THE DISCOVERY OF THE NEW WORLD AND THE COLONIAL LITERATURE

The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus_ Salvador Dali

The “Discovery”?

Although called “the discovery” of the New World of America, in fact it was a rediscovery.

Numerous Asians are believed to had formed the very first settlers of America who immigrated there thousands of years ago.

500 years before Columbus was born, Leif Erikson went to America along with his father and other Vikings(Norse).

Native Americans The Native Americans or the

Indians are the pre- Columbian inhabitants of North and South America and their descendants.

Application of the term "Indian” originated with Christopher Columbus, who thought that he had arrived in the East Indies, while seeking Asia.

Native Americans

The New World was first inhabited anywhere from 40,000 to 12,000 years ago, by people from eastern Asia.

By 1500, Native Americans numbered 15 million in North America and spoke 300 different language.

According to a prevailing New World migration model, migrations of humans from Eurasia to the Americas took place via Beringia, a land bridge which connected the two continents across what is now the Berin Strait.

Columbus Found the Americas

Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492 whilst he was searching for a new trade route to the indies (china). This unwanted discovery that huge land masses lay between the way to the Orient caused huge disappointments at first.

Amerigo Vespucci

In1499 Amerigo Vespucci explored the coast South

America. He demonstrated that the New World was not Asia but a previously-unknown forth continent.

The name America derives from the Latin version of his first name- Amerigo.

The centuries after the arrival of Columbus witnessed the eradication of the native tribes by Europeans settling upon their hunting grounds and, later, by Americans intent upon the great drive westwards in the search of new land and opportunity.

Britain

Inspired by the Spanish riches from colonies founded upon the conquest of the Aztecs, Incas, and other large Native American populations in the sixteenth century, the first Englishmen to settle permanently in America hoped for some of the same rich discoveries when they established their first permanent settlement in Jamestown, Virginia in 1607.

Britain

The British claimed most of the Atlantic seaboard north of Florida as belonging to Britain soon after Columbus discovered land across the Atlantic Ocean.

Britain

Thirteen colonies were well established by the middle of the eighteenth centuries and although each had a governor, the were ultimately answerable to the British crown.

In the French colonial regions, the focus of economy was on sugar plantations in Caribbean. In Canada the fur trade with the natives was important. About 16,000 French men and women became colonizers. Their colony was taken over by Britain in 1760.

Reasons for Immigration

The search for riches

Religious immigration

Forced immigration

The search for riches

 the hope of finding gold etc.

From the beginning of Virginia's settlements in 1587 until the 1680s, the main source of labor and a large portion of the immigrants were indentured servants looking for new life in the overseas colonies. Most of the indentured servants were teenagers from England with poor economic prospects at home. Their fathers signed the papers that gave them free passage to America and an unpaid job until they became of age.

Religious Immigration Many groups of colonists came to the

Americas searching for the right to practice their religion without persecution.

A strong believer in the notion of rule by divine right, England's Charles I persecuted religious dissenters. Waves of repression led to the migration of about 20,000 Puritans to New England between 1629 and 1642, where they founded multiple colonies. 

Forced immigration (Slavery) Slavery existed in the Americas, prior to

the arrival of Europeans, as the Natives often captured and held other tribes' members as captives.

 The Spanish followed with the enslavement of local aborigines in the Caribbean.

Forced immigration As the native populations declined (mostly

from European diseases, but also and significantly from forced exploitation and careless murder), they were often replaced by Africans imported through a large commercial slave trade.

By the 18th century, the overwhelming number of black slaves was such that Native American slavery was less commonly used. Africans, who were taken aboard slave ships to the Americas, were primarily obtained from their African homelands by coastal tribes who captured and sold them.

Education In the absence of schools the higher

education naturally languished. Some of the planters were taught at home by tutors, and others went to England and entered the universities. But these were few in number, and there was no college in the colony until more than half a century after the foundation of Harvard in the younger province of Massachusetts. 

The literature produced in the part of America known as the United States did not begin as an independent literature. England bestowed on the earliest settlers the English language, books, and modes of thought. England had an established literature long before the first permanent settlement across the Atlantic was considered.

Colonial Literature

Colonial Literature American writing began with the work of

English adventurers and colonists in the New World chiefly for the benefit of readers in the mother country.

Some of these early works reached the level of literature, as in the robust and perhaps truthful account of his adventures by Captain John Smith.

From the beginning, however, the literature of New England was also directed to the edification and instruction of the colonists themselves, intended to direct them in the ways of the godly.

Colonial Literature

Religious Literature The first work published in the Puritan

colonies was the Bay Psalm Book (1640), and the whole effort of the divines who wrote furiously to set forth their views to defend and promote visions of the religious state.

The approach of the American Revolution and the achievement of the actual independence of the United States was a time of intellectual activity as well as social and economic change.

Benjamin Franklin forwarded American literature not only through his own writing but also by founding and promoting newspapers and periodicals.

North vs. South Literature

The rising conflict between the North and the South that ended in the Civil War was reflected in regional literature. The crusading spirit against Southern slavery in Harriet Beecher Stowe's overwhelmingly successful novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) can be compared with the violent anti-Northern diatribes of William Gilmore Simms.

Post-civil war Literature

Once the war was over, literature gradually regained a national identity amid expanding popularity, as writings of regional origin began to find a mass audience.

The most important of original sources for the history of the settlement of New England are the journals of William Bradford, first governor of Plymouth, and John Winthrop, the second governor of Massachusetts, which hold a place corresponding to the writings of Captain John Smith in the Virginia colony, but are much more sober and trustworthy. 

The End

References

http://www.online-literature.com/henry-augustin-beers/studies-american-letters/1/

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/American_Literature/Colonial_Period_(1620s-1776)

http://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/entertainment/american-literature.html

http://www.landofthebrave.info/ http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/

wiki100k/docs/European_colonization_of_the_Americas.html