In order to understand the history of North America, it's good to review the three very different approaches each of the major colonial powers took with regard to the Indians:
1. French - Trade 2. Spanish - Assimilation 3. English - Land Ownership
Let's go over each:
1. French
The French were the greatest traders with the natives. Obviously they envisioned the fleur-de-lis flying over all of North America, but this was to support their primary interest which was mercantile. French trappers and traders wandered the furthest as a result.
French weapons dealing caused ceaseless consternation to the English and Spanish, who more tightly regulated trade and had to deal with the result of heavily armed tribes. Many conflicts between the French and their neighbors in the New World could be traced back to this.
But this also meant that the French typically enjoyed the best relations with the Indians. French trappers were the most welcome in Indian villages continent-wide and our best ethnographic accounts of first contacts usually come from French sources.
It wasn't a coincidence that Lewis and Clark found Charbonneau at the Mandan villages on the Missouri.
Osborne Russell wintered with a Frenchman at a Shoshone camp at present day Ogden, Utah in 1840.
French names all over North America attest to their roaming.
2. The Spanish were famously interested in the New World because of the three Gs - God, Gold, Glory. What this meant in practice was a cultural policy of assimilating with the native Indians. The new mestizo race of Latin Americans was born of this widespread mixing.
The most religiously devout of the three, the Spanish sent many missionaries who genuinely wished to convert the natives and improve their lives. These Jesuits, Dominicans, and Franciscans worked to spread Catholicism and European culture and practices throughout New Spain.
The pre-Columbian populations of Mesoamerica were orders of magnitude larger than the populations north of the Rio Grande. Even after multiple waves of epidemics killed off 90% of the population, there were still many millions of Indians who remained.
What this meant was that there was always going to be a massive population of natives who couldn't possibly be ethnically cleansed or exterminated without great cost to the new Spanish rulers.
Intermarrying happend almost immediately between the Spanish and Aztec elite.
When the Spanish moved into New Mexico in the early 1600s, they brought Aztec and Tlaxcalan families from central Mexico, and the leader of the expedition was married to a great-granddaughter of Montezuma himself.
The Spanish crown regularly chastised and punished Spaniards who were too cruel to natives. A Dominican friar named Bartolome de las Casas was a social activist in the 1500s who agitated for humane treatment of the conquered peoples, and was influential at court.
3. The Anglo interactions with the indians were primarily centered on land use issues. Coming from a strong tradition of English common law which emphasized the property rights of landowners, this English worldview of exclusionary land use was antithetical to the native one.
English settlers were primarily motivated by land ownership, as opposed to trading, proselytizing, or commodity extraction. Obviously this meant that they had the most intractable conflict with the Indians. The conflict ended only with complete subjugation of the indians.
The Anglo did intermarry with Indians to some degree, but the intensity of violence and the small numbers of natives relative to New Spain meant that it never manifested very strongly racially.
However, the Japanese, who fought both the English and Americans in the Pacific theater of World War 2 often remarked at the differences in fighting styles of the two races. They attributed a certain ferocity and stubbornness to the presence of Indian blood in the Americans.
This is only the most cursory summary of North American colonial history, and certainly exceptions are widespread, but I think it's helpful to understand the broad strokes as we examine how these peoples clashed and moved about North America during the Age of Exploration.
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A lot of people don't know that it's entirely legal to general contract the construction of your own home. It used to be very common, but doesn't happen as much anymore.
Here's a step-by-step guide for how to save 20% of the cost of your new home by building it yourself. (🧵)
This is totally possible without any construction experience. You shouldn't have to self-perform any of the work yourself. You won't need to swing a hammer. All you're going to do is put together the team and hire the subcontractors yourself.
1. Find the lot/land. You need to check with the city or county that building a single family home is an approved use in that zone.
Check for utility connections. Having all utilities stubbed to the lot up front is one of the best ways to save costs.
Many dream of building their own custom home someday, but those who get the opportunity often launch into the endeavor with very little training as to what makes a home beautiful and timeless. I've got three book recommendations that I think every future builder needs to read:
Failing to follow the rules of good architecture leads to "McMansions". The objection to the McMansion isn't that it's mass produced, it's that it is large without being tasteful, that the builder of the home had a layman's lack of understanding in what makes a home attractive.
In most states, you do not need to be a formally trained architect to design someone's home. Most custom home plans are drawn by Home Designers who rarely have the knowledge necessary, and aren't paid enough to make the effort. You cannot rely on Home Designers for good design!
The Jews have been a diaspora people not since the destruction of the temple in 70 AD, but since the Babylonian exile in 586 BC.
Most Jews lived outside Palestine during the life of Christ.
I think there are several important insights from remembering this historical context:
The Jewish diaspora began in 586 BC when the Babylonians conquered Judea and took most of the population back to Mesopotamia.
Small groups started returning to Jerusalem in 538 BC (Ezra, Nehemiah), but 586 BC was really the last time that a majority of Jews lived in Palestine.
The Assyrians had conquered the northern kingdom about 150 years previously, but were much more successful in destroying any group cohesion these other Israelite tribes had.
The Royal Navy in the Age of Sail didn't have any DEI initiatives or HR quotas, and yet they iterated a nearly perfect system over hundreds of years for finding the most competent officers for their battleships, and then conquered the world with it. I think it's worth examining:
Being the captain of a battleship in the Age of Sail is probably the most high-stakes, high-risk endeavor that I know of in history. Not only do you have the danger from rocky coasts and storms at sea, but you also engage regularly in naval combat with skilled peers.
Layer on the extreme distances at which these ships operated, and the lack of any communication with the outside world, and it's clear that only the most extraordinary men with extraordinary leadership capabilities were to be entrusted with these massively expensive ships.
Ukrainian language and culture was intentionally fabricated by academics in the early 1800s for explicitly anti-Russian political reasons. They took the vernacular accent of the peasants in the area and called it "Ukrainian" in order to produce a Ukrainian national consciousness.
Ivan Kotliarevsky was a Russian military officer who thought that Ukrainian peasants were folksy and funny, so he wrote a poem in their dialect in 1798. This was the first time anyone had ever published anything serious in "Little Russian". Anyone of any class spoke Russian.
Taras Shevchenko, the Godfather of Ukraine, almost single handedly brought Ukrainian national consciousness into existence. He was a hugely influential poet and painter, and moved in the highest circles of St Petersburg society. Statues of him are everywhere in Ukraine.
Deep in the deserts of the American southwest I once found something that I believe very few modern people have laid eyes on:
The area north of Lake Powell in Utah is one of the least hospitable and sparsely populated areas of the US. The Escalante River and the Henry Mountains were the last major river and mountain range surveyed in the lower 48. Nobody lives out there. Rough terrain. Very dry.
Because of how dry and inaccessible it is, there are still thousands of Native American archaeological sites in the area. Many are mostly undisturbed, only rarely visited by lonely hikers who find themselves off trails in desolate places.