Issue 1 longstoryporess.blogspot.com The United States Project 1 George Washington was inaugurated as the fi rst President of the United States on April 30, 1780. The history of the United States can be thought of as a voyage of discovery. The voyage of American history isn’t a journey to another continent or hemisphere, but possibly something even stranger. Along the way we will meet some knaves and some nobility, some cads and some crusaders. The history of the United States is a story of great changes, however, some things have held true throughout American history. One of these has been the American passion for freedom. This desire has taken many different THE UNITED STATES GAZETTE Living on the Edge of a Brave New World Issue 1 longstoryporess.blogspot.com The United States Project 2 forms, such as religious, social, political and economic freedom. The pursuit of freedom has sometimes involved very high-stake risks, the outcomes of which were not foreseen. In some instances-such as in the case of the Puritans in 17 th Century New England-some people wanted to the freedom to be unfree. The Puritans wanted the freedom to impose a sense of order on a chaotic and disordered world. In whatever way you describe it, the search for freedom is fundamental to understanding American history, from the Puritans to the Civil Rights movement. The second theme of American history is the pursuit of education. This is intimately linked to the pursuit of freedom. Once you have torn yourself away from the various kinds of unfreedom that existed in the past, you can create a new identity for yourself. Education is seen as the classic American form of making yourself whatever you wish. Americans have always had an unquestioned faith in popular government and have never seriously doubted the right of people to rule themselves. Sometimes it seems as if they fi ght politically with each other like wild animals , but they have never debated whether the United States should be a monarchy or a dictatorship. At that point, Americans stop fi ghting each other and start fi ghting you. There has also always been a willingness to experiment with new things. When you are living in a new world, with a new environment, and new rules to govern themselves, Americans have shown a special kind of openness to the untried. They have never felt constrained by the habits of other people or other times. This has been exempli fi ed by the ease with which the United States has A painting believed to be a portrait of Christopher Columbus painted after his death by Sebastiano del Piombo, dated to 1519. Issue 1 longstoryporess.blogspot.com The United States Project 3 assimilated waves upon waves of immigrants from a bewildering variety of backgrounds. Americans genuinely believe the United States is like nothing else the world has ever seen before and that the United States is exceptional. This can be demonstrated by the United States having been called “a city on a hill” by the Puritans, and the sentiment has persisted in American history to the present day. The United States is the fi rst large-scale democratic republic in human history. When other countries were busy butchering each other over whether the Psalms should be sung in Latin or French, Americans built a system of religious tolerance that put those arguments aside. The United States also opened its economic and political system to anyone with the brains and talent to make a way forward. Sometimes this American exceptionalism can deepen into smug- congratulation and a sense of self-righteousness, which people in many other parts of the world can fi nd irritating. The idea of being exceptional has also European Immigrants arriving at Ellis Island in 1915. The United States has welcomed immigrants from all over the world for much of its history. Issue 1 longstoryporess.blogspot.com The United States Project 4 given many Americans a sense of national mission, they believe that what the United States is doing isn’t just for Americans, but for all the world. They believe that the United States is worth loving, not just because it is a country for Americans, but because, as Abraham Lincoln put it, “it is a country of the free.” The United States has been built around a set of ideas, not around a certain race or ethnicity. Instead, the United States was created around a political document, in the form of the Constitution, which is itself informed by a constellation of political ideas established in the Declaration of Independence. This brings us back to the deep seated idea that above all else, Americans desire freedom, from the fi rst moment that they began to think of themselves as a nation set apart from Europe. This process The assembly room in Independence Hall in Philadelphia. This is the room where the constitution of the United States was drafted. This is where the ideals of the United States were given form. Issue 1 longstoryporess.blogspot.com The United States Project 5 began in 1492 when a Genoese entrepreneur and sailor named Christopher Columbus caught his fi rst glimpse of the New World. It wasn’t, of course, a new world at all. The time of the arrival of the fi rst people in North America is still somewhat uncertain, but it is believed that humans arrived in North America between 12,000 and 40,000 years ago. It is also not clear exactly where these North Americans came from. Conventional wisdom has suggested that North America was initially populated in three successive waves of migration from eastern Asia, by way of the Bering Straight Land Bridge. The Bering Straight land bridge formed because of falling sea levels during the last ice age. This knowledge has been inferred as a result of comparisons done between DNA samples taken from the current tribes of the Paci fi c Northwest and peoples living in east Asia. However, many native groups are A replica of the Santa Maria The Santa Maria was the largest of the three ships Columbus used to cross the Atlantic Ocean, which marked the beginning of the Age of Discovery. Issue 1 longstoryporess.blogspot.com The United States Project 6 resistant to the idea that they might have migrated to North America from elsewhere, instead of having evolved from the American soil they now occupy. In 1996, the discovery of a set of skeletal remains, which forensic anthropologists have come to call Kennewick Man, have muddied the waters even further. The results of the carbon dating tests of Kennewick Man suggest an approximate age of around 8,000 years old. However, Kennewick Man’s physical characteristics do not match either the tribes of the Paci fi c Northwest, or the modern day people of east Asia. Did Kennewick Man arrive in North America before the supposed fi rst waves of migration from eastern Asia, and if so, how did he get here? Or was he later-and if he was, where did he come from? Whenever and from wherever Kennewick Man arrived in North America, one thing is clear-the fi rst humans to arrive in North America following the end of the last ice age spread rapidly across the continent. North America’s mild and stable climate, and rich ecosystem, allowed for the rapid spread of the original population. By 1500 AD, an estimated ten to fi fteen million people lived in North America. In the intervening ten thousand years, the original indigenous population had proliferated into every corner of the continent and spoke at least three hundred languages in twelve different language groups. With their diverse languages, they also developed at least six hundred autonomous social systems. In Central and South America, the Mesoamericans had constructed even more complex societies, culminating in the great empires of the Maya, the Aztec and the Inca, which had emperors, aristocrats, farmers and artisans. Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, had a population of more than 200,0000 people and may have been one of the largest cities on Earth. If it were possible to take a picture of both Mesoamerica and Europe around the year 1200, you would notice some striking similarities. Southern Europe, along with the area around the Mediterranean basin, had given rise to a succession of A resin cast of the skull of Kennewick Man, on display in the Natural History Museum in Karlsruhe, Germany. Kennewick Man has been dated to approximately 8,000 BP and has raised many questions about when human fi rst migrated to the Americas. Issue 1 longstoryporess.blogspot.com The United States Project 7 increasingly complex cultures beginning with the Babylonians, who were followed by the Egyptians, Phoenicians, Carthagians, Greeks and then the Romans. From around the year 400 onward, the Roman Empire became increasingly troubled as a series of seismic cultural changes convulsed the empire. These began when support for the Roman state religion gave way to the worship of the God of Abraham, in the form of Christianity, in addition to a series of a series of civil wars that split the empire. Waves of immigrants from Asia began pressing on the Germanic tribes of Northern Europe, who lived along the Rhine, on Rome’s northern borders. The Germanic peoples sought shelter in the Roman Empire, which triggered a massive cultural and political collapse. By 900 AD, a new threat to Europe had emerged in the underbelly of Europe, Islam. Islamic armies emerged out of the deserts of Saudi Arabia and over ran the former provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire. They swept across North Africa and eventually lapped up against the southern border of modern France. An artist’s depiction of Rome during the Crisis of the Third Century. The Crisis of the Third Century occurred as a result of the combination of a succession of civil wars and barbarian invasions from outside the empire. Issue 1 longstoryporess.blogspot.com The United States Project 8 Europe became a political, social and economic backwater. It was politically disorganized, as the former provinces of the Roman Empire sought to set up their own political shops. The economy was mostly reduced to basic levels of barter and reciprocity, and the social, economic and political landscape was destined to stay at this level for a good long while. The only way for collapsed cultures to revive themselves is to import new resources and expose themselves to new ideas, which is dif fi cult and expensive. If it were possible to set the cultures of Mesonamerica next to the cultures of Europe, we might fi nd that the Mesoamerican cultures were more sophisticated than their European counterparts. The Europeans, however, were the exception to the rule that collapsed civilizations have a dif fi cult time reviving themselves. In 1096, Pope Urban II called to retake the city of Jerusalem from the Muslims. Jerusalem was also sacred to Islam and the Muslims were unwilling to surrender control of the city without a fi ght. The Pope’s call for pilgrimage quickly became a call for holy war, and thousands of Europeans- many of whom, had never been more than ten miles away from their homes-trusted themselves to leaky boats and proceeded to recapture Jerusalem and much of Palestine for Christianity. The Crusaders ultimately proved to be unable to hold their gains and the Crusader states were pushed back into the sea by around 1200 AD. The last Crusader state fi nally fell around 1270 and the last Crusade ended up in Tunisia instead of Palestine. Despite The Temple of the Great Jaguar, Tikal, Guatamala. While Europe was recovering from the collapse of the Roman Empire, the civilizations of Mesoamerica were experiencing a golden age. Issue 1 longstoryporess.blogspot.com The United States Project 9 these failures, the Europeans learned two important lessons; how to organize and support large scale expeditions and explorations into unknown territory, and how to trade with the Islamic world. For western Christians, Islam may still have been seen as a strange and hostile religion, but at the same time, Muslims also possessed attractive material resources, which the Crusaders learned to trade for. The Muslims possessed art, technology and culture. In addition, there were also rumours of even greater wealth to be had in India and China. The lure of wealth in Asia encouraged European governments to undertake a series of increasingly ambitious exploratory expeditions with the aim of fi nding and opening new markets in Middle East and Asia. In 1271, a Venetian merchant and adventurer named Marco Polo set off for the Orient with his two uncles on an expedition that took the better part of three years, bound for the heart of imperial China. Marco Polo would remain in China for the next seventeen years, looking after his family’s business interests and fi lling several posts in the Chinese government. Upon his return to Venice in 1295, Marco Polo published an account of his adventures in China and demonstrated what kind An illustrated manuscript page of students studying in a library during the Islamic Golden Age. Issue 1 longstoryporess.blogspot.com The United States Project 10 of fortunes could be made in Asia with nothing but a little perseverance and ingenuity. By 1300, Venice and several other previously impoverished Italian city-states had started to become wealthy due to trading with the Middle East and Asia. In 1346, a Genoese trading ship brought the fi rst strains of the Bubonic Plague-also known as the Black Death to Europe-which eventually reduced the population of the continent by at least a third. The Europeans who had pro fi ted the most by trading with the Middle East and Asia were the Crusader states, along with the various Mediterranean port cities and the Italian city- states-particularly Venice and Genoa-being on the Mediterranean, they had the advantage of location, with easy access to Palestine and the Islamic world. Western Europeans were determined not to miss out on the trade with Asia, but there was little they could do about this, as the Italian city-states controlled the sea routes and the Turks and the Arabs controlled the land routes. They had little choice but to search for another way to Asia. With the backing of Prince Henry the Navigator, the Portuguese undertook a series of expeditions into the Atlantic Ocean, which proved that it was possible to sail south down the coast of West Africa and into the Indian Ocean. By 1488, the Portuguese had mapped the coast of West Africa to the Cape of Good Hope, and sailed up the coast of East African into the Indian Ocean. A possible portrait of Prince Henry the Navigator, painted sometime in the 1450s. Prince Henry the Navigator provided fi nancial and technical backing for the Portuguese explores of the 15th Century, who pioneered many of the techniques that made the Age of Discovery possible. Issue 1 longstoryporess.blogspot.com The United States Project 11 Vasco Da Gama’s sea route dramatically cut the time and expense of travelling to India. When he returned to Portugal, Da Gama’s cargo netted a pro fi t of more than 600% for his backers and investors. The Spanish were right behind the Portuguese in breaking out into the Atlantic. In 1492, an entrepreneur and trader from Genoa named Christopher Columbus persuaded the King and Queen of Spain-Ferdinand and Isabella-to experiment with the idea of sailing, not east, through the Mediterranean, or south around the tip of Africa, but west across the Atlantic Ocean. It was hoped that an expedition sailing west into the Atlantic might eventually arrive at China’s back door. The Portuguese had already discovered the Azores and rediscovered the Canaries in this way. Because it appeared to have already worked for the Canaries and the Azores, so why not try and push beyond them? Vasco Da Gama arriving in Calicut. The sea route from Portugal to India pioneered by the Portuguese explorers cut out the Middle Eastern middle men and made trading with Asia faster and cheaper. Issue 1 longstoryporess.blogspot.com The United States Project 12 The major obstacle to this plan was not Washington Irving’s claim, that any ship sailing west would fall off the edge of the world, but that nobody knew how far across the Atlantic Ocean the distance to China would be, or whether or not there were islands in between to resupply. What’s more, the writings of Marco Polo had described the Japanese archipelago. Would they be in the way? If so, where were they? Despite these unknowns the Spanish had few options, if they wanted to trade with Asia, while avoiding the Portuguese. Queen Isabella awarded Columbus three ships which set sail from Spain in August, 1492. He made landfall on what he thought was an island off the coast of China on October 12, 1492. Rather, Columbus had probably arrived just off of Watlings Island in the Bahamas. The Landing of Columbus. Christopher Columbus’s exact landing place in the Caribbean is not known with certainty, but he is believed to have landed on Watlings Island, in the Bahamas on October 12, 1492. Issue 1 longstoryporess.blogspot.com The United States Project 13 Christopher Columbus was a complex and puzzling individual, and it has been dif fi cult for historians to ascertain exactly what he thought he had found. He called the natives he encountered “Indians,” which was logical given that he thought that he had arrived on an island off the coast of India. As a result, he thought that he had found the “West Indies.” By the time of his death, in 1506, it was clear to many of his contemporaries that the land was not China nor Japan, but large continents that stretched like a barrier across the Atlantic Ocean. The discovery of the Americas was met with disappointment, as they constituted a major obstacle to fi nding an alternate sea route to China. At fi rst, the Spanish saw the Americas as a problem to be overcome and tried their very best to fi nd a way around the them. An expedition under the command of Ferdinand Magellan attempted to sail south around the tip of South America and into the Paci fi c Ocean and discovered that both South America and the Paci fi c Ocean were far larger than expected. Vasco Nunez de Balboa led an expedition across the Isthmus of Panama searching for a navigable water way for the Atlantic to the Paci fi c. Other adventurers, such as Amerigo Vespuci, Martin Frobisher and Giovanni de Verrazano probed northward, looking for the Northwest Passage, through or around North America. The Europeans were initially disinterested in North America for its ow sake. They thought that even the continent’s physical appearance was frightening. The Sea of Ice. One of the unintended side e ff ects of the discovery of the Americas was the search for the Northwest Passage and a shorter sea route from Europe to Asia. Issue 1 longstoryporess.blogspot.com The United States Project 14 When no path through North A m e r i c a w a s d i s c ov e r e d , t h e European powers tur ned their attention to other matters, such as making war on each other. As a result, it was not the governments of Europe, but rather private entrepreneurs and freebooters who began to take a second look at the Americas. In 1519, a one time law student named Hernan Cortez landed on the Mexican coast with a force of six hundred men. In a two year campaign marked by pillage theft and slaughter, Cortez toppled the Aztec Empire, capturing a large fortune in gold and silver. By the time of his death in 1547, Cortez was one of the wealthiest men in Europe. In 1532, Francisco Pizarro undertook a similar campaign against the Inca in Peru, seizing an estimated $65,000,000 in today’s dollars, in Inca treasure. This was only the beginning as successive waves of Conquistadors rampaged across Central America and the southeastern United States who hoped to repeat of the exploits of Cortez and Pizarro. Due to a lack of oversight on the part of the Spanish government, the Conquistadors found the Americas to be a place where traditional European social norms and behaviours didn’t apply. The usual rules were suspended and the Americas were a place where-an one Englishman later put it-one could “live bravely.” Since the Americas had no pre-existing social structure, the Europeans felt free to build their own. They dabbled in social and political experiments that would have been virtually unthinkable in Europe. Unfortunately, the suspension of the rules also meant unbridled greed, the accumulation of enormous amounts of The meeting of Hernan Cortez and Montezuma II, the Aztec emperor, marked the beginning of the downfall of the Aztec Empire. Issue 1 longstoryporess.blogspot.com The United States Project 15 w e a l t h , i n a d d i t i o n t o organized thievery, brutality, slavery and mass slaughter. On the island of Hispaniola, where Christopher Columbus had established the fi rst permanent European outpost in the Americas, there had been a native population of approximately a million people. In the fi fty years following European contact, the indigenous population was reduced to approximately two hundred. The total and catastrophic collapse of the native population was due in part to slavery. The Spanish enslaved the natives and worked them to death in pursuit of Spanish enrichment. Most of the natives who died, due to exposure to European diseases, which ran wild among the native population, which lacked natural immunity. Does this make Christopher Columbus and the Conquistadors criminals? In 1990, just before the celebration of the fi ve hundredth anniversary of the Columbian Exchange was about to begin, one church organization claimed that the festivities were not an opportunity to observe the anniversary, but an opportunity to remember that the Columbian Exchange also resulted in slavery, genocide, ecocide, and exploitation. This may be true, but it is also beside the point, no one would have been more surprised at the celebration of the Columbian Exchange than Christopher Columbus. None of the consequences, good or bad, were remotely close to what he had had in mind when setting sail. This was not the fi rst time that American history would display one more theme that remains true to today, irony. Hunting Bu ff alo. One of the unforeseen consequences of European colonization of the Americas was the collapse of the bu ff alo herd and the end of the traditional bu ff alo hunt. Issue 1 longstoryporess.blogspot.com The United States Project 16 Colonizing the New World Very few people in history have had as much to gain as Charles of Habsburg. Charles was the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella. Ferdinand and Isabella themselves only had one child, Joanna the Mad. She married into the most powerful royal family in Europe, the House of Habsburg. Not only did the Habsburgs sit on the throne of Austria, but they also controlled all the German speaking states, which comprised the Holy Roman Empire. Joanna herself only had one child, Charles, who stood to inherit, not only the Kingdom of Spain, but the throne of the Holy Roman Empire. As a result, Charles V became the King of Spain in 1516, and Holy Roman Emperor in 1520. At the time of his ascension, Charles controlled more territory than any European monarch since Charlemange. He also had fewer tools with which to rule his possessions than any previous European monarch. The Holy Roman Empire consisted of a collection of duchies and principalities that were frequently restless, unruly and disrespectful. Charles had very few tools with which to tame them. At the same time, a German priest named Martin Luther was stirring up a frenzy with his protests against corruption in the Catholic Church. Charles saw his mission as bringing order to his various kingdoms. He was not successful in doing this and by the time he retired to a monastery in 1556, the Holy Roman Empire had lost much of whatever political authority it had had under Charles V. In Pope Clement VII and Charles V on Horseback Under a Canopy. Charles V spent much of his reign simply trying to bring order to his various kingdoms, Issue 1 longstoryporess.blogspot.com The United States Project 17 the meantime, Martin Luther h a d c r e a t e d a o u t l a w e d separatist movement within European Christianity known as Protestantism. Charles’ inability to control the German princes or, the Protestants, was not due to his lack of ability as a ruler. The problems Charles was faced with during his reign were larger than any one person could have dealt with. At the same time, Charles had something of a mania for managing the Spanish possessions in the New World. He didn’t mind Spanish adventurers and Conquistadors looting the various New World empires so long as they did it on their own dime, and sent regularly sent the required one fi fth share of their plunder back to Spain. However, Charles very much minded that when the conquest of the New World was over, the Conquistadors had set themselves up in the wreckage of the Aztec and Incan Empires as self appointed aristocrats. Once the initial phase of the conquest of the New World was over, agents of the Spanish crown shouldered their way in and either retired or demoted the Conquistadors and set about setting up formal colonial governments under the supervision of the Spanish crown. The Spanish possessions in Central and South America were divided into two viceroyalties. These were the Viceroyalty of New Spain and the Viceroyalty of Peru. Each of these viceroyalties were ruled by a A map of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, dated to 1561. Issue 1 longstoryporess.blogspot.com The United States Project 18 Viceroy chosen by the king and they were expected to b e r u l e d i n t h e s a m e manner that Charles ruled Spain, in other words from the top down. The Spanish Viceroys in the New World were able to impose order with a remarkable degree of success considering that only 250,000 Spaniards could be persuaded to emigrate to New Spain and Peru. From only a dozen outposts in 1530, the Viceroys of New Spain and Peru eventually chartered a hundred and twenty towns by 1574, followed by an additional two hundred and ten by 1624. Even more importantly, the Spanish Viceroyalties in the New World shipped two hundred tons of gold and 15,000 tons of silver back to Spain between 1500 and 1650. The total amount of bullion sent back to Spain by the Spanish treasure fl eets is estimated to have an approximate value of 1.4 billion dollars into today’s currency. This is believed to be at least three to fi ve times the entire stock of bullion in all of Europe during this period. In order to accomplish this, it was necessary to replace the Conquistadors, with their penchant for outright killing the native population, with agents of the crown, who were intent on reducing them to slavery. They did this by carving great estates, known has haciendas, out of the Aztec and Incan Empires. The owners of these estates were granted encomenderos, which gave them the right to levy servitude, which was little better than forced labour, from nearby indigenous villages and families. At the same time, the Church was working to Christianize the indigenous population. This resulted in the burning of traditional books and the suppression of traditional religious and cultural practices. This process had three phases. The fi rst phase was enslavement, either in the The Evangelization of Mexico. Organized religion was one of the primary tools used by Spain to deliberately and systematically oppress the indigenous population. Issue 1 longstoryporess.blogspot.com The United States Project 19 form of literal enslavement by the Conquistadors, or indirectly through the encomendero. The second phase consisted of dislocation, as traditional native religious and cultural practices were suppressed and replaced with Spanish culture. The third phase consisted of a period of confrontation, as the natives attempted to push back against their Spanish overlords, not just literally against forced labour or attempted enslavement, but also against the imposition of European religion and culture. The Europeans had an ally that the natives were almost totally unable to resist. This was disease. The spreads of European diseases in the Americans played an important role in clearing the way for European incursions into the New World. European diseases proved to be an extremely effective weapon against the indigenous population. The reason for this was because there was nothing in the natives’ medical experience to prepare them for the impact that European diseases, such smallpox, typhoid, scarlet fever, measles, whooping cough, dystentary and even the self-in fl icted disease of alcoholism, would have on their cultures. The Native Americans had constructed their civilizations without being exposed to European diseases. As a result, even when priests and missionaries tried to treat the native population fairly, they were unable to control the spread of infectious diseases. Along the eastern shore of North America, there were believed to have been as many as seventeen major epidemics among the native population. In some cases, these were infectious diseases that had travelled north from Mexico. In other cases, these disease outbreaks were the result of encounters with European ships along the coast. The Variola virus, magni fi ed 370, 000 times. The Variola virus is the cause of smallpox which killed o ff between 70 and 90% of the indigenous population as a result of sustained European contact. Issue 1 longstoryporess.blogspot.com The United States Project 20 This string of outbreaks included smallpox in 1519, typhus in 1531, and again in 1585. It has been estimated that as a result of repeated exposure to European diseases between 70% and 95% of native population died. By the end of the 17 th century, the Spanish settlement of the New World had matured and began to transition from an extraction society to a permanent settler society, where the Spaniards became permanent settlers with no expectation of returning to Spain at all. In 1516, Juan Ponce de Leon explored and mapped the coast of Florida. In 1521, he attempted to establish a Spanish settlement there, however, he was killed by the Calusa people, and the colony was abandoned. In 1539, Hernando de Soto fi nanced another expedition to Florida. He landed near what is now Tampa and struck north into Georgia before turning west toward the Mississippi River. He was probably the fi rst European to encounter the Cherokee people, who were living in the Georgia highlands. He found roads, towns, farms and temples, however, de Soto was not interested in any of those things. De Soto was looking for gold and plunged blindly onward. He eventually became the fi rst European to cross the Mississippi River, in May, 1542. De Soto found no gold among the indigenous peoples of the American southeast. His only accomplishment was to leave a trail of wreckage and disease among the Cherokee. A Spanish engraving of Juan Ponce de Léon from the 17th Century. Ponce de Léon explored and mapped the coast of what is now Florida in 1513.