Summary of Juan Gonzalez's Harvest of Empire

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

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#1 The arrival of European explorers to America began the most astounding and far-reaching encounter between cultures in the history of civilization. The Latin American and Anglo American cultures were shaped from their colonial beginnings in the 1500s to the independence wars of the early 1800s.

#2 The arrival of European explorers to America began the most far-reaching encounter between cultures in the history of civilization. The Latin American and Anglo American cultures were shaped from their colonial beginnings in the 1500s to the independence wars of the early 1800s.

#3 European explorers to America began the most far-reaching encounter between cultures in the history of civilization. The Latin American and Anglo American cultures were shaped from their colonial beginnings in the 1500s to the independence wars of the early 1800s.

#4 The arrival of European explorers to America began the most far-reaching encounter between cultures in the history of civilization. The Latin American and Anglo American cultures were shaped from their colonial beginnings in the 1500s to the independence wars of the early 1800s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Sep 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9798350031249

IRB Media

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Insights on Juan Gonzalez's Harvest of Empire

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The arrival of European explorers to America began the most astounding and far-reaching encounter between cultures. It brought together two portions of the human race that until then had never known of each other’s existence.

#2

The Native American population was around 60 million when the Spanish arrived. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán was a bustling metropolis. The Mayans, America’s Greeks, had the hemisphere’s only known phonetic script.

#3

The first Europeans to arrive in North America were the Spanish, who found hundreds of native societies in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. The Pueblos were a peaceful civilization that survived off the ocean of barren scrubland by planting extensively in river bottoms.

#4

By the fifteenth century, the frequency of plagues had ebbed, and the continent emerged into a dazzling era of artistic and scientific achievement. The first printing presses disseminated the new knowledge widely, and monarchs ruled England and Spain.

#5

The English emerged from the Middle Ages bedeviled by strife among their own people. The most bloody of those conflicts was the thirty-year Wars of the Roses, which finally drew to a close in 1485 when Henry Tudor of the House of Lancaster vanquished Richard III of the House of York.

#6

The first Europeans to touch what is now American soil were the Spanish, in 1513, when Juan Ponce de León discovered La Florida. The most extraordinary exploit was that of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who arrived in Florida in 1527 as second-in-command to Pánfilo de Narváez, the bungling governor of Cuba.

#7

The first Europeans to cross North America were Spanish explorers led by Cabeza de Vaca in 1542. They were separated from their fellow Spaniards and enslaved by coastal tribes, but they escaped and began traveling with the Native Americans.

#8

The Spanish Conquest was the second largest genocide in history, after the Native American population was wiped out by European diseases. The Spanish killed more than the British or French because they encountered more complex and wealthy societies that desperately resisted their attempts to subjugate them or take their land.

#9

The Indian genocide was the first protest against Spain from a Spaniard, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, who had arrived in Santo Domingo as a landowner but opted instead to become a Franciscan missionary.

#10

The Anglo-Indian relationship was one of mutual savagery, and this type of behavior was common far after the colonial period. In 1814, Andrew Jackson’s men massacred and cut off the noses of 557 Creeks, then skinned the dead bodies to make souvenir bridle reins.

#11

The Spanish and English colonies in America were completely different, as the English never saw proselytizing among the Indians as important, while the Spanish saw it as a unified effort with colonizing and conversion.

#12

The first European settlers in America were the Puritans, who segregated themselves from the Indians not even wanting to meet them until decades after their arrival. The Spanish settlers, on the other hand, saw the Indians as a simpler, less corrupted human being that could be more easily converted to Christianity.

#13

The Spanish monks were the first Europeans to colonize the Americas, and they did so by establishing many missions that became thriving