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The Spanish called Central America Tierra Firme in the 15th century - and it comprised the wealthiest region of the so-called Spanish Maine by the first twenty years of the 16th century since Hispaniola was experiencing a demographic collapse by the start of the century.   Later, parts of Central America and South America were called Veragua, Uraba, and Darien.  The harbor of Cartagena in modern Colombia was the best harbor on the Atlantic coast of the Americas, but the easiest to find for the conquistadores was probably the Gulf of Paria, in what is now modern Venezuela - where Trinidad and Tobago nearly touch South America.  Columbus called this Veragua.

https://www.patreon.com/AtlanticWorld

Jesse and Chris talk a lot about the Hapsburg Dynasty, especially Joana the Mad and Charles II.  It is pretty undeniable that because of madness and incest, the Spanish Hapsburgs were unable to keep the Spanish empire together in times of crisis.

Chris has a lot of interesting things to say about communism - why does communism have such a terrible track record of producing terrible rulers?  Perhaps dictatorship is not the correct answer to the problems that the poor face.

Towards the end of the interview, Jesse and Chris discuss more modern issues - like how dementia is a form of madness and one that clearly seems to have some impact on the upcoming US Presidential election. 

Jesse asks Chris for his professional advice on how we might best deal with contemporary issues like smart phone addiction and being locked down in Coronavirus quarantine without becoming mad ourselves.

https://www.amazon.com/How-Madness-Shaped-History-Narcissists-ebook/dp/B07QGPB8CN

Next, the episode moves on to the topic of Amerigo Vespucci, the infamous Italian liar for whom two continents are named.

Vicente Pinzon was the Spanish explorer who "discovered" Brazil in 1498, and his expedition, as well as those of Mendoza, and de Lepe. 

However, although the Spanish first sailed to Brazil it was claimed by the Portuguese after the voyage of Pedro Alvarez Cabral, on his way to India.  Cabral's fleet spent 9 days on the Brazilian coastline.  They built a cross.  It was very festive.

Portugal's king Dom Manuel sent a return fleet to Brazil the next year, commanded by Niccolo Coelho, who took some time mapping Brazil’s coastline – in all journeying something like 2,500 miles of coastline– and amongst his crew was a certain Amerigo Vespucci.

Spanish and Portuguese attempts at uncovering the straight to the Pacific are then discussed before getting to the successful attempt by Ferdinand Magellan. 

Next the episode turns to the French in Brazil and the resulting rivalry between Portugal and France.  It turns out that the French don't give a damn about the Treaty of Tordesillas.

Ultimately, the Portuguese begin sending fleets to Brazil to "pull out the weeds of French colonialism" and after the Portuguese burn a French fort the Portuguese decide to settle Brazil in order to keep their rivals out.  Thus begins the system of donatary captaincies in Brazil.

Finally, the episode ends with a discussion of "go-betweens" and how people like Amerigo Vespucci were more important for their depictions of America than for his claiming to be first to get there.  Europeans become obsessed with the freedoms with Brazilians possess and ultimately the Tupi-Guarani cannibals in Brazil are partly responsible for later episodes of European history such as the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and real revolutions like the Dutch Revolution and later American and French Revolutions. Wow, what a story!

Primary Sources

The Letters of Amerigo Vespucci and other documents illustrative of his career Kindle Edition

by Amerigo Vespucci (Author), Bartolomé de las Casas (Author), & 2 more

The Voyage of Pedro Álvares Cabral to Brazil and India: From Contemporary Documents and Narratives (Hakluyt Society, Second Series) 1st Edition

by William Brooks Greenlee (Editor)

Documents and Narratives Concerning the Discovery and Conquest of Latin America: The Histories of Brazil; Number Five, Volume II Paperback – February 4, 2016

by Pero de Magalhães (Author), John B. Stetson, Jr. (Contributor)

Secondary Sources

The European Discovery of America: Vol 2, The Southern Voyages A.D. 1492-1616

by Samuel Eliot Morison

A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250-1820

by John K. Thornton

Latin American Civilization: "History and Society, 1492 to the Present" 4th Edition

by Benjamin Keen (Editor)

Europe and the People Without History Second Edition

by Eric R. Wolf

Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, 1415-1580 (Europe and the World in the Age of Expansion, vol. I) Paperback – November 25, 1977

by Bailey W. Diffie and George D. Winius (Author)

Go-betweens and the Colonization of Brazil: 1500–1600 annotated edition

by Alida C. Metcalf  (Author)

Chapters of Brazil's Colonial History, 1500-1800 Revised Edition

by Capistrano de Abreu (Author), Arthur Brakel (Translator), Frernando A. Novais (Preface), Stuart Schwartz (Introduction)

Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe Kindle Edition

by Laurence Bergreen  (Author) 

The Brazil Reader: History, Culture, Politics (The Latin America Readers) Kindle Edition

by James N. Green (Editor),

Island on Fire

Bonus episodes? WOW!  Support the show on Patreon!

History of the Atlantic World Podcast Patreon  https://www.patreon.com/AtlanticWorld

Deep Into History Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/deep-into-history/id1440486315

History Required Discord Server https://discord.gg/a4gqnuG

A Difficult Truth news show  https://www.twitch.tv/adifficulttruth

Henry Charles Lea is a boring writer here is the proof https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kArOfpx-mAA&t=2s

Bibliography

https://www.amazon.com/Spanish-Inquisition-1478-1614-Anthology-Sources/dp/0872207943

https://www.amazon.com/Spanish-Inquisition-Historical-Revision/dp/0300078803

https://www.amazon.com/Forbidden-Passages-Moriscos-Colonial-Americas/dp/0812248244/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1AEDR762OPFZ2&dchild=1&keywords=forbidden+passages+muslims+and+moriscos&qid=1593139718&s=books&sprefix=forbidden+passages%2Cstripbooks%2C182&sr=1-1

https://www.amazon.com/Atlantic-Diasporas-Conversos-Crypto-Jews-Mercantilism/dp/0801890349/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=atlantic+diasporas&qid=1593139774&s=books&sr=1-1

https://www.amazon.com/Early-Modern-Spain-Documentary-History/dp/0812218450/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=early+modern+spain+cowans&qid=1593139811&s=books&sr=1-1

https://www.amazon.com/Jewish-Pirates-Caribbean-Swashbuckling-Freedom/dp/0767919521/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=jewish+pirates&qid=1593139827&s=books&sr=1-1

https://www.amazon.com/Other-1492-Jewish-Settlement-World/dp/0595152791/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=the+other+1492&qid=1593139847&s=books&sr=1-1

https://www.amazon.com/Bernard-Lewis/dp/0195102835/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=cultures+in+conflict&qid=1593139873&s=books&sr=1-4

https://www.amazon.com/History-Inquisition-Spain-Henry-Charles/dp/1345685807/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=lea+the+inquisition&qid=1593139898&s=books&sr=1-3

https://www.amazon.com/History-Inquisition-Middle-Ages-Complete-ebook/dp/B0082P1ZA4/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=lea+the+inquisition&qid=1593139926&s=books&sr=1-1

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Atlantic World Podcast, a member of the Big Heads Media Network.  This is part five of Conquest of the Americas.  I am your caffeinated host Jesse Wuest, thank you for listening.  Now, as you know Big Heads Media is sort of like a Netflix of Podcasts because what they do is sift through the great sandbox of the Internet to find the best podcasts and collect them for people who enjoy listening to them like you and me.  Needless to say that means we are part of an in awesome line-up of history podcasts.   One of them is Deep Into History which is an absolutely fantastic show:

I also want to tell y’all about a discord server that I’m involved with.  Discord is basically a pretty cool social media platform if you’re not aware and one group I’m a member of is called History Required.  History Required is a community of well, obviously history nerds like me, and they have really neat discussion points like Questions of the Day.  Anyway, I put a link to the community in the shownotes and so please check them out. And hey, you can find me there! WOW.

In addition, I also put a link up for a really cool political talk show that I’d like to promote on Twitch.TV.  Now I just recently learned about Twitch.tv myself but it’s basically a live Youtube.  Anyway, the show I like on Twitch.TV is called A Difficult Truth, which is basically a progressive talk show hosted by a dude who does news and politics and tries to bring the important issues to the front.  It airs 4 times a week, Monday-Thursday, What more can you ask for?  I put a link up for the show in the shownotes.

Alright folks thanks for supporting the people who support this show.  Awesome, now if you want to support the show directly -  First, please take a moment to share, subscribe, rate, and review the podcast and if possible, head on over to Patreon.com/AtlanticWorld and become a Patron of the show – by doing so you’ll be helping me to get research materials faster and that means you get quality episodes faster in return.  You can do so for as little as one dollar per month – a pittance in exchange for some great history.  In addition, you’ll get to listen an audio form of a new project I’m working on called The Man Who Killed George Washington, which I ultimately hope to publish as a graphic novel.  I’m uploading a preview for The Man Who Killed George Washington soon so you can check that out and see if you want to hear more.  At any rate, please check out the show notes for links to all of this great stuff and in addition I’ve also got the bibliography for this episode listed there if you want to read and learn more.

One might sum up the conquest of the Americas basically as an extension of the crusades and especially of the Reconquista of Spain and Portugal.  These nations were reconquered by Christian warriors slowly and hundreds of years after the start of the Reconquista, the final Muslim kingdom Grenada capitulated to Spain.  In that same year, 1492 – Christopher Columbus discovered the New World in the name of Ferdinand and Isabella, the most Catholic King and Queen of this most Catholic realm.   Now, last episode we learned that the conquest of the Americas wasn’t completely one-sided – while no American armies sailed to Europe to sack coastal villages – American ideas – and specifically, Brazilian ideas - certainly did cross the Atlantic and one migh...

http://acm5.blogs.rice.edu/

https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/mapping-atlantic-world-circa-1500#

https://rice.academia.edu/alidametcalf

Body Count Podcast  

Primary Sources

Letters from Hernán Cortés

The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Vol 1 (of 2)

The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Vol 2 (of 2)

The Conquistadors, Edited and translated by Patricia de Fuentes

Victors and Vanquished, Edited by Stuart B. Schwartz

The Broken Spears, Miguel Leon-Portilla

Secondary Sources

Latin American Civilization edited by Benjamin Keen

The History of Latin America, Marshall Eakin

Mexico and the Spanish Conquest, Ross Hassig

De Orbe Novo, Peter Martyr

The Course of Mexican History, Meyer, Sherman, Deeds

The European Discovery of America, Samuel Elliot Morrison

The Aztecs, Michael Smith

Conquest, Hugh Thomas

History of the Conquest of Mexico, William Prescott

Buy this book!  https://uncpress.org/book/9781469658995/blurring-the-lines-of-race-and-freedom/

From UNC Press Website: "The history of race in North America is still often conceived of in black and white terms. In this book, A. B. Wilkinson complicates that history by investigating how people of mixed African, European, and Native American heritage—commonly referred to as "Mulattoes," "Mustees," and "mixed bloods"—were integral to the construction of colonial racial ideologies. Thousands of mixed-heritage people appear in the records of English colonies, largely in the Chesapeake, Carolinas, and Caribbean, and this book provides a clear and compelling picture of their lives before the advent of the so-called one-drop rule. Wilkinson explores the ways mixed-heritage people viewed themselves and explains how they—along with their African and Indigenous American forebears—resisted the formation of a rigid racial order and fought for freedom in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century societies shaped by colonial labor and legal systems.

As contemporary U.S. society continues to grapple with institutional racism rooted in a settler colonial past, this book illuminates the earliest ideas of racial mixture in British America well before the founding of the United States."

Dr. Wilkinson Academic Bio:  https://www.unlv.edu/people/ab-wilkinson

The Apotheosis of Franklin https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/221528

Brunias' Linen Market https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/21113

From Johns Hopkins Press:

"Textiles are the books that the colony was not able to burn."—Asociación Femenina para el Desarrollo de Sacatepéquez (AFEDES)

A history of the book in the Americas, across deep time, would reveal the origins of a literary tradition woven rather than written. It is in what Danielle Skeehan calls material texts that a people's history and culture is preserved, in their embroidery, their needlework, and their woven cloth. In defining textiles as a form of cultural writing, The Fabric of Empire challenges long-held ideas about authorship, textuality, and the making of books.

It is impossible to separate text from textiles in the early modern Atlantic: novels, newspapers, broadsides, and pamphlets were printed on paper made from household rags. Yet the untethering of text from textile served a colonial agenda to define authorship as reflected in ink and paper and the pen as an instrument wielded by learned men and women. Skeehan explains that the colonial definition of the book, and what constituted writing and authorship, left colonial regimes blind to nonalphabetic forms of media that preserved cultural knowledge, history, and lived experience. This book shifts how we look at cultural objects such as books and fabric and provides a material and literary history of resistance among the globally dispossessed.

Each chapter examines the manufacture and global circulation of a particular type of cloth alongside the complex print networks that ensured the circulation of these textiles, promoted their production, petitioned for or served to curtail the rights of textile workers, facilitated the exchange of textiles for human lives, and were, in turn, printed and written on surfaces manufactured from broken-down linen and cotton fibers. Bringing together methods and materials traditionally belonging to literary studies, book history, and material culture studies, The Fabric of Empireprovides a new model for thinking about the different media, languages, literacies, and textualities in the early Atlantic world.

Buy Complexion of Empire

Dear World, Love History Podcast

Voice From the Underground Presents: Dig On America Podcast

Liam's Warrior Brigade

SOURCES

The Broken Spears
Victors and Vanquished
The Conquistadors
Yucatan Before and After the Conquest
Indian Conquistadors
Rereading the Conquest
The Nahuas After the Conquest
The War for Mexico's West
Nuno de Guzman and Panuco
The Golden Empire
The Conquest of Michoacan
The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico
Conquest of the Sierra
Provinces of Early Mexico
Strike Fear in the Land
Ambivalent Conquests
The Early History of Greater Mexico
Latin American Civilization
The History of Latin America
The Course of Mexican History
Mexico and the Spanish Conquest
History of the Conquest of Mexico

The Memoirs of the Conquistadhor Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Vol 2 (of 2)
Cortés, Hernán. Cartas y relaciones de Hernan Cortés al emperador Carlos V. Edited by Pascual de Gayangos
Warren, Fintan. “The Caravajal Visitation: First Spanish Survey of Michoacán.”
Sheptak, Russell N., and Rosemary A. Joyce. “Hybrid Cultures: the Visibility of the European Invasion of Caribbean Honduras in the Sixteenth Century.”
Wagner, Henry R. “Early Silver Mining in New Spain.”
Newson, Linda. “The Depopulation of Nicaragua in the Sixteenth Century
Fowler, William R., and Jeb J. Card. “Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in Early Colonial El Salvador.”
The Conquest of Michoacan: The Spanish Domination of the Tarascan Kingdom in Western Mexico, 1521-1530

BUY THIS BOOK

Quiz and Hers Podcast

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Sources
Latin American Civilization
One Vast Winter Count
Europe and the People without History
The Spanish Borderlands Frontier
The History of Latin America
The Martyrs of Florida
Imperial Spain's Failure to Colonize Southeast North America
Florida Indians and the Invasion from Europe
Empires of the Atlantic World
The Last Conquistador
The Spanish Frontier in North America
Narrative of the Coronado Expedition
Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun
The Southern Voyages
Chronicle of the Narvaez Expedition
Frontiers: A Short History of the American West

PATREON  Thank you for your support!