Sound Bites -- Provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some with audio commentary)
131-140 of 333 Sound Bites. [show all]
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131) [...] that the world Columbus found was not America because he could not conceive it, and not Asia because he did not find it, but rather a world in limbo, existent in thought, but not in fact. (Wilcomb E. Washburn, "The Meaning of ‘Discovery' in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries." American Historical Review 68.1 [1962]: 21. )
132) The Renaissance Englishmen who became Americans were sustained by an idea of order. They were sure, above all, of an external and immutable principle which guaranteed the intelligibility of their relations to each other and to their world and thus made possible their life in society. It was a principle to be expressed in the progress and elevation of civilized men, who striving to imitate their God, would bring order to chaos. America was such a chaos, a Newfoundland chaos. Her natural wealth was there for the taking because it was there for the ordering. So were her natural men. (Roy Harvey Pearce, qtd. in Juan E. Tazón, "The Evolution of a Stereotype: The Indian in English Renaissance Promotional Literature." Beyond Pug's Tour: National and Ethnic Stereotyping in Theory and Literary Practice. Ed. C.C. Barfoot. Rodopi, 1997: 132. )
133) As long as the wars against pagans were truly defensive, religious motives were intermingled with the consciousness of fighting for hearth and home. But the military situation changed during the tenth century. (Carl Erdman, The Origin of the Idea of Crusade. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977. 96. Translated from Die Entstehung des Kreuzzegsgedankens by W. Kohlhammer. Verlag: Stuttgart, 1935. )
134) European technology did more than impress the Indians with the white man's power. It bestowed on Europeans the aura of divinity. As the agents of impressive technological force, Europeans soon competed with the most successful of native spirits. (Bernard W. Sheehan, Savagism and Civility: Indians and Englishmen in Colonial Virginia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980: 164. )
135) Although the countrie people be very barbarous, yet haue they amongst them such government, as that their Magistrats for good commanding, and their people for du subiection, and obeying, excel many places that would be counted very civill. The forme of their Common wealth is a monarchical government, one as Emperour ruleth ouer many kings or governours. (John Smith commenting on the government of Powhatan's people, qtd. in Wesley Craven, White, Red, and Black: The Seventeenth Century Virginian. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1971: 43. )
136) [W]e assert that by law infidels ought to be subject to the faithful. (Hostiensis, 1200-1271, qtd. in Robert A. Williams, Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest. New York: Oxford UP, 1990: 65. )
137) Now compare their [the Spaniards'] gifts of prudence, talent, magnanimity, temperance, humanity, and religion with those little men (homunculus) in whom you will scarcely find traces of humanity; who not only lack culture but do not even know how to write, who keep no records of their history except certain obscure and vague reminiscences of some things put down in certain pictures, and who do not have written laws but only barbarous institutions and customs. But if you deal with the virtues, if you look for temperance or meekness, what can you expect from men who were involved in every kind of intemperance and wicked lust and who used to eat human flesh? And don't think that before the arrival of the Christians they were living in quiet and the Saturnian peace of the poets. On the contrary they were making war continuously and ferociously against each other with such rage that they considered their victory worthless if they did not satisfy their monstrous hunger with the flesh of their enemies, an inhumanity which in them is so much more monstrous since they are so distant from the unconquered and wild Scythians, who also fed on human flesh, for these Indians are so cowardly and timid, that they scarcely withstand the appearance of our soldiers and often many thousands of them have given ground, fleeing like women before a very few Spaniards, who did not even number a hundred. (Sepúlveda, Demócrates Segundo, qtd. in Lewis Hanke, All Mankind Is One: A Study of the Disputation Between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1550 on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity of the American Indians. DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 1974: 85. )
138) As becomes apparent, the Madoc tradition perfectly offered itself as a colonial myth of origin. Its vagueness in important points, as well as the primordial blankness at the heart of it, made it useful for several interpretations, dependent on political necessity and historiographic and geographic preferences. (Gesa Mackenthun, Metaphors of Dispossession: American Beginnings and the Translation of Empire, 1492-1637. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1997: 32. )
139) Now, as worthy sons of the mother church, repel force and injury; for in law it happens that whatever anyone does in self-defense he is held to have done lawfully...Therefore, brothers, take courage with these arms, courage, that is to say, either to defend the fatherland in war against barbarians or to ward off enemies at home, or to defend comrades from robbers, for such courage is full of righteousness. Indeed, such works of vengeance are duties which righteous men perform with a good conscience ... And he who puts wicked men to death is a servant of the Lord, for the reason that they are wicked and there is ground for killing them. (An archbishop accompanying a Crusade, qtd. in Robert A. Williams, Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest. New York: Oxford UP, 1990: 67-68. )
140) [W]e do perceive that when occasion doth present you do rather allure and bring in that rude and barbarous nation to civility and acknowledging of their duty to God and to us, by wisdom and discreet handling than by force and shedding of blood; and yet, when necessity requireth, you are ready also to oppose yourself and your forces to them whom reason and duty cannot bridle. (Queen Elizabeth to Walter Deveraux, Earl of Essex, regarding a massacre in Ulster, Ire., qtd. in Robert A. Williams, Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest. New York: Oxford UP, 1990: 67-68. )
