■ COMPARATIVE QUESTIONS ■

1. Question

   What do these sources reveal about the challenges facing the various cultures that collided in the early period of American colonial settlement?

2. Question

   Compare European assessments of Africans and Native Americans. What differences do you see in how Europeans described these two different groups of people? How, for example, do the attitudes displayed by Columbus (Document 1-3), Thomas Morton (Document P1-3), and Father Louis Cellot (Document 2-6) toward Native Americans differ from those expressed about Africans by Thomas Phillips (Document P1-4) and Edmund White (Document 2-5)?

3. Question

   What might you rank as the most historically significant effect of the cultural exchange between Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans during the period from the mid-fifteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century? In answering this question, what definition of “historically significant” helps you to evaluate the evidence?

4. Question

   To what extent did the patterns of exchange between Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans shape the development of the North American colonies?