TPS Online Newsletter This month's newsletter celebrates Christopher Columbus. The following "newsletter" provides learning features, activities, photographs, and more from the Library of Congress' American Memory Web site. Please use these resources to facilitate students understanding of qualities that make a great explorer and the personal and historic accomplishments of Christopher Columbus. Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) was an Italian explorer who sailed across the Atlantic Ocean in 1492, hoping to find a route to India (in order to trade for spices). He made a total of four trips to the Caribbean and South America during the years 1492-1504. Early in the morning of October 12, 1492, a sailor looked out to the horizon from the bow of his ship, the Pinta, and saw land and a new era of European exploration and expansion began. The Genoese navigator Cristoforo Colombo, known to us now as Columbus,
was only the first of many Italian explorers who would come to shape
the Western Hemisphere as we know it today. In 1497, the Venetian
Giovanni Caboto, or John Cabot, sailed to Newfoundland and became
the first European to see the shores of New England. By 1502, the
Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci had deduced that these new
discoveries were part of one great continent. Within a few years,
that continent had been given his name--America. 1492: An Ongoing Voyage The exhibition focuses on the early Americas from the time of the
indigenous people of Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean
through the period of European contact, exploration, and settlement.
This exhibition explores several themes, including the pre-Columbian
cultures of Central America and the Caribbean as revealed in sculpture,
architecture, and language; encounters between Europeans and the
indigenous peoples; the growth of European Florida; and piracy and
trade in the American Atlantic. The western dream of individual freedom and limitless expansion
has shaped American cultural values and political ideologies. Literature,
theater, and film have retraced the legends of the West and reinterpreted
its heroes for modern audiences. The lure of the West began with
the earliest European voyages across the Atlantic, but it was not
until the late eighteenth century that a distinctively American
West emerged. In the great expanse of territory stretching from
the Appalachians to the Mississippi, circumstance and opportunity
created an arena of complex struggles that prefigured other western
eras that followed. Parallel Histories: Spain, the United States, and the American
Frontier explores the history of the Spanish presence in North America
from the first voyage of Columbus in 1492 to the continued exploration
and settlement of California and the American Southwest in the early
19th century. The bilingual collection includes rare books, maps,
government reports, and other materials from the collections of
the National Library of Spain, the Biblioteca Colombina y Capitular
of Seville, and the Library of Congress. Most of the documents are
from the 15th through early 19th centuries. Teacher Guide Images of Christopher Columbus and His Voyages In 1493, Columbus wrote a brief report concerning his discoveries
of "Islands of India beyond the Ganges." It was intended
as a public notice to announce his discoveries and to garner support
for another voyage. Christopher Columbus Saw Land! Exploration and Explorers France in America/France en Amérique is a bilingual digital
library made available by the Library of Congress in partnership
with the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The collection
contains complete books, maps, prints, and other documents from
the partner libraries illuminating the role France played in the
exploration and settlement of the continent, the French and Indian
War, and the American Revolution. Additional documents exploring
economic, scientific, literary, and artistic exchanges between the
two nations in the course of the nineteenth century. The late fifteenth-century landfall by Christopher Columbus on
the island of Guanahani, in the Bahamas, forced open the gates to
a whole new world for the Spanish and other European explorers.
America, as it came to be called, became the destination for numerous
expeditions and adventures from 1492 onward. In October 1492 Christopher Columbus and his crew reached the Bahamas.
From that time forward Europeans and the people living in the continents
of the Western Hemisphere now known to us as the Americas, North
and South, came into permanent contact. That encounter took numerous
forms, generating responses from various sides. These reactions
depended as much on the circumstances and world view of indigenous
groups as they did on European objectives and values. Fill Up the Canvas What motivated thousands of people to journey west during the 1800s? Westward by Sea: A Maritime Perspective on American Expansion,
1820-1890, contains a variety of materials from the Mystic Seaport
archival collection, including logbooks, diaries, letters, business
papers, and published narratives of nineteenth-century voyages as
well as photographs, sketches, maps, and nautical charts. They provide
an excellent resource for studying maritime exploration, missionary
activity in the Pacific, the Gold Rush, the whaling industry, and
the histories of California, Hawaii, and Texas. A sailor on board the Pinta sighted land early in the morning of
October 12, 1492, and a new era of European exploration and expansion
began. The next day, the 90 crew members of Christopher Columbus's
three-ship fleet ventured onto the Bahamian island of Guanahaní,
ending a voyage begun nearly ten weeks earlier in Palos, Spain. Universalis cosmographia secundum Ptholomaei traditionem et Americi
Vespucii alioru[m]que lustrationes. Columbus taking possession of the new country Christopher Columbus The landing of Columbus at San Salvador, October 12, 1492
Christopher Columbus: Discoverer of America 1492 Christophe Colomb a la cour d'Isabelle II / Pairs, Vve. Turgis
; Lith. de Turgis.
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