Early American and Colonial Period to 1776

LITERATURE

EARLY AMERICAN

• NATIVE AMERICANS

• EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE

Native Americans

• Arrived across Bering Strait 30,000 years ago.

• Nomadic hunters and gatherers.

• By 1500, there were 700 distinct tribes living in North America.

• Most tribes were peaceful – settling difference through negotiation, not war.

• Complex cultures

What do you know about American early history?

Native American Literature

• Oral tradition

• Poetry and stories

• Presented in form of myths, folk tales, and songs

• Common theme: Examines the close relationship between human beings and nature. Shows a deep respect for the land.

Native American Literature

Purpose of Native American Literature

To Entertain To TeachTo reinforce

Tribal customs

COLONIAL PERIOD(1492 -1776)

Historical BackgroundPeople:

native inhabitants: Indians

Immigrants mostly from Europe: Spanish; Dutch; French

English immigrants, Jamestown, Virginia, 1607

Puritans and ---

a group of religious people

advocated religious &moral principles Pilgrims AFRICAN

The Spanish

• In 1492, Columbus opened the door to a century of Spanish Exploration

- Narvaez & DeSoto in southeastern U.S.

- Coronado in southwestern U.S.

The EuropeansThe Spanish

• By 1550, Spanish control extended throughout Mexico, Central America, part of the southwestern U.S., most of the West Indies, & most of western South America

Why the Spanish explored America?

• Adventure

• Desire for Converts to Christianity – establishment of missions.

• Clothing, food, and housing

• By 1630, over 60,000 Native American converts.

The Spanish

• St. Augustine, Florida – oldest town in the U.S. 1565.

• Destruction of Native America societies.

• By 1588, Spanish influence was in decline after the defeat of the Armada.

The EuropeansThe English

• Jamestown was founded in 1607. Within seven months, disease and hardship claimed the lives of 2/3 of the settlers.

• Tobacco was first cash crop.

• Successful because they regarded the new settlements as their home.

• Plymouth Colony was established in 1620 by Pilgrims.

The Africans

• Estimated 15 million Africans were transported to the Americans between 1540 & 1850.

• Most Africans in America were West African or coast of Central African descent.

The Africans

• First Africans in North America were probably slaves of the Spanish & Portuguese.

• Slavery developed in the colonies in early 1600s.

• By 1644 laws requiring lifelong servitude for black slaves.

• Quakers were the only religious body to oppose slavery for over a century.

The Africans

• Slave traders maximized profit by carrying as many as physically possible on a slave ship.

• The Brookes carried over 600 people from Africa to the Americas. It was originally built for 451 people.

• Only half of the peoples taken from Africa became effective workers in the Americas. Many died from disease, were crippled for life, or committed suicide.

The Africans

• By the 17th century, slaves could be purchased in Africa for about $25 and sold in America for about $150.

• Even with a death rate of about 50 percent, merchants could expect to make tremendous profits.

Historical Background

3. Belief---Puritanism

• Puritans

- wanted to “purify the church” because they thought the church was corrupted and had too many rituals

took roots in the New World

LiteratureFrom orally transmitted works to printed

offerings- Before the first colony Jamestown set up in

1607: * no written literature among the more than 500

different Indian languages and tribal cultures in North America

- American literature began with abstraction and philosophy

- American writings began with the works of English adventurers and colonists in the New World

- two kinds of writings

+ practical matter-of-fact accounts of farming, hunting, travel, etc. to inform people “at home” about life in the new world, to induce immigration

+ highly theoretical, generally polemical, discussions of religious questions.

The literature of exploration

- Epistola (1493) by Christopher Columbus

- reveals the adventurous characteristics of early American literary works.

- It recounts the trip’s drama – the terror of the men who were frightened

of monsters and thought that they mind fall off the edge of the world.

- It retells how Columbus faked the ships’ logs to repress these men and

to describe the first sighting of land as they neared America.

- The literature is an interesting mixture of travel accounts and

religious writings. America was described and painted in glowing

colors as the land of riches and opportunity.

Puritan Literature (in northeastern section of the United States, known as New England )

- Puritan writing style varied enormously: * full awareness of worshipping God and of the spiritual

dangers that human beings faced on earth.* Life = a test, the world = constant battle b/w the forces of

God and the forces of Satan- The minds of the people were occupied with matters of religion, the

problem of settlement, politics- The writings were histories, tracts, pamphlets, sermons or articles on

religion- Typical writers:• Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards (about the Puritan religion)• William Bradford, Thomas Hutchinson, William Byrd (about history of

New England…)

LITERATURE IN THE SOUTHERN AND MIDDLE COLONIES

• aristocratic and secular, reflecting the dominant social and economic systems of the southern plantations

• The Puritan emphasis on hard work, education and earnestness was rare

• Pleasures like horseback riding and hunting. • The church was the focus of a genteel social life,

not a forum for minute examinations of conscience.

Of Plymouth Plantation, Book II by William Bradford

• William Bradford (1590-1657 ) - one of the leaders of the English Puritan

Separatists who we now call "The Pilgrims." - This history was his personal journal,

completed around 1650, after he had served some 35 years as governor of the colony.

- The first excerpt describes his feelings as he is on The Mayflower in 1620, on the night before they land to start their puritan colony, the first utopian experiment in the Americas.

William Byrd and The History of the Dividing Line

• WILLIAM BYRD (1674 – 1744)

• Born in the colony of Virginia but educated in England

• he later returned to America and became an important government leader.

• His diaries tell about daily life on a colonial southern plantation.

• He was upper-class, well-educated and familiar with London high society.

• His diaries often describe poor country people and native Americans whose cultures and habits were different from his own

• Byrd's writings are fine examples of the keen interest Southerners took in the material world: the land, Indians, plants, animals, and settlers

• “History of the Dividing Line” is a diary of a 1729 trip of some weeks and 960 kilometers into the interior to survey the line dividing the neighboring colonies of Virginia and North Carolina.

• The quick impressions that vast wilderness, Indians, half-savage whites, wild beasts, and every sort of difficulty made on this civilized gentleman form a uniquely American and very southern book.

• William Byrd ridicules the first Virginia colonists:

"about a hundred men, most of them reprobates of good families,"

and jokes that at Jamestown:

"like true Englishmen, they built a church that cost no more than fifty pounds, and a tavern that cost five hundred.“

New England

• The first settlements were built along the Atlantic coast and on the rivers that flowed to the ocean. In the Northeast, settlers found hills covered with trees and soil filled with stones left behind when the Ice Age glaciers melted. Water power was easy to harness, so "New England" – including Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island – developed an economy based on wood products, fishing, shipbuilding, and trade

The middle colonies and The Southern colonies

• The Middle colonies: New York + Pennsylvania – had a milder climate and more varied terrain. - industry and agriculture developed - society was more varied and cosmopolitan. - In New York: Bohemians, Danes, Dutch, English, French,

Germans, Irish, Italians, Norwegians, Poles, Portuguese, Scots, and Swedes.

• The Southern colonies: Virginia + Georgia + Carolina – had a long growing season and fertile soil- the economy was primarily agricultural. - small farmers and wealthy aristocratic landowners owning

large plantations lived there (also African slaves)

• The 1500s: the age of Spanish exploration in the Americas (from the South)– Juan Ponce de León landed in what is now Florida in 1513. – Hernando De Soto reached Florida in 1539 and continued as

far as the Mississippi River. – In 1540, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado set out north from

Mexico, which Spain had conquered in 1522, in search of the mythical Seven Cities of Cibola. He never found them, but his travels took him as far as the Grand Canyon in Arizona, as well as into the Great Plains.

• Other Europeans occupied the northern portion of the present-day United States– Giovanni da Verrazano,– Jacques Cartier, – Amerigo Vespucci, for whom the continent – America –

would be named.