Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®)

Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) by Kenneth C. Davis Page A

Book: Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) by Kenneth C. Davis Read Free Book Online
Authors: Kenneth C. Davis
truly bloodless battles in American history. As the two principal competing nations of the early seventeenth century, England and Holland sporadically came to war, and when Charles II reclaimed the throne in 1661 after the period of Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate, he asserted English rights to North America. Charles II granted his brother, the Duke of York, the largest and richest territorial grant ever made by an English monarch. It included all of present New York, the entire region from the Connecticut to the Delaware rivers, Long Island, Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and the present state of Maine. In 1664, four English frigates carrying 1,000 soldiers sailed into New York Harbor. The Dutch and other settlers there, unhappy with the administration of the West India Company, gladly accepted English terms despite Peter Stuyvesant’s blustery call to resist. Without a shot fired, New Amsterdam became New York.
    The Duke of York in turn generously created a new colony when he split off two large tracts of land and gave one each to two friends, Sir George Carteret and Lord John Berkeley, an area that would become New Jersey. Also gained as part of this annexation was a settlement known as New Sweden. Established in 1638 by Peter Minuit (dismissed earlier as governor of New Amsterdam and now in Swedish employ), and centered on the site of Wilmington, Delaware, New Sweden had fallen to the Dutch under Stuyvesant in 1655. (Although this Swedish colony had little lasting impact on American history, the Swedes did make one enormous contribution. They brought with them the log cabin, the construction destined to become the chief form of pioneer housing in the spreading American frontier of the eighteenth century.)
    The English exercised a surprisingly tolerant hands-off policy in ruling the former New Amsterdam. Life as it had been under Dutch rule continued for many years.
    A MERICAN V OICES
J ACQUES C ARTIER (1491–1557), French explorer, on the Hurons:
The tribe has no belief in God that amounts to anything; for they believe in a god they call Cudouagny, and maintain that he often holds intercourse with them and tells that what the weather will be like. They also say that when he gets angry with them, he throws dust in their eyes. They believe furthermore that when they die they go to the stars and descend on the horizon like the stars. . . . After they had explained these things to us, we showed them their error and informed them that Cudouagny was a wicked spirit who deceived them, and that there is but one God, Who is in Heaven, Who gives everything we need and is the Creator of all things and that in Him alone we should believe. Also that one must receive baptism or perish in hell. . . .
     
    When did the French reach the New World?
     
    French attempts to gain a piece of the riches of the New World began in earnest with Jacques Cartier’s voyage of 1534, another expedition in the ongoing search for a China route. Cartier’s explorations took him to Newfoundland, discovered by Cabot almost forty years earlier, and up the Gulf of St. Lawrence, sailing as far as the Huron Indian villages of Stadacona (modern Quebec) and Hochelaga (Montreal). In 1541, Cartier’s attempt to settle a colony failed and he returned to France. In 1564, during France’s religious civil wars, a Huguenot colony was established on the coast of Florida near present-day Jacksonville. The colony, Fort Caroline, was completely destroyed and its inhabitants massacred in 1565 by the Spanish under the command of Admiral Pedro Menéndez, the founder of Saint Augustine, Florida. The slaughter of the French Protestants signaled the end of France’s attempts to settle the future United States and they shifted their attention north.
    While cod fishermen from France, as well as England and Portugal, continued to make temporary settlements around Newfoundland, the French also began some early fur trading with Indians that would provide France with the real

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