The New World: Before and After 1492 (BRAND NEW CLASS)
Dr. Richard Bell is Professor of History at the University of Maryland. He holds a PhD from Harvard University and has won more than a dozen teaching awards, including the University System of Maryland Board of Regents Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching. He has held major research fellowships at Yale, Cambridge, and the Library of Congress and is the recipient of the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship and the National Endowment of the Humanities Public Scholar award. Professor Bell is author of the new book Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and their Astonishing Odyssey Home, which was shortlisted for the George Washington Prize and the Harriet Tubman Prize.
Overview
Where does American history begin? The history of North America doesn’t begin in 1492 when Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue. It actually begins millennia before then when the first humans settled this great continent. But who were those first settlers—the people we now call Native Americans? How did they get to America and what sorts of lives did they build for themselves when they got here? Why did the Europeans come searching for a new world in 1492? What were Columbus and his patrons, the King and Queen of Spain, hoping to find on the other side of the Atlantic? And what sort of colonies and empires did the Spanish and then the French and then the English build on this continent and in the Caribbean when their ships finally hit land?