Analyzing Bartolome de las Casas, The Destruction of the Indies

Description

Since it is impossible for anyone to travel back physically in time, historians have to  rely mainly on scattered and incomplete records and artifacts that have survived from the past—in other words, on primary sources, on materials produced in the period we intend to study.  Typical examples of widely used primary sources include census data, newspapers, letters, old films, physical artifacts such as articles of clothing or weapons, photographs, paintings, court records and other official documents, and so on.   They might also include memoirs, diaries, collections of correspondence, novels and poetry, written by those who lived through and bore witness to the events in question.  So in the absence of a time machine that would enable us to interview historical figures and view events with our own eyes, we have to fall back on the next best thing: we can interrogate historical documents that can serve as eye-witnesses and provide us with evidence to help us  answer the questions we pose about the past. Unfortunately, however, most primary sources provide us only with clues rather than direct , unambiguous answers.  And clues need to be decoded and interpreted.  Most primary sources were not of course produced for the purpose of providing future historians with objective information about the past.  They may have been created to sell products (in the case of advertisements); to persuade people to adopt a particular course of action; to justify and to excuse failure; to advance a particular political cause or agenda; to represent, in the case of artistic and literary productions, a particular vision of nature, society or human relationships.  Texts produced by early European explorers–even when they are sympathetic and even admiring of the  peoples and cultures they encounter–may reflect  cultural and religious biases that undermine their reliability as objective eyewitness accounts of non-European societies.  No single primary source can give us all the information we need about whatever aspect of the past we are studying. We therefore need to examine each primary source carefully and critically, to learn how to assess and extract the information it contains in order to answer our questions about the past.                                                            In analyzing a primary document, you can pose a number of general questions that may help you to reveal its meanings.  For example: 1)     What exactly are you looking at, what kind of a document is it (newspaper, novel, memoir, official record, etc.)? 2)     Who created it? 3)     Why did they create it? 4)     When did they create it? 5)     Who was the intended audience for this document?  6)     What does the document actually say, what is the plain surface meaning of it? 7)     What are the underlying assumptions and ideas behind the surface text?  What feelings or attitudes are revealed that may not be explicitly stated in the document, but may be communicated through tone, use of metaphors, figures of speech, emotionally charged words or images, etc.? 8)     What can we learn about the meaning of the document by thinking about how the ideas it contains are expressed?  What does the writing style or mode of expression tell us about the meaning of the document?   You also need to address more specific questions relating particularly to Las Casas’s text.  What does Las Casas reveal about the non-European cultures encountered by early Spanish explorers and conquistadors? And what is the impact of the latter upon the former?  What do they reveal about the motives, methods and consequences of European—and in this case specifically Spanish expansion? What do they  reveal about the nature and role of such factors as religion, trade and violence in early encounters between Europeans and indigenous peoples? What do they tell us about European attitudes towards the various peoples they encountered, as well as about any assumptions and prejudices that might have affected the accuracy of their observations?  Conversely, what do they tell us about the attitudes  of non-Europeans towards the Europeans invaders?   Assignment: Your main task is to analyze The Destruction of the Indies in terms of its usefulness and reliability as a primary sources for understanding the early history of Spanish expansion and conquest in the Western Hemisphere.  This will obviously involve some description of the contents of the text, but the bulk of your essay should be devoted to critical analysis.  You  should try, with the help of the above  questions (where they are relevant) to construct an argument  that relates these documents to the key historical topics that we are examining in this course.  In a short essay you obviously cannot discuss every historical issue that is raised by Las Casas’s account of early Spanish conquest and colonization.    So try to focus on those  aspects of  the text that in your opinion makes it especially valuable and illuminating for historical researchers interested in the early stages of European expansion and the first direct encounters between European and the indigenous inhabitants of the  “New World.” You  also need to focus on  any aspects of Las Casas’s account that makes it problematic, difficult to interpret and/or untrustworthy for historians; such as any explicit or implicit biases and motives, hidden agendas, the absence of reliable evidence, etc.  Finally you should conclude with an overall assessment of the Destruction of the Indies  as a source for  helping  you to understand the encounters and  interactions between Europeans and non-Europeans in the early stages of European expansion.    Your essay should be based mainly on your own analysis of Las Casas, rather than on ideas borrowed from secondary sources.   However, you are allowed to use secondary sources, including course readings, for general historical background information that you may need to help you gain a fuller understanding of Las Casas’s text.  Any secondary sources that you use must be fully documented with footnote citations, and a full bibliography must be provided.