The Birth of America: From Before Columbus to the Revolution – A Provocative History of Colonial Transformation and National Character

The Birth of America: From Before Columbus to the Revolution – A Provocative History of Colonial Transformation and National Character

From the fearful crossing of the stormy Atlantic to the growth of the early settlements, from the French and Indian War and the unrest of the 1760s to the inevitable break with England—here is an insightful and fascinating account of the transformation of an unknown land into an extraordinary nation. In this provocative history of colonial America, William R. Polk explores the key events and individuals that defined this critical epoch by offering vivid descriptions of the societies the Europeans came from and what they believed they were going to , while introducing the native peoples encountered in the New World and the black Africans who were brought across the Atlantic. As John Adams would point out to Thomas Jefferson, the long years that witnessed the formation of our national character and the growth of our spirit of independence were indeed the real revolution. That is the compelling story at the root of The Birth of America . From the fearful crossing of the stormy Atlantic to the growth of the early settlements, from the French and Indian War and the unrest of the 1760s to the inevitable break with England—here is an insightful and fascinating account of the transformation of an unknown land into an extraordinary nation. In this provocative history of colonial America, William R. Polk explores the key events and individuals that defined this critical epoch by offering vivid descriptions of the societies the Europeans came from and what they believed they were going to , while introducing the native peoples encountered in the New World and the black Africans who were brought across the Atlantic. As John Adams would point out to Thomas Jefferson, the long years that witnessed the formation of our national character and the growth of our spirit of independence were indeed the real revolution. That is the compelling story at the root of The Birth of America . William R. Polk taught Middle Eastern history and politics and Arabic at Harvard until 1961, when he became a member of the Policy Planning Council of the U.S. Department of State. In 1965, he became Professor of History at the University of Chicago, where he established the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. His many books include The Birth of America and Understanding Iraq . The Birth of America From Before Columbus to the Revolution By William Polk HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Copyright © 2007 William Polk All right reserved. ISBN: 9780060750930 Chapter One The Native Americans Who were the Native Americans? The Spanish, French, and English explorers were perplexed by that question. Their first assumption that the natives were Chinese was soon abandoned; the natives obviously were not European and did not seem to be African either. The explorers could not think of any other possibilities. William Strachey spoke for them in 1612 in his Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania : "It were not perhappes too curyous a thing to demaund, how these people might come first, and from whome, and whence, having no entercourse with Africa, Asia nor Europe , and considering the whole world, so many years, by all knowledg receaved, was supposed to be only conteyned and circumscrybed in the discovered and travelled Bowndes of those three." The Indian societies he saw, Strachey would have been astonished to learn, were formed by thousands of years of migration, splitting apart, rejoining, exchanging mates, settling, and adapting -- essentially the same process that shaped European lives and culture. Just as Europeans were products of the migrations of western Asians, so the Native Americans were descendants of migrants from eastern Asia. And just as the Europeans' languages give a view of their history, so American Indians' languages illustrate their background. The first Indians the Spaniards encountered in what they named La Florida spoke dialects of a language known as Muskhogean. It was one of 583 languages that have so far been identified as spoken by natives in North and South America. Linguists trace it back to a tongue they call Amerind. Linguistic evidence points toward northeastern Asia as their "origin." What the spread of language indicates has now been confirmed by genetic studies. Together they suggest that ancestors of the American Indians probably began crossing to North America roughly 30,000 years ago. Climatologists now believe that from about 60,000 years ago, Asia and North America were joined at what is now the Bering Strait and archaeologists have found evidence of human settlements in northeastern Siberia from about 40,000 years ago. So it was possible for humans and animals to walk across a land bridge, which geologists call Beringia. They began to do so because, although much of North America was covered by huge glaciers and sheets of ice, parts of Alaska enjoyed a relatively mild climate. Even in the coldest times, there was a corridor of relatively open countryside that channeled movement