The material below is excerpted or taken entirely from the following site

The material below is excerpted or taken entirely from the following site, and all reproductions should recognize this source: http://ericir.syr.edu/Virtual/Lessons/crossroads/sec2/Intro.html#CHALLENGE

I. Reinterpreting the Encounter

Just in time for the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus's voyages to the Americas, historians have abandoned the rhetoric of discovery -- or, at least, brought it under severe control. No longer do we say that Columbus and the other European explorers "discovered" America. Rather, the European voyagers encountered Indian peoples and cultures who had been present in the Americas for hundreds or even thousands of years.

As John Noble Wilford has pointed out, the quincentenary of Columbus's voyages differed profoundly from the quadricentenary of 1892 and the tercentenary of 1792 -- both of which emphasized the unalloyed benefits of the "discovery of America" and the bravery and modernity of Columbus's thought and enterprise. In part, of course, the 1892 omission of Indian peoples from the commemoration of Columbus, except as anthropological curiosities, stemmed from the series of Indian wars that ranked with the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Civil War as determinants of American foreign and military policy. The Indians were conquered foes, perceived as being somewhere on the spectrum between brave enemies and savage primitives. To accord them equal billing with the great Christopher Columbus was, to their way of thinking, ridiculous.

The shift from the emphases of the quadricentenary to those of the quincentenary reflects the dramatic transformation in twentieth-century American views of the Indians (see essay I) -- of their status as indigenous peoples, of the dignity and worth of t heir cultures, of the plausibility and validity of their ideas about the proper relationships between human beings and the natural world, and of the sufferings they endured at the hands of white explorers, settlers, and conquerors. It also reflects two other factors:

(i) post-Vietnam doubts about America's role in the world and

(ii) the problems posed by the conflict between defenders of Western culture and attackers of "cultural imperialism."

Nonetheless, although this conceptual shift may look to some like "political correctness," it makes good sense. It recognizes that what we used to call the "Discovery of America" was really a "first contact" (of the sort beloved by fans of science fiction on) between two sets of civilizations and cultures. (Indeed, European colonists in North America would not have survived without the aid of the Indian peoples who greeted and befriended them and taught them what crops to cultivate, what game to hunt, and how to build shelters.) This first contact, however, was not governed by the "prime directive" of noninterference familiar to devotees of Star Trek. Most European explorers, conquerors, colonizers, and missionaries felt few compunctions about interfering with indigenous cultures -- by deliberate force (as with Francisco Pisarro's 1531-1533 conquest of the Inca empire in Peru), by a combination of force and accident (as with Hernando Cortes's unsuccessful 1518 assault on the Aztec empire in Mexico, which h exposed the Aztec to smallpox that devastated the population and made Cortes's 1521 attack a success), or by accident (95 percent of the Maya people of Mexico succumbed to diseases contracted due to contact with Europeans).

There were some beneficial results of contact, however; Europeans introduced new technologies, crops, and domestic animals to the Americas, and Indian peoples absorbed these innovations into their own cultures and economies. And, even though Spanish authorities insisted on supplanting (often by forcible conversion) indigenous religions with Roman Catholocism, the Roman Catholic clergy soon emerged as powerful advocates for justice for native peoples. Ultimately, however, Europeans received the great majority of the benefits of American colonization.

II. Exploration, Conquest, Exploitation, Colonization

The story of this period is more than the story of contact between Europeans and Indians. It is also the story of the Europeans' attempts to found colonies in the Americas -- some as bases for exploration, conquest, and exploitation; others as permanent colonies.

How do we tell the story of this period? The best way is to synthesize an array of older and newer historical and pedagogical methods.

There are two areas of special concern in studying the period of contact:

(i) the chronology of exploration, conquest, and colonization: Traditionally, teachers have marched their students through the roster of explorers, discoverers, conquerors, and empire-builders, whether in strict chronological order, geographical order, or a combination of the two (that is, in the order established by the succession of European nations in exploration, conquest, and colonization -- first the Portuguese, then the Spanish, and then the English, French, Dutch, and Swedish).

This chronology is still worth giving to students -- as long as we tell them why they need it and why they will find it useful. In essence, we can demonstrate the utility of chronology by illustrating how it provides (i) a basic framework on which they can hang additional ideas and information, and (ii) context, background, and useful juxtapositions that enable them to make historical connections and begin learning how to interpret history for themselves. If we explain the utility and necessity of abs orbing the chronology, they will not approach it as just another arid, useless set of dates, names, and events. (This point is true across the whole sweep of American history -- not just in this period.)

For example, there remains considerable value in the traditional juxtaposition of the history of English exploration and discovery in the Americas with the ideas and achievements of the Renaissance in England. At the same time, however, we should not fall into the hoary cliche that the Spanish were a backward-looking people in decline, merely because Spanish culture in the Renaissance does not resonate with modern American culture in the ways that English Renaissance culture does.

(ii) Rather than just treating the succession of European voyages, settlements, and colonies as a kind of proto-Amtrak timetable, we and our students must grapple with the spectrum of goals, purposes, and methods followed by the various European nations -- including their competition with one another.

Before we examine the differing motivations that European nations had to come to the Americas, we should analyze the factors they had in common. All the European nations were beginning to experience a massive growth in population, recovering from the terrible depredations of the Black Death of the fourteenth century. Population growth brought in its wake the growth of national economies, the growth of consumer demand (including demand for exotic products), and the development of advances in shipbuilding and navigation, so that mariners could compete more effectively in the mercantile traffic of fifteenth-century and sixteenth-century Europe. The resurgence of commerce also gave a powerful impetus to the forces of centralization and nationalism, building powerful new monarchic nations whose leaders were intent on consolidating their claims to power by cultivating and fostering the economic development of their nations. Finally, European nations, fascinated by and hungry for increased trade with the we wealthy nations of Asia (and inspired by the popular accounts of travelers such as the Venetian merchant Marco Polo), sought better and more effective routes of transportation and trade -- which, in turn, drove these governments to encourage advances in shipbuilding and navigation, and then voyages of exploration. (Much of this summary will be familiar from "older" accounts of the "Age of Discovery.")

To offer a few broad generalizations for each exploring and colonizing European nation (keeping in mind William Blake's warning, as quoted by Axtell -- "To generalize is to be an idiot"):

(a) The Spanish and the Portuguese came to the Americas to pursue dreams of empire, both secular and religious. Although the Portuguese acquired Brazil under the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), the Spanish were the principal Iberian power in the Americas. Their religious aims were simple: to win these lands and peoples for Catholicism. Their secular aims included bringing Central and South America under their imperial governance to augment the power of Spain in world affairs, seeking great wealth (both the gold and gems that were rumored to abound in the Americas), and gratifying their individual ambitions for power and glory (especially in a stratified society like Spain, the Americas offered intoxicating opportunities for social and political advancement).

As James Axtell points out, the old, powerful "Black Legend" that purported to describe the Spanish explorations, conquests, and colonial enterprises is largely a caricature. Under the terms of this legend, the Spanish colonists were conquistadores (conquerors ) -- brutal men, interested only in loot, pillage, rape, and murder, who left a trail of savage destruction wherever they went. Even though many of the early Spanish conquistadores were interested only in gold and gems and were ruthless in their methods, emphasis on brutality and greed does not explain how the Spanish created a colonial empire in Latin America that lasted for more than two centuries (longer, indeed, than the British Empire lasted in that part of North America that we now know as the United States). The "Black Legend" has some basis, notably in the work of the Spanish priest and former conquistador Bartolome de Las Casas, who intended his impassioned histories to persuade the Spanish monarchs to restrain the excesses of the exped expeditions of exploration, conquest, and conversion they had authorized. But, as Axtell notes, the "Black Legend" is also largely an artifact of nineteenth-century Protestant Americans of English or Anglo-Saxon ancestry who were convinced that Catholic lands and peoples were tyrannous, lazy, cruel, and semi-barbarous. It has thus obscured the stability, cultural achievements (including the founding of universities in Mexico older than any in North America), and occasional benificence of the Spanish colonies.

It also should be noted here that slavery (in particular, African slavery, because enslaving Indians proved unsuccessful) was introduced to the Americas by the Portuguese and the Spanish -- over a century before the first Africans arrived in Virginia (in 1619). In part, the European slave traders joined a slave trade that was several centuries old, beginning with west Africans' selling slaves to Mediterranean traders in the eighth century. Apparently, the small but continuous traffic in slaves, in which the Portuguese were the leading European practitioners, exploded in the fifteenth century when the Portuguese applied slavery to the cultivation of sugar cane, first in their Atlantic island colonies and then in Latin America. The Spanish quickly followed owed suit, to be succeeded in the seventeenth century by the Dutch and in the eighteenth century by the English.

(b) The French also came to the Americas for wealth and power, but their methods were different. They did not seek to conquer the regions they explored and laid claim to -- only to repel the competing claims of rival powers like Spain and England and to establish a foothold for themselves in the American continents (a pattern followed as well by the Dutch and the Swedish, who sought to establish colonies as international economic bases, rather than as permanent settlements). The traditional view is that, because the French did not engage in a full-scale colonizing enterprise like that of the English, they missed a priceless opportunity. To be sure, that statement itself is based on a huge network of unarticulated assumptions about how a European nation ion "should" look upon the "opportunities" presented by the Americas.

(c) The English were laggards in the race for the Americas, but, because they ultimately changed their understanding of the nature and purpose of colonies, the English colonies eventually were among the most successful in the Americas. At first, English explorers sought the same kinds of benefits that animated the Spanish, Portuguese, and French enterprises -- discovery of gold, jewels, and other valuable goods for trade and commerce. Gradually, the English shifted their emphasis to include the plant planting of self-maintaining colonies that, due to the structure of English government, politics, and political theory, acquired a measure of self-governance. As a result, traditional accounts of the English explorations and colonizations are remarkably benign, emphasizing the ideas that the founders of the colonies planted "seeds of democracy" in the "New World."

What drove the English to reconceptualize the nature and purpose of colonies? One factor was the disastrous Roanoke experiment of 1584. That colony, founded on the traditional model by Sir Walter Ralegh, disappeared without a trace within three years. The change in the nature of English colonies also grew out of a combination of economic factors. The growing demand for wool, which led many landowners to enclose their lands as pasturage for sheep, deprived many English families of farmland that they had used for subsistence farming. The growing number of landless poor, combined with a dramatic population growth (from three million in 1485 to four million by 1603), posed a major problem that, English officials became convinced, could be solved by exp exporting the "surplus population" to colonies in North America. Finally at the same time that the English were grappling with the challenges posed by the Americas, they also were struggling with the crises of religious divisions and sectarian rivalry. It therefore seemed a useful expedient to permit members of difficult religious minorities -- the most famous examples are the Pilgrims in 1620 and the Puritans in 1630 -- to leave England for America. The mother country would be safely insulated from these dissenting religious colonies by distance and the hardship of travel; mother country and colonies could thus leave one another alone.

By the close of this period, the Europeans had only the most dim and uncertain ideas of how the new societies they had planted in the Americas would develop. The "voyages of discovery and exploration" set the stage for a reconceptualization of the European world. No longer would Europeans be limited to the European continent -- they would now occupy the land on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, creating what later scholars would call the Atlantic civilization. The development of the American component of that civilization is traced in essay III.

III. The Differentness of the Colonial World

This "differentness" includes several key components:

Newness: We tend to forget just how comparatively new the American world is. A good, unsettling illustration is to recall the 1992 fire at Windsor Castle, and then realize that that castle was standing long before any European settlement in the Americas.
The colonies were the first "new" societies in thousands of years of European history. The colonists who came to the Americas knew that they were taking part in the founding of new societies, the success of which was not foreordained by any stretch of the imagination. They remembered the Roanoke experiment (1584) in present-day North Carolina, and several other, less famous failed colonial ventures. They knew about the appalling loss of life in the first years of the Jamestown colony (1607) and the Plymouth colony (1620).
The colonies' political structures were likewise new, and their fragility helped exacerbate the contentiousness of colonial politics throughout the period. The problem of "newness" is further illustrated by the development of the colonies of Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut. Originally, there were two settlements in Massachusetts -- Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth -- and two settlements in Connecticut -- Connecticut and New Haven. By 1700, Massachusetts Bay had swallowed up Plymouth, and Connecticut had absorbed New Haven.
Monarchic Society: This element of differentness is captured in the very word "colonial." The idea of being "colonial" is inextricably bound up with the political and constitutional status of the colonies as appendages of England (after 1706, Great Britain).
The English colonies were monarchic societies, acknowledging the sovereignty of the English Crown (except for the Commonwealth period, 1649-1660, following the execution of Charles I, when the colonies acknowledged the sovereignty first of the Commonwealth , and then of Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector). This monarchic context had important consequences for the internal social and political structures of the colonies. Although classes in the colonies were neither so fixed nor so complex as the English social system, there were important distinctions between gentlemen, or "the better sort," and ordinary people, sometimes subdivided into "the middling sort" and "the lower sort." We see these distinctions, which at times achieved mind-numbing complexity, most clearly in the ways that Harvard and other colonial colleges ranked their students -- not by academic distinction, nor by alphabetical order, but by social rank.

These distinctions mattered most in colonial politics. In each of the colonies, a system of factional and familial loyalties and animosities formed the context within which particular disputes played themselves out. To cite the most famous example, the 1735 case of the New York printer John Peter Zenger was not an isolated attack on freedom of the press by a tyrannical royal government; Zenger was an ally of the Livingston-Alexander faction in opposition to the Delancey faction, which dominated New York's executive and judiciary. Another important illustration is the longstanding opposition pitting the Hutchinsons and Olivers against the Otises and their allies in Massachusetts. When one faction took the part of the Crown and the mother country, the e other faction gravitated to the "popular" or "democratic" side. These patterns persisted through the Revolution and early national periods, eroding only under the assault of Jacksonian democracy in the 1820s and 1830s.

These distinctions in social rank were not ironclad -- for example, in 1706 Benjamin Franklin was born the youngest son of a "middling sort" printer in Boston; within forty years, on his retirement from the printing business, he had established himself as a gentleman in Philadelphia. Still, it would be almost inconceivable in the seventeenth-century colonial world, and extremely difficult in the eighteenth-century colonial world, for someone like Bill Clinton to aspire to high (or, indeed, any) political office.

Agricultural Society: Most modern American students have had no direct exposure to the life of a farmer and thus no direct understanding of how an agricultural economy functions. Thus, we have to make certain that they realize how central agriculture, and the rhythms and constraints of farming, were to the lives of the colonists. Only a comparative handful of Americans in this period -- maybe five percent, as of 1787 -- lived in "cities" (that is, towns of 5,000 people or better). Virtually all Am Americans -- even ministers, doctors, and lawyers (the main "gentlemanly," nonfarming occupations of this period) -- got most or at least a major part of their income from farming. To the extent that it is ever possible for a family to be self-sufficient, many colonial American families were self-sufficient, visiting "towns" only for religious services, an occasional purchase of fabrics or manufactured imported goods, "court day" (to sue and be sued, or to listen to their neighbors suing and being sued), and political and social gossip.
Neighbors, Strangers, and Foes: The British North American colonies coexisted uneasily with a remarkable range of neighbors. First, of course, there were the several Indian nations, whom the colonists sometimes esteemed as friends, sometimes valued as trading partners, and sometimes feared as savage enemies. Second, there were the rival colonies founded by other European nations -- the Spanish to the south and west, the French in Canada and the Ohio Valley, the Dutch and Swedes in the mid-Atlantic coastal region. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the colonies of British North America periodically lived in fear of their conquest or annihilation by the French and their Indian allies, and throughout this period the colonists and their British governors and military protectors labored to establish defensive alliances with friendly or neutral Indian nations. A vital point about this subject is that the colonial wars -- usually misnamed the "Indian wars" -- were almost always adjunct to conflicts between the European powers in Europe. These "Indian wars" were actually the American front of "mini-world-wars" fought regularly for a century, and ending (finally) with the Treaty of Paris in 1763 (distinct from the Treaty of Paris of 1783 that ended the Revolutionary War).
The Marginality of the Colonial World: Although modern Americans may view the colonial past as the central drama of the period, the colonists were seen at the time, and for the most part saw themselves, as marginal to the great drama of the period -- the struggle for pre-eminence in world affairs among Britain, France, and their European allies. Moreover, because the colonists were on the cultural margins of the Atlantic civilization, until the middle of the eighteenth century they tended to be regarded by inhabitants of the mother country as backward, parochial, and almost as savage (by cultivated metropolitan British standards) as the Indians who shared the continent with them.

IV. The Diversity of the Colonial World

The colonies of British North America were founded by different people and groups, at different times, and for different reasons. There was no "master plan" to create a large, organized political entity called British North America; it just evolved that way. This diversity was not just political, although there were several types of colonies; it was also religious, ethnic, and cultural. To be sure, the diversity of colonial life may look like various kinds of vanilla to a citizen of the United States, circa 1993, but it was considerable and remarkable in the view of any European visitor to the American colonies.

Political Diversity: The colonies fall into three broad categories:

Charter colonies were organized either by groups of economic speculators and investors or by those seeking to found a polity where they could follow their own religious practices and beliefs. They were granted a document, called a charter, by the Crown; this document represented a partial and conditional grant of sovereign power over an area of North America (sometimes specified with precision, sometimes not) where the grantees could found a colony. (One of the reasons the Pilgrims entered into the Mayflower Compact was that they knew they had landed outside the territory specified in the charter they had been issued.) Charter colonies include Virginia and Massachusetts Bay.
Proprietary colonies were organized by one powerful individual who received authority from the Crown to found and administer a colony; he and his descendants were known as "proprietors." Pennsylvania was the principal proprietary colony.
Crown colonies were organized as direct possessions of the monarch -- although some of these colonies had charters as well. Sometimes they were founded from scratch (North Carolina); just as often, they were conquered territories that had been founded by another nation (New York, formerly Nieuw Netherland).

Ethnic/Religious Diversity: In his most recent work on immigration and demographic history, Bernard Bailyn has pointed out that even if the American Revolution had never taken place this period would be an extraordinarily important one, for it witnessed one of the greatest mass migrations of people in human history. He calls it "the peopling of British North America" -- a phrase, of course, that seemingly slights the presence of the Indians, though Bailyn's point is that these waves of European immigration dramatically increased the population density of North America and transformed the life of the continent. Two types of diversity are especially important -- diversity of ethnic origins (among various types of Northern Europeans) and diversity of religious belief (mostly among varieties of Protestant Christianity, although Catholics and a smattering of Jews are present in the colonies from a very early period). Thus, for example, the Church of England, or Anglican Church (after independence, know n in America as the Episcopal Church), dominated the southern colonies -- Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia. Although the Anglican Church was dominant in Maryland, it had to contend with a large and flourishing Roman Catholic population (as Maryland had been founded to provide a haven for English Catholics). Pennsylvania, dominated by Quakers, was a hospitable home to those of practically every Christian denomination, and Philadelphia even boasted one of the few Jewish congregations (other s were founded in New York City; Savannah, Georgia; and Newport, Rhode Island). New Jersey, again, was dominated by the Anglican Church but was also home to most Protestant Christian denominations. New York, which began as a Dutch colony, was a crazy-quilt of religious groups and loyalties, almost as diverse as Pennsylvania -- though the beleaguered Anglicans still sought to confirm their pride of place as the established church in the counties that made up what we would recognize as New York City. New York was more a sphere for forced religious diversity than a center of religious liberty. Rhode Island was the second great island of religious liberty, with Pennsylvania. The other New England colonies were dominated by various Calvinist denominations -- Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Methodists -- in an uneasy truce with Anglicans; these denominations united only in resistance to Catholics, Baptists, and Quakers. (See section IV below for a discussion of the legal and political aspects of e checkered religious geography of British North America.)

V. Colonial Protypes of American Politics

Two aspects of the colonial experience are notable because they appear to us to be prototypes of later political and constitutional doctrines that are critical to the course of American history. While we are right to acknowledge their significance and to note connections between them and their successors, we should not assume that the later developments were implicit in their colonial precursors, nor should we view these features of the colonial period through the lens of subsequent history.

Religious Liberty: Although the old conventional wisdom has it that the religious dissenters came to America to seek religious liberty, the newer conventional wisdom notes, correctly, that the dissenters sought that liberty for themselves and were at times notably harsh on those who wanted religious liberty for views differing from those of the majority religious group. At the same time, some colonies (Rhode Island, New York, and Pennsylvania) practiced religious toleration, under which the majority chose to stay its hand rather than slapping down dissident minorities. Religious toleration was thus a very different thing from religious liberty, which recognizes the right to hold different opinions on religious questions.
It is still a matter of vigorous historical and jurisprudential dispute what an "established church" was in the colonial, Revolutionary, and early national periods. History, in this as in so many other cases, mingles uncomfortably with constitutional law because those who seek to interpret the religion clauses of the First Amendment often have recourse to the history of religion, and of religion's relationship with government, during the colonial, Revolutionary, and early national periods. For this reason, this issue requires somewhat extended treatment here.
Those - the "nonpreferentialists" or "accommodationists" -- who oppose Thomas Jefferson's concept of a strict "wall of separation" between church and state maintain that an established church could only be a single church, allied closely with the state, like the Church of England in Great Britain. They maintain that no such religious establishment ever existed in the American colonies, therefore that no "wall of separation" prohibits government aid to religion, and thus that government need not remain neutral as between religion and no religion -- only that the government may not pick and choose which religion it seeks to aid.
Their adversaries, the "separationists," maintain that there was such a thing as a "multiple establishment" -- a legal arrangement by which several different churches all received government tax moneys and official support -- and that those who sought to establish separation of church and state by adopting the First Amendment were aware of this situation and sought to prevent the federal government from reviving it on the national level.
Intercolonial Union: Although the colonies were not founded on any "master plan," and usually regarded one another with wariness and suspicion, pressures from outside often prompted efforts to forge intercolonial unions. In 1643, the New England Confederation was a notable success in coordinating colonial efforts in the seventeenth-century "Indian wars." But it broke up when Massachusetts Bay absorbed Plymouth and Connecticut swallowed New Haven. In 1685, the English sought to impose union from above and outside -- the Dominion of New England abrogated colonial charters, dissolved colonial legislatures, and created one unified administration for New England and New York. The colonists finally rebelled against the Dominion government, as the American counterpart to the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689. Finally, in 1754, delegates from most of the colonies, meeting in Albany, New York, crafted the Albany Plan of Union -- which, unfortunately, was rejected both by England (which resented its proposed cession of powers to an intercolonial government and legislature) and the individual colonies (which resented their loss of local sovereignty).

At the close of the Seven Years' War (or the French and Indian War), fewer British subjects were more loyal to the Crown and more proud to be Britons than the inhabitants of British North America. The colonists had fought side-by-side with British forces against the French and their Indian allies, and had contributed to a tremendous victory that reshaped the power balance of the Atlantic world. It was thus all the more stunning that, within five years, divisions between the colonies and the mother country first erupted, inaugurating more than a decade of polemical argument and then popular violence that culminated in the first colonial revolution of modern times, and the first successful colonial revolution in history -- the subject of essay III.