Beginnings To 1700

In “The Marvels of Spain and America” section of “Beginnings to 1700,” Wayne Franklin describes the remarkable changes that occurred to both Europe and the Americas as voyages began to take place. Americas like Europe:“complete with fortresses, churches, horses, new foods… and much else that Colón in 1493 could have found only in Europe” (Franklin 4). The natives and Europeans both used their own traditions and borrowed from each other to endure or outwit the opposing side, causing the earliest records of the Americas to be covered in violence (Franklin 5). Franklin also describes how the natives proved to be resourceful by resisting and exploiting the exotic cultures that the Europeans were inflicting on the landscape, even though the original
Europeans united by similar languages and culture while natives in North America “spoke hundreds of different languages belonging to entirely different linguistic families” with widely diverse cultures and religions (Franklin 7). Native Americans didn’t have a written alphabet so they had oral cultures: “relying on spoken words… and the memory of those words to preserve important cultural information” (Franklin 7). Experimentation was done to convey the qualities of oral stories with special typography. However, Franklin tells that other people fail to see how these alterations can “reproduce the effects of a living voice”, so they chose to translate into “formats that look like either poetry or prose” (8). In David Cusick’s “The Iroquois Creation Story”, the story itself shows how native oral stories lack the excitement when on paper as they would being told or performed: “the bad mind became so unmanly that he could not conduct his brother any more”
After England had established its colonies in America, it restricted the colonists’ use of the printing press very harshly: “where restrictive laws, the last of them repealed as late as 1693, had long confined printing to four locations: London, York, Oxford, and Cambridge” (Franklin 16). Awareness was also being brought to natives as Franklin includes, “There was a pair of texts , for instance, dealing with the Native Americans of New York that suggest how colonialism was altered by the drive toward cross-cultural interaction” (16). The printing press led to more developments in literature which continued into today’s form of English: “Such more mundane items contributed as well to the establishment of print culture and, ultimately, of literary traditions in British America” (Franklin 17). In Cotton Mather’s “The Wonders of the Invisible World”, the most productive author of his time, describes that he records the Salem witchcraft trials: “But I shall no longer detain my reader from his expected entertainment , in a brief account of the trials which have passed upon some of the malefactors lately executed at Salem”