For more than four decades, American Heritage's reputation for engaging, impeccably researched historical journalism has made it one of the most respected names in American story-telling. In that same tradition of quality comes the American Heritage History of the United States, an entirely new work of history which is a worthy successor to the American Heritage New History of the Civil War and the American Heritage New History of World War II. In this rich and inspiring book, acclaimed historian Douglas Brinkley takes us on the incredible journey of the United States--a nation formed from a vast wilderness of mountains and streams on whose fringes a few small colonies made a bold cast at freedom, then burgeoned into an expanding democracy, and ultimately flourished as a world power. From the first primitive maps outlining a New World to the faded daguerreotypes of young men in uniforms standing beside Confederate flags; to pictures of hopeful immigrant families arriving at Ellis Island; to the stirring photographs of Civil Rights marchers; to the terrible images of the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing--the history of America offers a stunning album of people and events.

Written By: Robert McNamara
Historian Douglas Brinkley freely admits that this huge new book is not a "comprehensive history of our nation's origins and developments," but is intended to be "an illustrated volume meant to pique the general reader's interest in U.S. history." Brinkley is perhaps being too modest: his text, though necessarily fast-paced, does provide a substantial overview history of the United States.

Brinkley's narrative begins in a Europe thrashing with political and religious turmoil, follows the tumult to the New World, and ends 600 pages later with a comparison of the Internet to Thomas Jefferson's ideal of a "truly open marketplace of ideas." The writing is clear and concise throughout, and major political and economic themes of American history are essentially divided into the book's 22 chapters. Obviously, much material had to be omitted, but Brinkley's editorial decisions on what deserved inclusion are sound. He has a genuine feel for both what is important and how to present it in a lively manner.

The hundreds of illustrations, including maps, paintings, and photographs, are central to the concept of the book, and caption writer Julie Fenster's contributions (some of which might be termed "mini-essays") can't be overlooked. A potential flaw in books of this sort is that overly flashy design can impede the narrative, but the American Heritage History of the United States succeeds admirably in being both attractive and functional in its execution.




CHAPTER 1: SETTING THE STAGE

"Your Highnesses have an Other World here, by which our holy faith can be so greatly advanced and from which such great wealth can be drawn." So wrote Christopher Columbus to the king and queen of Spain on October 18, 1498, after his third voyage across the ocean. Yet he didn't have any real idea of what he had found and what he had started -- how could he have? Who could have imagined the vast lands that stretched thousands of miles beyond anything he had seen, the tens of millions of people living there, and the death and devastation he and his successors had already begun to bring upon them, and the future empires that would grow up on the lands they inhabited? Who, above all, could have imagined the new kind of civilization, the world's first experimental civilization, that centuries later would arise as the United States of America?

Columbus went to his grave in 1506 still boasting that he had discovered a new route to Asia; nonetheless, Columbus's tales of the strange lands he visited and the riches they held captivated Europeans, just as the tales of Marco Polo and the legendary explorer Prester John had captivated them centuries earlier. The human spirit had begun to stir in Western Europe in the late fifteenth century, and Europeans had begun to reach outward -- down and around the coast of Africa, far to the distant East, and into the unknown Atlantic. After the long, dull stasis of the Dark and Middle Ages from the fifth through the fourteenth centuries, when religious philistinism held sway, and after the bubonic plague had wiped out nearly one-third the population of Europe between 1348 and 1350, people in every country, at every level of society, and in every realm of human endeavor were eager for change. This restlessness eventually spawned economic growth, a revival of the arts, and a passion for nation building. For a time, however, the mere suggestions of what later would be dubbed the commercial revolution, the Renaissance, and the Reformation disturbed Europe's intellectuals, divided the powerful Church, and agitated everyone from king to peasant with the threat of transforming the most basic ways life was lived. Many felt the winds of change, but few agreed as to their meaning. Some observers thought any change presaged the end of European civilization through invasions by groups such as the Turks, while others feared the growing anti-Church sentiments would lead to bloody conflicts that even the might of the pope could not quell.

Amid the confusion, a small handful of Europeans, particularly in port cities, saw more reason for hope than for fear. These early capitalists believed their continent's future depended on its commercial ties to other lands in every direction: Asia, Africa, and whatever lay beyond the known world. Such forward thinking was, however, a minority view. Most Europeans looked at the changing society as they had always regarded everything: as necessarily focused around the Mediterranean Sea that had been the center of Western civilization for all five thousand years of its existence.

At the time, it was hard to imagine political and social power developing anywhere else. After all, since the early medieval era eight centuries earlier, western Europe had been divided between the world's two mightiest entities -- the nobility and the papacy -- which had struggled for power with one another far more often than they had joined together against common foes. Victory usually had gone to Rome, but that began to change toward the end of the fifteenth century. The Church had been weakened by internal corruption and schisms, allowing kings across the Continent to seize power from local bishops and then to flout papal policies and directives. Throughout Europe, monarchs ruled over nation-states that were becoming ever more secular and their populations ever more worldly and less pious (not to mention ever more interested in the kingdoms on earth than in the promised one of heaven).

Nowhere was this transformation more apparent than in Britain, which had been ripped apart over the preceding two hundred years by court intrigues, troubles with Rome, a bloody Hundred Years' War with France, and a struggle for the throne between the houses of Lancaster and York known as the Wars of the Roses. It wasn't until 1485 that Britain's agony appeared to end with the coronation of Henry VII, who then spent ten years quashing coup attempts before Charles VIII of France gave him the support he needed to sustain his rule. At the time, the resulting rapprochement between Britain and France seemed the most important event of 1492.

After a period of political turmoil of its own, France was united and free from foreign influence, which allowed Charles VIII to turn to his fondest project: the conquest of Italy, the epicenter of civilization since before the Christian era that had made Rome so dominant and, over the centuries, so domineering.

By the late fifteenth century, however, Italy comprised a patchwork of monarchies, republics, and factional papal states, none of which trusted any of the others. It was a disunion that seemed to augur well for the French and badly for the Italians. The particularly ineffectual papacy of Innocent VIII allowed the election of Rodrigo Borgia, who succeeded him in 1492 as Pope Alexander VI and devoted his reign to aggrandizing his notorious family, a decadent lot given to unsavory political machinations, sexual escapades, and the fairly indiscriminate use of poison rings. Italy, for so long the heart and soul of Europe, was insular, rudderless, and, as a consequence, threatened from all sides.

The greatest menace came from the East in the form of the Turks, who deemed the country a great prize. Sultan Bayezid II wanted to follow in the footsteps of his father, Mehmed II, who had conquered Constantinople and expanded the Ottoman Empire to the Balkans, Greece, and Bosnia -- in the process cutting Western trade and other contacts with the Byzantine Empire that then dominated southeastern Europe. But Italy was eyed just as hungrily from the West by Spain's shrewd Kind Ferdinand II. Although in the mid-fifteenth century his nation was splintered by geography, religion, culture, and language -- Catalan being spoken in the east and northeast, Castilian in the north and central regions, Arabic in the far south, and various Hebrew dialects across the entire Iberian Peninsula -- the calculating king had plans. Ferdinand had assumed power in Aragon in 1479, but it was his strategic marriage to Queen Isabella of Castile, who had come to him for help, that united their two small nation-states into what would become Spain, a sovereign power strong enough to drive back incursions from Portugal, the Holy Roman Empire, and, in 1492, expel both the Moors (Muslims whose ancestors had invaded Spain in the eighth century) from Granada and the Jews from across the nascent nation.

That momentous year, 1492, thus marked any number of turning points for Europe. To observers of the time, it looked as though the future hinged on political maneuvers in northern Italy, from which either France or the Holy Roman Empire would likely emerge as the Continent's dominant power. Britain and Spain, both led by strong kings and graced with abundant access to the seas, seemed likely to prosper, but their distance from the supposed center of power made them unlikely to prevail. In 1492, Europe's heart remained in Rome, and its major arteries still wound along the Mediterranean Sea. Populations grew across western Europe, thus creating a need for trade routes over land as well as over the seas.

The economic boom in fifteenth-century Europe was paced by a sharp upturn in commerce growing out of the rise of population and migration. Local markets in more communities teemed with business and multiplied in both size and number. The most dramatic expansion occurred in the long crucial seaports where Europe made contact with the rest of the world, but cities throughout the Continent's interior also blossomed as overland trade was conducted over greater distances rarely traversed since the fall of the Roman Empire.

The inadequacy of fifteenth-century Europe's road systems quickly grew into a major problem as the volume of trade expanded along with the population. Most goods sent overland were toted by pack animals or in wheeled carts on rutted dirt paths. Aside from a few thoroughfares in Lombardy that were kept open year-round, most roads were unpaved, neglected, and impassable in poor weather. Even the marvelous road system that was perhaps the greatest legacy of the Roman Empire had fallen into near irretrievable disrepair during the Middle Ages, when most Europeans simply had no need of roads. During that timid era, the vast majority of people seldom ventured more than a few miles from the small hamlets in which they had been born, raised, and married, and where they lived and died, nestled among generations of their families and friends.

When the occasional need or longing for travel did arise, therefore, sea routes usually proved easier, faster, and a lot cheaper. For much of the fifteenth century, vessels from Genoa and Florence engaged in regular trade at ports throughout the Hanseatic League, a loose confederation of northern European cities principally along the coasts of the Baltic Sea. Although these sea routes covered longer distances, prices for shipping goods averaged less than one-fiftieth what land transport cost. In fact, the "round ships" used in Mediterranean trade, which could carry nearly eight hundred tons of cargo apiece, were not only faster but in most cases more reliable than the horse-and mule-drawn wagons and carriages that were their overland counterparts.

The round ships were also noticeably lucrative, so it wasn't long before the financial attractions of sea trading inspired technological innovations aimed at making it even more profitable. The fifteenth century witnessed great advances in shipbuilding techniques and the engineering of navigational equipment such as the compass and astrolabe, the precursor to the sextant. Accurate maps, called portolani, began to be produced in Spain and northern Italy and found their way across the Continent. These maps showed landforms, winds, currents, and tides, although not latitude nor longitude. Ship captains, therefore, needed great skill in reading winds and tides if they hoped to sail out of sight of land for any length of time -- not that many were so bold. Although men (and the occasional woman) of means could and did travel from place to place across Europe to study, conduct business, or pursue various pilgrimages, voyages beyond the Continent were rare.

But boundaries vex the human spirit, and, before long, visionaries and adventurers began looking for ways to broaden the world. These bold mariners ignored the daunting risks and opened the way to the forging not only of new nations but of a new civilization based on interdependence among states in every portion of the globe. It is little wonder that explorers' stories of discovery remain so enticing across the centuries.

In fact, it was the tales brought back from faraway lands by the first few individuals brave enough to have made the journeys that helped fuel the passion for unknown realms. Various popes, of course, had been sending emissaries to the Far East for hundreds of years; in the thirteenth century, one John of Plano Carpini had been dispatched to Asia as papal representative to the Mongol court of Genghis Khan at Karakorum in Central Asia and returned to write and speak widely of his experiences and discoveries. Another envoy sent by Louis IX of France, William de Rubruquis, traveled to the northwestern Himalayas, to Karakorum, and to other Eastern cities, then fascinated scholars with his writings on the Orient. But history depends as much upon who reads it as who writes it, and it was Marco Polo who best knew his audience and how to play to their interests.

Polo and some of his family had left Constantinople for China in 1260, and eleven years later he embarked on his monumental overland journey through Asia. It was not until 1298, while in a Genoese prison after being captured in a sea battle, that Polo dictated his epochal Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian, Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East. Like Plano Carpini and William de Rubruquis, Polo wrote of the highly sophisticated societies he had encountered in the Orient, but, unlike them, he did not write for scholars. At a time when commerce was growing exponentially in both volume and importance, Marco Polo found a much larger readership among the trading classes, who took a hearty self-interest in his descriptions of "valuable and odorous woods, the gold and gems, and all manner of spices -- pepper white as snow, and also the black kind, in great quantities." In fact, Polo took pains to point out just how vast an opportunity for trade China represented, a notion that had immense appeal for the small European merchant class who had been frustrated for years by the Continent's interminable political conflicts.

Suddenly a new world beckoned, and a commercially promising one at that. Why stop there? For several centuries Europeans had been hearing tales of Prester John, a Catholic priest who supposedly had once held dominion over a vast and rich land "to the East." Both William de Rubruquis and Marco Polo wrote of the mysterious kingdom, the latter making several references to its "storehouses of wealth." At first, it was thought that Prester John's realm must have been in Asia, but by the mid-fifteenth century most Europeans who took an interest in the matter believed this precursor of El Dorado had been located somewhere on the east coast of Africa.

Both opinions proved right, if not in the details. Asia and Africa each had a great deal to offer Europe, and contacts among the three continents had grown steadily during the preceding hundred years. By the beginning of the fifteenth century, European merchants were routinely sending ships to ports on the Mediterranean's eastern rim, where caravans were organized to traverse Asia Minor with cargoes destined for trading centers in India and China. These overland journeys were costly, but their rewards were potentially far greater. At a time when necessities such as rye, wheat, and barley sold for less than four Prussian marks a ton, and salt for six and olives for thirty, the rare Eastern spice saffron garnered more than 3,000 marks a ton, and the less exotic ginger 500. Even lowly pepper, a leading trade commodity, commanded considerably more than 300 marks a ton. These exorbitant prices resulted from the simple law of supply and demand, in this case the latter coming from wealthy Europeans who deemed Eastern condiments not only delicious but indicative of the social status of those who could afford them. As a consequence, trade grew more lucrative than ever: if an Italian merchant dispatched ten ships to the East and only one returned, his net profits could still exceed 5,000 percent.

At first, Italy's city-states enjoyed the lion's share of this remunerative Mediterranean trade. Before long, however, both Italy and Mediterranean commerce had fallen into decline. The friendly relations and active commerce Venice and Florence had maintained with the Byzantine Empire came to naught when the Ottoman Turks destroyed the empire in 1453. Pope Nicholas V called for a crusade to drive the invaders from Constantinople, but Rome's previously invincible military forces failed, as did a subsequent attempt to convert the Turks to Christianity. These events precipitated the falloff in Mediterranean commerce -- and a consequent rise in the prices of Eastern goods, which made transporting them all the more profitable. The resulting vigorous interest in trade demanded that new routes and methods be found for obtaining products from the East.

Nicholas's failure to take Constantinople tolled the death knell for the Catholic Church's dominance in European affairs. After this proof of papal fallibility, Italy's city-states petered out, and the Continent's economic center began to shift from the Mediterranean to the eastern Atlantic, where nations favored with coasts to the north and west continued to gain commercial -- and thus political -- significance. A new age was dawning, even if it was apparently evident to only a few forward thinkers in an obscure corner of Europe.

Opening to the East

A small, poor seafaring nation that so far had not figured much in European affairs, Portugal was destined to assume importance, if briefly, by dint of its fortunate location on the southeastern edge of the Continent on the Iberian Peninsula between Spain and the Atlantic Ocean and just northwest of the Strait of Gibraltar, the narrowest gap separating Europe and Africa. What's more, while Britain and the Holy Roman Empire had occupied themselves with fighting over Italy and various lingering animosities, Portugal had remained at a distance that allowed for taking advantage of new opportunities, which a succession of strong leaders fully intended to do. A young nation in spirit as well as in fact, Portugal had not united into a sovereign state until the thirteenth century and did not become a European power until the late fourteenth century, when its King John I drove out the Castilians and formed an alliance with Britain against further Spanish meddling. Acknowledging defeat in 1411, Castile signed a peace treaty with King John that allowed the Portuguese monarch to concentrate on the seas. His successors Edward and Alfonso followed suit throughout the fifteenth century, slowly but surely adding to Portugal's financial, and thus political, power. But it was King John's third son and Kind Edward's younger brother, Prince Henry, who put Portugal on top of the map of Europe.

Henry the Navigator, as he came to be called, was a man of eclectic interests. As a devout Christian, he had striven to drive the Moors from Europe and then to hound them across North Africa. As a scion of the Portuguese royal family, he worked to advance the causes of his nation and its monarchy. As a would-be Renaissance man, he pursued knowledge for its own sake. As a shrewd businessman, he encouraged promising new trade efforts. And as a believer in a horoscope that forecast greatness for both himself and his country, Henry went out of his way to prove the prophecy true.

His father, King John, had read Marco Polo's book and had been captivated by the tales of Prester John. As a result, the king ordered the siege and capture of Ceuta, an important Moroccan port he intended to be Portugal's first step toward the East and its abundant wealth. So, in 1415, the twenty-one-year-old Prince Henry obeyed his father and took part in the conquest of Ceuta, where he was then ordered to remain as governor -- and explorer. While taking stock of the region, Henry met scholars and traders from all over North Africa, which fueled a fascination with African affairs that soon eclipsed his interest in European matters. He dreamed of Portuguese ships sailing down the west coast of Africa to the kingdom of Prester John and of an alliance with fellow Christians to encircle the Muslim lands to the north and thereby win a continent for Portugal and the Church. Naturally, the enormous wealth to be gained from such an enterprise did not escape the prince's notice.

At first Henry found it hard to persuade Portuguese sailors to embark on the African voyages; in fact, it wasn't until 1434 that one Gil Eanes reached Cape Bojador in northwest Africa, the farthest south any European had ever traveled. Eanes found no gold and little worth trading for, but not everyone was deterred by his report. In 1441, Antão Gon\a231alves and Nuno Tristão captured twelve Africans from the Cape Bojador area, bound them in slavery, and brought them back to Portugal, thus beginning one of the most shameful episodes in the history of civilization: the African slave trade.

Sadly, money has often vanquished morality in human history, and the voyages went on, allowing Portugal to establish a string of trading posts along Africa's northwest coast from which to import gold, spices, and slaves. When Henry the Navigator died in 1460, others took up his work, pushing farther south and initiating trade with more and more African nations, all with the blessing of Portugal's succeeding monarchs. Then, in 1482, Diogo Cam discovered the Congo River, which he believed to be a sea route to the Indies -- the fount of so many legends of gold and dreams of riches -- loosely defined as China, Japan, the Spice Islands, and everything else between Thailand and India. If he was proved right and Portugal managed to gain control of the Congo, Cam knew that his nation could well become economic master not just of Europe but of the world.

Portugal designed a three-pronged drive to the East and executed it throughout the next decade. As Diogo Cam set sail up the Congo, King John II sent explorers across the Mediterranean and south along the African coast, all in search of the treasures of the Orient. In 1493, an expedition returning from India's Malabar Coast reached the eastern coast of Africa, where the wealth of the Ethiopian court dazzled the Portuguese visitors: here indeed was the fabled land of Prester John, even if he did turn out to be an Abyssinian chieftain.

It didn't matter. An expedition headed by Bartolomeu Dias reached the Cape of Good Hope in 1488 and sent word back to Lisbon that Portugal had discovered a new passage to the Indies. King John was not all that impressed; he remained convinced that the best current routes lay through the Mediterranean and that the most promising one for the future would be found in crossing the Congo. When King Manuel I took the throne in 1495, however, he turned to Dias's achievement to fulfill his hope of establishing relations with the nations of the Orient. In 1497, the new king launched an expedition south to the Indies headed by his newly minted ambassador Vasco da Gama, who was charged with formulating Portugal's "Oriental policy."

Da Gama's four small ships rounded the cape and then sailed north, hugging the coast to visit the ports and city-states along the way. In the process, the Portuguese captain encountered a number of African, Indian, and Muslim vessels, and in 1498 he picked up a Gujarati sailor sufficiently familiar with the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea to lead him on to the seaport of Calicut in southwestern India. Da Gama sailed back to Lisbon after a stay of three months in ships laden with gems and rare spices. The voyage had been an unqualified success: da Gama's exploits not only opened a new route to the Indies but put Portugal at the forefront of commerce between Europe and Africa. In fact, when talk of a "new world" arose in European capitals toward the end of the fifteenth century, the phrase referred not to the Americas but to Africa, which looked more commercially promising. Unfortunately, the Portuguese also imported African Muslim prisoners of war back to the Iberian Peninsula; the custom of black slavery had started to grow in Europe.

Opening to the West

The lure of Africa's rich trading opportunities might well have satisfied the expansionist interests of the rest of Europe had it not been for other explorers who were as daring and ambitious as da Gama, yet devoted to different directions. Had Christopher Columbus not forayed westward, for example, it is conceivable that Spain and then France, Britain, and the Netherlands would have sent their ships south instead, in search of new lands to trade with and perhaps colonize. The scarcity of harbors on Africa's west coast presented some difficulties in establishing settlements there, but the rewards looked to be substantial. Africa was wealthier in gold than the Americas and it was far more familiar. Thus, the first European transatlantic crossings take on added significance. Coming when they did, Columbus's voyages helped turn at least some of Europe's attention away from Africa and toward the New World.

Although every American schoolchild may know that in 1492 Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue, details about the explorer's life remain spotty. A few facts are reasonably certain: he was an experienced sea captain who had been born in Genoa around 1451. By 1476 he was in Lisbon, whence he sailed down the African coast as far south as Guinea. He visited Iceland in 1477, when he likely heard tales of early Viking forays to the West, such as the one that led Leif Eriksson to what Eriksson called Vinland, which may have been part of North America. Columbus also probably heard the stories the British had told for centuries about St. Brendan's Land, which supposedly had been settled by Irish monks in the sixth century.

Still, the great question remained: Just how far west were these lands? Columbus sought counsel from two sources. One was the scientist and theologian Cardinal d'Ailly, who believed that the earth was round, that its land mass exceeded the volume of its oceans, and that the sea to the west was relatively small. The other source was the Florentine astronomer and cartographer Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, who believed the Indies were just a short distance from Europe and with whom Columbus corresponded throughout the late 1470s. It proved not to matter that both were pretty much wrong.

In any case, once again commercial concerns determined the course of history. Recognizing that his Italian homeland had neither the interest nor the resources to undertake major expeditions into the unknown, in 1484 Columbus approached Portugal's King John II about funding a voyage all the way west. The king, however, was both preoccupied with internal affairs and convinced that the East had more to offer than anything to be found in the West. Undaunted, Columbus immediately set out for Spain when he heard that Queen Isabella, envious of Portuguese trade, wanted to gain a foothold in Asia for her nation.

At the time, most Spaniards seemed more concerned with ejecting the Moors than with exploring unknown territories, but their queen nevertheless proved willing to support an expedition. She and Columbus forged an agreement whereby he was named admiral and was granted the right to invest one-eighth of any profits gained -- with Isabella putting up one-fourth and the rest coming from Italian bankers. Queen Isabella also provided Columbus with three ships: the 60-ton Niña, the 55-ton Pinta, and the 120-ton Santa Maria. Today, many yachts larger than the Niña can be found docked in marinas on the Great Lakes, not to mention off the coasts -- and not one owner would be so foolhardy as to take such a little boat beyond sight of land.

In consideration of the danger, in addition to giving him a percentage of any profits resulting from the voyage, Isabella also stipulated that Columbus receive the right to govern any islands or mainlands he might discover. Although the expedition was ostensibly undertaken in the name of trade on the supposition that a clear route to the commerce-rich Indies lay to the west, the provision regarding discoveries has led some historians to conclude that Columbus may have believed the legends of a spectacularly wealthy land somewhere west of the known world.

On August 3, 1492, Christopher Columbus and his crew of eighty-seven pushed off from Palos, Spain, in their three ships and headed for the Canary Islands, where they picked up the trade winds and started sailing west. It wasn't exactly a smooth journey. Along the way, Columbus felt obliged to doctor his captain's logs and to lie to his men about the distances they had traversed, hoping to keep them focused fearlessly on their goal. After all, most of the sailors were relatively uneducated, still convinced that the Earth was flat and that at some point they would simply fall off the end of it. As Columbus wrote on October 10, 1492, as reported in his journal of the first voyage:

Here, the people could stand it no longer and complained of the long voyage; but the Admiral cheered them as best he could, holding out good hope of the advantages they would have. He added that it was useless to complain, he had come to [find] the Indies, and so had to continue it until he found them, with the help of Our Lord.

Two days later, on the morning of October 12, Columbus sighted the Bahamas and landed on Watling Island, which he named San Salvador. From there he sailed on to Cuba and then to Haiti, trading with the natives on each and even persuading some to take the voyage back to Europe with him. (Because he thought he had landed in the Indies, he called the native inhabitants Indians.) When Columbus returned to Spain in March 1493, his ships' logs, many of them falsified, created a wave of public interest. Queen Isabella learned of her explorer's exploits within a few weeks, even if the accounts were far from the truth. The admiral claimed to have reached China and Japan and to have found great wealth in them. Although he was clearly not only exaggerating but lying outright, people ate up his stories.

The Spaniards set about legalizing their claims in short order through negotiations with Portugal and Rome, and by May, Pope Alexander VI had granted Spain possession of all lands to the south and west not held by other Christians as of Christmas Day, 1492. Two years later Portugal accepted the Treaty of Tordesillas, a modified version of the papal contract under which a line of demarcation was set at the meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. East of this meridian all discoveries belonged to Portugal; west of it, all discoveries belonged to Spain. In effect, this meant that Spain was granted the Americas while Portugal got all of Africa plus the tip of Brazil -- which at the time looked like the better part of the bargain. Of course, this contract embraced only the Iberian parties interested; Britain and the Netherlands had yet to be heard from.

Copyright © 1998 Douglas Brinkley; American Heritage, a division of Forbes Inc.; and Byron Preiss Visual Publications, Inc.