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Colonial America Alan Taylor Summary

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Of both the reading assignments over the summer I enjoyed Colonial America by Alan Taylor, because of the writing structure, the footnotes/sources and the visual aids. This text is no more than what it is named for, the colonization of America. The book is a view of the events that led to colonization, and the effects said colonization had on the, now american, landscape. It is a clean a simple overview of the causes and effects of the colonization of America. The first thing that the author did that made this text standout was the structure he wrote it in. Most historical texts try to sound smart and use big words, or just give an overload of facts, but while this book does have many facts, making it a bit dry, they are spaced well enough …show more content…

(page 129 - 145) What makes that a good thing is, for example, you wanted to check the author’s facts, or read more in depth on a certain subject in the text just refer to the footnotes in the back of the text. This also gives the text a feeling of validity to it, or in other words looking at the footnotes makes you know the author actually did quite a bit of research prior to writing the book. This book is good for anyone who is interested in the topic of the colonization of America, because, say, for example, you were interested in the topic of New Spain you could read chapter 2, (pages 22 - 35) then refer to the chapter 2 footnotes, (pages 131 - 132) for more texts or readings that deal with the topic of New Spain. And there’s much more that goes beyond that. The author has a very thorough documentation in the back of the book he has almost twenty pages of sources cited in the back of the book. The author draws from many different sources so there is bound to be many diverse types of writing, some the reader may or may not like. But overall the author has a good number of sources all of which were reasonable to have in the book, and they all add extra information for those who are …show more content…

When author used aids he did not use them to pad out space, but to convey more information on his topic he was discussing. The map (page 2-3) is used to expose us to the difference of maps from Europe in the 1500’s to the maps of natives in the 1500’s. The natives had maps on a much smaller scale and those maps were not one-hundred percent correct geographically, whereas the maps from Europe were much grander, and geographically correct. The usage of visual aids helps you to grasp how Europeans and natives alike didn’t know how expansive their ‘New World’ was. The authors use of portraits can show you how the colonizers saw the natives as ‘savages’ and to them proper clothes were a sign of civilized people, the portrait of Pocahontas (page 57) shows her in much different clothing than that of what she would wear if she still was with her tribe. These portraits like the one of Theyanoguin (page 110) canbe used as an example of how different the natives looked from the colonizers and how strange they were. It can also show the cultural hybridity of the the native chief after he had made a visit to England to negotiate with Queen Anne. The author also includes one political cartoon depicting one of the rich family in Charleston during the 1800’s (page 88), this family most likely owned slaves, so to me this cartoon could be a attack on how most of the richest families in Charleston made

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