New World

New World is what European explorers, journalists, and rulers first called the lands across the North Atlantic Ocean. In the Age of Discovery in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europe was the center of military power, culture, medicine, literature, and the arts. Rulers financed great exploration expeditions to find lands and resources previously unknown to them for advancing their wealth and domination.

Explorers thought they were destined for Asia and India, but the Western sea lanes they forged took them to lands uncharted by Europeans. The rich beauty, plethora of natural resources, rich soil for agriculture, forests and plains, fresh water rivers and lakes, wildlife, herds of animals, and the Indigenous populations astounded them. Their messages back home intrigued Europeans reading of their exploits. John Cabot called the territories off the Labrador coast "Newfoundland"; its name has remained the same ever since. The most lustful and articulate language to describe what the explorers found was to call it a New World. Eventually, the New World came to include parts of Canada, America, and the Caribbean Islands.

Brief History

One explorer’s saga relates that a thirteenth-century Scandinavian preceded Florentine, Spanish, and English explorers to the New World. Leif Eriksson described the New World full of "wheat fields and vines." Amerigo Vespucci followed Columbus and informed Europe that Columbus did not discover Asia, but a New World, the fourth part of the world, with another great ocean on its western shores. The New World eventually included the Caribbean Islands and Bermuda. Its size, majesty, and wealth made it a must for geographers to add the New World to Africa, Europe, and Asia.

Author and historian Stephen Greenblatt reports in his book Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World that explorers had the same sense of wonder about the peoples native to the New World. The wonders of this New World were described by explorer Vespucci in a widely published letter to European readers claiming the continent he found is "full of animals and more populous than our Europe, or Asia, or Africa, and even more temperate and pleasant than any other region known to us."

The New World inspired the imagination of Europeans enhancing their growing interests for exploration and their emotional and intellectual experiences. They wanted to learn much more. Commercial interests realized the potential for commerce and fortunes to be made from the natural resources that could be shipped to European factories for finished goods to then be sold to New World inhabitants.

Old World/New World concepts were not lost over the centuries on scientists and politicians. Archaeologists, anthropologists, botanists, and biologists focused their attentions on Europe and Africa until Europeans made contact with and settled in the New World. In the New World, they found species unknown to them, labeling their finds New World monkeys and primates (from Central and South America), in contrast to Old World monkeys and apes. New World vultures are close to, but distinct from, Old World vultures. Old World crops and animals included barley, lentils, oats, cattle, chickens, goats, and more. These were introduced later into the New World. New World items like maize, squash, tomato, peppers, turkey, and others made their way to European kitchens.

New World Today

New World exploration changed the dynamics of the religious world. Financial gain, power, and domination were important factors in European colonization of the New World. Distinctive divisions grew between Protestants and Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists, Dominicans and Franciscans in their quests for dominance and authority in the New World. But the New World also created opportunities for freedom, riches, and independence for hardy individuals. Nevertheless, holy wars were launched against Indigenous peoples unwilling to convert.

"New World" continued as a sobriquet for America despite the disasters European colonists wrought upon the environment, ecology, and Indigenous populations. Heavy costs to the land, animals, and people in the New World came with European exploration and exploitation. Explorers opened the box to pestilence, genocide, sexual exploitation, racial hatred, and enslavement of Indigenous populations and Africans from the earliest days.

Europeans living in the Old World under the yoke of kings and despots, burdened by religious oppression, discriminated against because of creed and national cultural labeling, held down by one’s social class and profession, could imagine freedom for their kind in the New World but not for Indigenous peoples or enslaved Africans.

The constitutional freedoms the Founding Fathers of the United States expressed in the nascent New World traversed across the North Atlantic Ocean, contributing to the French and Russian revolutions and their flames of liberty and fraternity. The New World established its mission as one of government responsibility for the safety, health, and welfare of the nation. It remains synonymous with reform of the social order and charity.

The New World was not solely a place of exploration, but also of discovery. It created a legacy of ascendancy and energy, a lasting, decisive, and permanent change for people.

Bibliography

Gerbi, Antonello, and Jeremy Moyle. Nature in the New World. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Oxford University Press, 2003 (reprint).

Herzog, Tamar. Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas. Harvard University Press, 2015.

Koven, Seth, and Sonya Michel. Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States. Routledge, 1993.

Mitchell, Jean Brown. "European Exploration." Encyclopedia Britannica, 13 Jan. 2025, www.britannica.com/topic/European-exploration/The-continental-interiors. Accessed 21 Mar. 2025.

Morgan, Jennifer L. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

Standard, David E. American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. Oxford University Press, 1992.

Vazquez, Carmen Inoa, and Rosa Maria Gil. The Maria Paradox: How Latinas Can Merge Old World Traditions with New World Self-Esteem. Open Road Integrated Media, 2014.

Weaver, Stewart A. Exploration: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2015.