Lecture: Doing History & Worlds Before 1607

Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 1

Opening

Think of a nursing student reading a medical chart, a business major asking where a report's figures came from, or a future teacher sorting a family's old letters. Each of them asks the same questions. Who made this? When? Why? And what does it leave out?

Those questions are the heart of this course. This is Week 1, so we start at the foundation. In this lecture I'll tell you what history is and how to sort its evidence. Then I'll give you four moves for reading any source. After that we'll travel back before 1492, to the cities of the Americas, and read three real documents from 1492 to 1494. We'll finish with the difference between contact and conquest, and with the great exchange of plants, animals, and diseases that followed. Next, in Week 2, Colonization & Empire, you'll use the same moves to compare how four European powers built colonies.

1. What history is: primary and secondary sources

Picture a recipe card in a drawer at a relative's house. The ink has faded. Someone wrote one amount, crossed it out, and wrote a bigger one. Nobody remembers who made the change. Still, that card tells you something true about your family's past: what they cooked, and that someone tested the recipe and fixed it.

Now picture a label beside an old fishing boat in a harbor museum. It explains how the boat was used. It's helpful, but a staff member wrote it much later, from records they studied.

That's the first idea of the course. History is interpretation from evidence: a historian reasons from sources to a claim about the past and says how sure the evidence lets anyone be. The recipe card is a primary source, a source made during the period being studied. The museum label is a secondary source, a later account that interprets primary evidence.

Here's the test I want you to carry. Ask one question: was this made during the period I'm studying, or later? Timing decides it, not age or tone. And the answer can change with your question. The label is a primary source if you're asking how museums explained boats in the year it was written.

The course has a small sorting set to practice on. It's illustrative, which means it was written for this course and describes no real document. A ship's log kept on a 1620 crossing is primary. A 1999 museum label about that crossing is secondary. A 1765 newspaper notice of a boycott is primary. A historian's 2010 article on boycotts is secondary.

Pause and try this. A merchant's account book from a Charleston shop, kept from 1774 to 1776. Primary or secondary, for a question about that shop?

Think about when the book was written.

Here's the answer. It's primary, because the merchant kept it during those years, at the time the sales happened.

That makes 3 primary sources and 3 secondary sources among the first six items, since the modern map of the 1803 purchase is secondary too.

2. The four moves of historical thinking

Imagine a friend forwards you a screenshot. It says your favorite store is closing. Before you believe it, you ask some questions. Who wrote the first message? When? Was there a rumor going around? Does the store's own page say the same thing? You already think like a historian.

Historical thinking is the historian's way of reading evidence, and this course practices it as four moves, always in the same order. The first is sourcing: asking who made a source, when, why, and for whom, and naming its type and the host that keeps it. The second is contextualization: placing a source in what was happening around it. The third is close reading: reading a source line by line for what it says and what it leaves out. The fourth is corroboration: checking a source against other sources to see what they confirm or complicate.

That order is this course's own teaching choice. An education researcher named Samuel Wineburg studied expert readers in 1991. He described sourcing, contextualization, and corroboration as their habits. Close reading is the common classroom addition.

The moves serve bigger habits of mind. Causation asks why something happened. Change and continuity asks what shifted and what stayed the same. Periodization asks how we divide the past into named periods, like "before 1607". Contingency asks what could have gone another way. Significance asks why something matters, and to whom.

One rule I'll repeat all term. Contextualization explains a source. It never excuses what the source describes. And every reading ends in one plain sentence that names what the source shows and what it doesn't.

Pause and try this. You check whether the store's own page confirms the screenshot. Which of the four moves is that?

It's the last of the four.

Here's the answer. That's corroboration, because you're checking one source against another to see whether it holds up.

3. The Americas before 1492

Picture a city in the Mississippi River valley. It has a great plaza, a huge earthen mound rising above it, and homes spread out around it. Now set the clock back centuries before any ship from Europe crossed the Atlantic. That city was real.

Long before 1492, the Americas held large, varied, and complex societies. Cahokia, near present-day St. Louis, is the site UNESCO calls the largest pre-Columbian settlement north of Mexico. It was the leading center of the Mississippian culture, which flourished from about 800 to the 1300s. I say "about" on purpose. UNESCO's own page gives that period two different end points, so we say it in words and don't memorize either one. That's sourcing at work.

Far to the south stood Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Mexica, the people now commonly known as the Aztecs.

The Americas held many other societies too. And many Native nations of North America exist right now, govern themselves, and keep their own histories. So in this course we write about them in the present tense.

Here's the wrong turn I want you to avoid. People often picture the Americas before 1492 as nearly empty, a wilderness waiting to be found. Start the clock before the ships arrive, and that picture falls apart.

Pause and try this. Someone says the Americas were "almost empty" before 1492. Which site from this section answers them most directly?

Think about the word "largest".

Here's the answer. Cahokia does, because UNESCO calls it the largest pre-Columbian settlement north of Mexico, and an empty land doesn't hold a city like that.

4. Europe's motives and the royal grant

Think about a contract for a big building job. Before any digging starts, someone writes down who pays, who gets what, and who will be in charge. A contract tells you what its signers wanted before the work began.

European voyages had contracts too. Crowns and merchants in Europe wanted a sea route to Asian trade, wealth, the spread of Christianity, and an edge over rival kingdoms. Those are the motives historians usually name.

The course's first document shows them in writing. It's a royal grant, a document in which rulers give someone rights and duties. Let's source it. Ferdinand and Isabella, the rulers of Castile and Aragon, made it for Christopher Columbus. It was given at Granada and dated 30 April 1492, months before he sailed. You read it on the Avalon Project, in an English translation, so you call it a translation.

Now read one phrase closely. The grant sends Columbus "to discover and subdue some Islands and Continent in the ocean". Listen to that verb, subdue. It means to bring under control. Before a single ship left port, the crowns had written rule over distant lands into the plan.

Here's the plain sentence. The royal grant shows that Ferdinand and Isabella authorized Columbus to discover and subdue lands across the ocean. It's evidence of the crowns' intentions, not of what the people living in those lands thought or did.

Pause and try this. In the grant's pinned phrase, which word shows that the voyage was about rule, and not only about trade?

It's the second of the two verbs.

Here's the answer. The word is "subdue", because it means bringing lands under control, which is rule, not buying and selling.

5. Columbus's own account of 1492

Think about the first review someone posts after a long trip. It's written fast, by one person, often to impress the people back home. It's real evidence of the trip, and it's also one person's pitch.

In 1492 Columbus sailed west to reach Asia, and he reached the Caribbean instead. The Library of Congress names the island where he arrived as Guanahani, in the Bahamas. It was home to the Taíno, the Indigenous people of those islands. The Library also notes that Columbus believed to the end that the Caribbean was part of Asia.

He wrote an account of the voyage, and it was printed in 1493. The Library of Congress holds a Latin printing made at Rome. Its exhibit page quotes an English rendering of the letter and doesn't name the translator. This letter is the week's Primary Source Workshop document, so let's walk it.

Here's one line from that English rendering.

"There I found very many islands, filled with innumerable people, and I have taken possession of them all for their Highnesses, done by proclamation and with the royal standard unfurled, and no opposition was offered to me."

Source it first. Columbus wrote it, about his own voyage, for the rulers who paid for it. Then the context: the grant had asked him to discover and subdue, so he had every reason to report success. Then the close reading. He says the islands were filled with people, so they weren't empty. He claims possession by a ceremony the Taíno had no part in shaping. And when he says no opposition was offered, that's his claim about the Taíno, not their account. Corroboration comes last, and here it runs out fast. The grant confirms what he was sent to do, but no Taíno voice is in this letter.

Pause and try this. Did Columbus reach the North American mainland on the 1492 voyage? Where did he land?

Picture the map before you reply.

Here's the answer. No, he didn't. He reached Guanahani, an island in the Bahamas, in the Caribbean, far from the lands that later became the United States.

The plain sentence: the letter shows how Columbus wanted the crowns to understand his voyage; it's evidence of his claims, not of the Taíno's view.

6. The Treaty of Tordesillas

Imagine two neighbors who agree, over coffee, to split a park between them. Neither one owns the park. The families who already live along it are never asked. The deal says a lot about the two neighbors and nothing about the people it affects.

In 1494 two European crowns made a deal like that for much of the world. The Treaty of Tordesillas was concluded in 1494, between the crowns of Castile and Aragon and of Portugal. It set a line "drawn north and south, from pole to pole", far out in the Atlantic, west of the Cape Verde Islands, and it divided newly encountered lands between the two crowns.

Source it. It's a treaty, an agreement between governments, made two years after the first voyage. You read it on the Avalon Project, and that page is headed TRANSLATION, because the text is an English translation.

Now ask the close-reading question that matters most here: who signed, and who didn't? Two European crowns signed. No Indigenous nation took part, even though the line divided their lands.

Pause and try this. How many parties made the Treaty of Tordesillas, and was any Indigenous nation among them?

Count the crowns before you reply.

Here's the answer. Two parties made it, Castile and Aragon on one side and Portugal on the other, and no Indigenous nation was among them.

So the plain sentence is this. The treaty shows how two crowns divided lands between themselves after 1492. It's evidence of their claims, not of who lived on those lands or what those people agreed to.

7. Contact and conquest

Think of a new student joining your class. On the first day, people meet, trade names, maybe argue about a seat. That's a meeting. It would be something else if the new student took over the room and made the rules by force.

Historians keep two words apart the same way. Contact is the meeting of peoples who had not met before, with the trade, exchange, and conflict that follow. Conquest is one people taking control of another's land and government by force.

The years make the difference visible. In 1519 Hernán Cortés led an expedition to Mexico. By 1521, war and diseases new to the Americas had destroyed Tenochtitlán, the Mexica capital. That was a conquest, and it cost many lives. It came 2 years after Cortés's expedition landed.

Farther north, in 1565, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés established St. Augustine, in Florida, on Timucua land. The National Park Service calls it the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the continental United States. The English founded Jamestown, their first permanent colony in North America, in 1607. Take 1565 away from 1607 and you get 42 years. So St. Augustine is the older settlement, by 42 years. In this course Jamestown marks the edge of our first frame, before 1607.

Pause and try this. Which is older, St. Augustine or Jamestown, and by how many years?

Compare 1565 with 1607.

Here's the answer. St. Augustine is older, by 42 years, because it was founded in 1565 and Jamestown in 1607.

8. The Columbian Exchange

Picture a plate of fries with ketchup and a mug of hot chocolate. Potatoes, tomatoes, and cacao all came from the Americas. Before 1492, no one in Europe had tasted them. Now picture a bun and a glass of milk. Wheat and cattle came the other way.

The Columbian Exchange is the transfer of crops, animals, people, and diseases between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres that began after 1492. Alfred W. Crosby named it in his 1972 book. The Old World means Europe, Africa, and Asia.

The course's set has 12 items. Seven crossed from the Old World to the Americas: horses, cattle, pigs, wheat, sugarcane, smallpox, and measles. Five crossed from the Americas to the Old World: maize, potatoes, tomatoes, cacao, and tobacco. So the exchange ran both ways.

One part of it was devastating. Diseases carried from Europe and Africa, smallpox above all, struck Indigenous American populations that had no prior exposure. Very large numbers of people died. Historians keep revising the estimates of how many, so we say it in words and don't memorize a death figure.

Last, let's put the whole era in order. The course keys six years: 1492 for Columbus's first voyage, 1494 for the Treaty of Tordesillas, 1519 for Cortés's landing in Mexico, 1521 for the fall of Tenochtitlán, 1565 for St. Augustine, and 1607 for Jamestown. From the first year to the last is 115 years. Someone chose those edges, and that's periodization.

Pause and try this. Tomatoes: did they cross from the Old World to the Americas, or from the Americas to the Old World?

Think about that mug of hot chocolate's neighbors on the plate.

Here's the answer. Tomatoes crossed from the Americas to the Old World, like potatoes, maize, cacao, and tobacco.

Closing

Let me pull it together. History is interpretation from evidence, and you sort sources by timing: primary sources were made at the time, and secondary sources explain it later. You read every source with four moves, in order: sourcing, contextualization, close reading, and corroboration, and you end in one plain sentence. The Americas before 1492 held large, complex societies, Cahokia and Tenochtitlán among them. The royal grant of 1492 sent Columbus to discover and subdue, and his own letter claims possession of islands full of people. The Treaty of Tordesillas divided lands between two crowns with no Indigenous nation at the table. Contact is a meeting, and conquest is control by force, and St. Augustine is older than Jamestown. And the Columbian Exchange ran both ways, with diseases that devastated Indigenous populations.

Next in this module come the slide deck, the Readings and Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz. Then, in Week 2, Colonization & Empire, you'll compare how Spain, France, the Dutch, and England built colonies, starting with the charter behind Jamestown.

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