Colonial identifications for native Americans in the Carolinas, 1540-1790

UNCW Author/Contributor (non-UNCW co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
David Lewington Crane (Creator)
Institution
The University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW )
Web Site: http://library.uncw.edu/
Advisor
Paul Townend

Abstract: In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries the powers of Europe competed in an imperial struggle for control of the Americas. While exploring the Americas, Europeans encountered people whose descendents had lived in the Americas for ten thousand years. The ways in which European colonists identified Native Americans varied between time and place, and depended on the role Native Americans played in their colonial projects. The Spanish Crown colonized the Caribbean, Central and South America, and the Gulf Coast of the United States. The English colonized parts of the Caribbean and the eastern seaboard of North America. The two nations each ventured into a region that came to be known as the Carolinas, between the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia and the Florida Peninsula. This thesis will argue that Spanish and English colonists in the Carolinas based their identifications for Native Americans on several factors. Their identifications for Native Americans reflected the usefulness of Native American polities to the Spanish and English in achieving their goals of colonization, their preconceptions about Native Americans they intended to colonize, and the nature of their relationships with Native American polities in the Carolinas.

Additional Information

Publication
Thesis
A Thesis Submitted to the University of North Carolina at Wilmington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree of Masters of Arts
Language: English
Date: 2009
Keywords
Indians of North America
Subjects
Indians of North America

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