History 10-- Historical Contexts and Moral Judgments: Assessing the Encounter of Old and New Worlds
For class on Tuesday, September 17: Please read the assignments in this order: Methods and Skills, Carr, Weber and Sale.
Bring to class one-paragraph responses to the following questions about these readings. It would work best to retype these questions in a word processing program, compose a response to each, then print out the result for class. Print out two copies, one to hand in and the other to supplement with notes taken during class discussion.
1. To what extent does Weber refrain from making moral judgments on the Spanish or the Native Americans? Is this a good thing? Does he describe the meeting of the Spanish and Indians as an encounter, a collision, or an invasion? How do these concepts differ?
2. Are Sale’s criticisms of Columbus fair or justified? Do they hinder or help our understanding of Columbus and his culture? Is Sale improperly projecting twentieth-century values into his discussion? Is his point to lower Columbus’s reputation, to expose his limitations, or to highlight his hidden assumptions? Is Sale equally critical of the Taino people? Why not?
3. Which of these readings is more sensitive to historical context? How so? How do the two authors differ in the way they apply moral judgments to history?
4. How and to what extent should our long-term view of the New World encounter (for example, our approval of the spread of European culture or criticism of the environmental damage that Europeans did to the New World) color our description of its early history?
5. Would it be helpful for historians to apply Carr’s labels of “progressive” or “reactionary” (108) to Columbus and Coronado? Why or why not?
6. Carr believes that historians should pass moral judgment “not on individuals, but on events, institutions, or policies of the past” (100) Do Weber and Carr appear to agree with him? To what extent do you agree?