John Winthrop

Having been granted a charter for land, John Winthrop and a group of fellow Puritan merchants set sail for America in 1629. As first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Winthrop was charged with founding the colony on binding social principles. Out of this need, Winthrop delivered his famous sermon, A Model of Christian Charity. His sermon presented the budding community with two critical motivational concepts: first, the ideal of the "City on a Hill" acting as an example for other communities, and second, the promise of spiritual reward in return for social utilitarianism, solidarity, and hard work. These tenets set forth a strong foundation, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony flourished as a result. However, objectors (like Anne Bradstreet) to Winthrop's narrow interpretation of the Bible challenged the concept of this "divine covenant" and its similarities to exclusionary Roman Catholic practices. Despite these conflicts, Puritans continued to immigrate to the new and prospering Christian colony for the next two decades.

Jamestown and The Virginia Company

In 1606, James I was king of England, and one of his many goals was to expand English territory to include the eastern coast of the New World. He authorized the Virginia Company, a London-based trading company, to expand British territory through the issuing of land charters. Jamestown was one of these charters.

Jamestown, founded on May 14, 1607, was the first permanent English settlement in North America. As chronicled in John Smith's The General History of Virginia, members of the colony suffered several hardships, including starvation, disease, disorganized leadership, and Native attacks. It was not until the colony's mastery of the tobacco crop that Jamestown became a permanent colony.

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca

In 1527, Spanish colonizer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca set sail with the Narváez expedition to current-day Florida. However, the planned expedition ended in the crew's desertion, ships lost in a hurricane, and Narváez (a proven poor leader) abandoning De Vaca and three other men. Stranded near what is now Galveston, Texas, the group of four men spent the next few years as prisoners to the Karankawa Indians. De Vaca's text, The Relation of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, documents his observations of the encountered Native American tribes during his captivity and eventual release. His record, a work of objective social science, is recognized as the first European ethnographic study of the New World.  

Bartolomé de las Casas

Spanish cleric and visitor to the island of Hispaniola, Bartolomé de las Casas is known for famously documenting the brutality inflicted by Spanish colonizers on the Native residents of the New World. In his unflinching work, The Very Brief Relation of the Devastation of the Indies, Las Casas details the brutal actions of the Spanish colonizers, whom he describes as "acting like ravening beasts, killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing, and destroying the native peoples." Las Casas disagreed with the Church's view of Natives as savages; however, as a man of faith, he neither turned from the Catholic church nor doubted its authority over the New World. Instead, through his writings and confrontations with the Church, he worked tirelessly to persuade his people of the irreparable social harm in their actions. To this day, Bartolomé de las Casas is hailed as an early champion of Native American rights and as a voice of conscience for the Spanish Catholic Church.

Columbus and the New World

With the support of Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, Columbus made four voyages to the Indies between 1492 and 1504. Though the New World filled Columbus with a sense of wonder, the difficulties of colonization and the political conflict surrounding his voyages continued to discourage him until the end of his life. Record of Columbus' voyages survives through several documents, including a journal and a series of letters written by Columbus himself. Thanks to the range in content and expression found in these documents, readers today are allowed an intimate understanding of Columbus' shifting feelings toward discovery, prosperity, and the New World as he imagined it. 

Oral Tradition of the Pima Indians

The Pima are a Native American Indian people who made (and still make) their home in the deserts of southern Arizona and northern Mexico. While the name 'Pima' was given to them by the Spanish, the tribe knew themselves by the name O'odham, which by different accounts means "river people" or "the people." For the Piman tribe, their narratives did not rely on the written word. Instead, their narratives were generally carried down through song, storytelling, rhetoric, and other oral traditions. It is through the orature of the Native American people that American literature makes its first marks.