History

An illustrated companion volume to the PBS series looks at the social, political, and intellectual history of Christopher Columbus, exploring the voyages and present-day repercussions.

The Age of Discovery explores one of the most dramatic features of the late medieval and early modern period: when voyagers from Western Europe led by Spain and Portugal set out across the world and established links with Africa, Asia and the Americas. This book examines the main motivations behind the voyages and discusses the developments in navigation expertise and technology that made them possible. This second edition brings the scholarship up to date and includes two new chapters on the important topics of the idea of "discovery" and on biological and environmental factors which favoured or limited European expansion.

Columbus planned and carried out his Enterprise of the Indies during an age of discovery and creation - a period of astonishing cultural activity not only in Europe but throughout the world. Five hundred years later an exhibition and book celebrate this crucial turning point in civilization by examining the art and history of the principal cultures in Europe and the Mediterranean, the Far East, and the Americas.

In Ancient Ocean Crossings: Reconsidering the Case for Contacts with the Pre-Columbian Americas, Stephen Jett encourages readers to reevaluate the common belief that there was no significant interchange between the chiefdoms and civilizations of Eurasia and Africa and peoples who occupied the alleged terra incognita beyond the great oceans.More than a hundred centuries separate the time that Ice Age hunters are conventionally thought to have crossed a land bridge from Asia into North America and the arrival of Columbus in the Bahamas in 1492. Traditional belief has long held that earth’s two hemispheres were essentially cut off from one another as a result of the post-Pleistocene meltwater-fed rising oceans that covered that bridge. The oceans, along with arctic climates and daunting terrestrial distances, formed impermeable barriers to interhemispheric communication. This viewpoint implies that the cultures of the Old World and those of the Americas developed independently.

500 year ago, Christopher Columbus "discovered" the Americas" that was to change radically the lives of all indigenous Americans and shape their subsequent histories. In the second edition, the author details the clash of cultures and considers the impact of the exploration and conquest of America.

This fascinating history explores the dynamic relationship between overseas colonisation and the bodily experience of eating. It reveals the importance of food to the colonial project in Spanish America and reconceptualises the role of European colonial expansion in shaping the emergence of ideas of race during the Age of Discovery. Rebecca Earle shows that anxieties about food were fundamental to Spanish understandings of the new environment they inhabited and their interactions with the native populations of the New World. Settlers wondered whether Europeans could eat New World food, whether Indians could eat European food and what would happen to each if they did. By taking seriously their ideas about food we gain a richer understanding of how settlers understood the physical experience of colonialism and of how they thought about one of the central features of the colonial project. The result is simultaneously a history of food, colonialism and race.

Violent mutiny was common in seafaring enterprises during the Age of Discovery—so common, in fact, that dealing with mutineers was an essential skill for captains and other leaders of the time. Mutinies in today’s organizations are much quieter, more social and intellectual, and far less violent, yet the coordinated defiance of authority springs from dissatisfactions very similar to those of long-ago shipboard crews. This highly original book mines seafaring logs and other archives of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century ship captains and discovers instructive lessons for today’s leaders facing challenges to their authority as well as for other members of organizations in which mutinous events occur.

Prior histories of the first Spanish mariners to circumnavigate the globe in the sixteenth century have focused on Ferdinand Magellan and the other illustrious leaders of these daring expeditions. Harry Kelsey's masterfully researched study is the first to concentrate on the hitherto anonymous sailors, slaves, adventurers, and soldiers who manned the ships. The author contends that these initial trans global voyages occurred by chance, beginning with the launch of Magellan's armada in 1519, when the crews dispatched by the king of Spain to claim the Spice Islands in the western Pacific were forced to seek a longer way home, resulting in bitter confrontations with rival Portuguese. Kelsey's enthralling history, based on more than thirty years of research in European and American archives, offers fascinating stories of treachery, greed, murder, desertion, sickness, and starvation but also of courage, dogged persistence, leadership, and loyalty.

The First Voyage around the World is also a remarkably accurate ethnographic and geographical account of the circumnavigation, and one that has earned its reputation among modern historiographers and students of the early contacts between Europe and the East Indies.

Translated and Edited, with Notes, an Introduction and Appendices. Includes also letters of King Manuel and Girolamo Sernigi, 1499, and early seventeenth-century Portuguese accounts of da Gama's first voyage."

Cloves and nutmeg are indigenous to the Spice Islands of Eastern Indonesia. This intriguing book tells of the many uses of these exotic spices and the history of their trade over period of more than 2,000 years. The book describes how such aromatic spices influenced the battles, the politics, and the rise and fall of numerous commercial empires. It follows the Silk Road across Central Asia and the Spice Route over the Indian Ocean, and it shows how the spice trade into Europe came to be dominated by Middle Eastern and Venetian merchants. Backed by the Crowns of Portugal and Spain, explorers - such as Columbus, Vasco de Gama, and Magellan - dreamt of capturing this trade by sailing directly to the Spice Islands, driving the maritime exploration of the world known as "The Age of Discovery." Much of the story is told through the lives of these historical characters, as well as Sir Francis Drake, Jan Pieterzoon Coen, Pierre Poivre, and others who are lesser known but equally important. The story also revolves around the intense rivalry between the Sultans of Ternate and Tidore and their relationship with the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and English, who at different times occupied the Spice Islands. The book follows the growth of the Dutch and English East India Companies - which were founded to profit from the spice trade - and their efforts to monopolize that trade. It finishes as the Dutch East India Company goes into bankruptcy and the once splendid Sultanates sink into obscurity.

Using tax and mintage records, this book provides a district-by-district annual accounting of the gold and silver officially produced and minted in colonial Latin America, placing that output within the context of the emerging early-modern world economy.

Continued from Second Series 23, 24, 25, 30. Books XIV-XVII, translated into English and edited, with introduction and notes, by Alfred Percival Maudslay, M.A., Hon. Professor of Archaeology, National Museum, Mexico, relating the expedition to Honduras, the return to Mexico, the rule of the Audiencia there, and the record of the conquistadores, with an appendix including the fifth letter of Cortes to the Emperor Charles V, 1526.