploration and colonization presented.