The Birth of America by William R. Polk

This book begins with some good information on the culture, languages and customs of the East Coast American Indian groups already here in North America as the modern age began.  This served as good basis for moving on to the age of exploration and discovery in the 15^th and 16^th centuries as French, Spanish and British explorers arrived on the eastern shores of the New World.

The author covers Ponce de Leon (1513 in La Florida), Panfilo Narvaez (1528 in Tampa Bay), Pedro Menendez de Aviles in 1565 in St. Augustine and Cabeza de Vaca (who traversed North America after the dissolution of Narvaez’s expedition).  We have Hernando de Soto, first in Peru, then up the Mississippi.  There is LaSalle, Verrazano (he sailed for France) who epxlored from North Carolina up to Massachusetts in 1524, Champlain, Cartier and Sir Francis Drake who was basically an English pirate!  (Note: The Portuguese heyday of exploration with its routes to India (Vasco da Gama in 1497) and the circumnavigation of the globe (Ferdinand Magellan in 1519) did not touch the northern continent of the New World.  Pedro Alvares Cabral came to the  southern continent when in 1500 he discovered Brazil.)

 The author has chapters on the perils of sailing the Atlantic, the slave and sugar trades and the French explorers and the fur trade.  He devotes a substantial chapter to the empires of West Africa that fed the slave trade and were the origins of blacks in America.  These were the Dahomey, the Congolese, the Akan and the Mali empires.  The author explores the Europe that gave rise to the New World and then focuses for the remainder of the book on the development of commerce, crops, industry, governance and rebellion in the colonies.

This was a good book for brushing up on your high school American history and gaining a more in-depth understanding of the topics that receive often superficial treatment in the textbooks.  For example, everyone knows that the colonists opposed the Stamp Act.  But what actually happened in 1765 in Boston when the British attempted to introduce the act was not the grassroots groundswell of discontent that is usually described.  Rather, the violence that was stirred up over this act was the work of a “trained mob,” with the players behind the scenes being Boston’s Samuel Adams and James Otis.  The author describes these two as taking the role of “Robespierre in the later French Revolution, inflaming the public and brushing aside the moderates.”   Adams is referred to as an “agitator,” “a shadowy figure” who “was no stranger to violence.”  The rioting in Boston over the Stamp Act was basically a terrorist act carried out by thuggish gangs from the North and South ends of Boston under the direction of the “shadowy” Adams.  Ignominious beginnings for the birth of  freedom in America!

The strength of this book was the way in which the author examined pre-Revolutionary America.  He organized 150 years of history into thematic topics and then explored those topics in some depth. The chapters on the Indians and slavery were particularly helpful in dispelling a lot of erroneous stereotypes and over-simplifications often associated with these two groups.  I took copious notes on most of the chapters.