Author Archives: jbelshaw

The Iberians Three decades after Columbus’s voyages, the Spanish were in control of a vast quilt-pattern of indigenous empires. Their military prowess had been sharpened in the reconquista and their tolerance for non-Catholics dulled by the Inquisition. The colonization of … Continue reading →

In the period before contact with the Americas, the countries of England and France, as they appear on the map today, had not yet taken shape. For much of the Middle Ages, both regions faced invasions by Germanic and Scandinavian tribes … Continue reading →

A map of the world in 1400 reveals a patchwork of small countries and kingdoms, most of them heavily centralized, but few of them truly expansive. There are exceptions, such as the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (and its successor state, … Continue reading →

In Chapter 2 we considered the very deep history of human occupation in the Americas. Here, we do the same for the Europeans. Northwestern Europe to 1491 The earliest human-made or anthropogenic tools discovered in France have been dated to more than 1.5 … Continue reading →

Pre-contact North America was home to a numerous and diverse array of peoples, languages, religions, and cultures. Scientific origin theories such as the Bering land bridge and coastal migration suggest that the ancestors of these groups arrived in the Western … Continue reading →

These brief histories of the Aboriginal Americas reveal that categorization is complicated. Take language, for example, which is often used as a key element of nationality (e.g., French people speak French and live in France and almost everyone in France speaks French). … Continue reading →

Early in their encounters with Aboriginal peoples, European newcomers struggled to conceive of and understand a continent teeming with (what was to them) mysterious peoples with highly unusual ways of doing things. Often the Europeans rejected the possibility that these civilizations … Continue reading →

The telling of Aboriginal history in Canada often begins with a discussion of human migration routes into the Americas, which reflects the long-standing misperception that was held by Europeans that Aboriginal societies were primitive, usually migratory, and unlikely to have been … Continue reading →

The idea that the Americas have no history before the arrival of Europeans derives mainly from the apparent absence of a written record. European, Middle Eastern, and Asian civilizations evolved highly bureaucratic and centralized administrative functions based on the ability to write … Continue reading →