Sound Bites -- Provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some with audio commentary)

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91) It is important to consider and weigh the amount of influence the Roman Catholic Church levied throughout the colonization of foreign lands.  Taking note of how powerful and influential a group, of any type or denomination, reminds us of how easily, quickly, and unknowingly we can be motivated or manipulated by governing forces.  It is necessary to question and weigh the motivations, good and bad, of our leaders to ensure that their powers do not go unchecked and remain for the good of all.  This term good has been manipulated into violent conversion tactics, and we must learn from the past to ensure that such means do not constitute a future barbaric end. (Melissa Morris, Lehigh University )

92) The truth claims of a historical narrative thus depend on the rhetorical power of narrative to adjust past events retrospectively to the ideological requirements of the present. (Gesa Mackenthun, Metaphors of Dispossession: American Beginnings and the Translation of Empire, 1492-1637.  Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1997: 27. )

93) Alexander's bulls resolved both legal problems raised by Columbus's voyage—the rights of Spain in relation to the barbarous peoples of the islands discovered and the rights of Spain in relation to Portugal—firmly in favor of the Spanish Crown. (Robert A. Williams, Jr.,  The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest.  New York: Oxford UP, 1990: 79. )

94) Innocent I (401–417) maintained that all "greater causes" (causae maiores) – a vague and almost infinitely expansible expression – should be reserved to the apostolic see.  "Whatever is done in the provinces," he laid down, "should not be taken as concluded until it has come to the knowledge of this see," adding that the pope's decisions affected "all churches of the world." (Geoffrey Barraclough, The Medieval Papacy.  London: Thames and Hudson, 1968:  24. )

95) Heer [Virginia] nature and liberty afford vs that freely which in England we want, or it costeth vs daily. (John Smith, qtd. in Bernard W. Sheehan, Savagism and Civility: Indians and Englishmen in Colonial Virginia.  Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980: 33. )

96) It might even be permissible to make alliances with the infidels in order to correct by pressure from without those unruly Christians who disturbed the right order in Europe. . . . Colonies are useful and possess nominal membership. (Michael Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages.  Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1963: 420. )

97) Could the Indians learn to live like Spaniards?  Was it possible to colonize the new lands peacefully with Spanish farmers?  Could the Indians be won over to Christianity by peaceful means alone?  Could the encomienda system, by which some Spaniards were supported by Indians, be abolished?  Some influential Spaniards believed strongly that the answers would all be "yes," but the experiments or quasi experiments failed to convince the crown and resulted in no fundamental change in royal policy.  Hotly debated at the time, they never really had a chance to succeed in the hostile environment of the New World.  The experiments [reducciones:  experiments in Indian freedom] appear to us today, from the vantage point of four hundred years, as tragic comedies enacted on doomed little islands around which the ocean of the conquest boiled and thundered until it overwhelmed them.  But it is an important fact that the experiments were conducted at all. (Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America.  Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1949: 2. )

98) [Green's argument begins with the] fundamental assumption that the lawfulness of an action must be determined according to the law in force at the time of the act, as opposed to the law in force when a subsequent dispute arises. (L.C. Green and Olive P. Dickason,  The Law of Nations and the New World.  Alberta: U of Alberta P, 1989:  viii. )

99) What is thought to have brought about a major rift is corn supply.  [...] Requests actually turned into demands the Indians could not meet unless they surrendered some of their precious seed corn or themselves went short. (David Beers Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584-1606.  Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1985: 214.)

100) The "Discourse" [Richard Hakluyt's]  was a tour de force of colonial promotion. (Susan Schmidt Horning, "The Power of Image: Promotional Literature and Its Changing Role in the Settlement of Early Carolina." North Carolina Historical Review 70.4 [1993]: 372.)