that's all for our nfl special. be sure to join us next week when we start introducing you to a new crop of high school athletes. for everyone here, i'm charles davis. we'll see you next time. (uplifting music) (upbeat music)

hello, and welcome to mosaic. our topic today is history. specifically the history of north america and the history of catholics in north america. our guest today is an eminent historian, the author of a dozen books, the latest, continental ambitions. catholics in north america. our guest is kevin starr. educated at st. ignatius high school in usf and has a doctorate from harvard and many other degrees, awards and honors and is currently a professor at the university of southern california. his new

book tells the stories of the first three centuries of the european encounter with north america from 1500 to 1800 and opens with this bold statement, there can be no understanding of american culture and history without the understanding of the role played by catholic peoples and the unfolding drama of the american experience. who are those peoples and what were those roles. please stay with us and after the break we will talk with professor starr and charted scratch the surface of his amazing fund of historical knowledge.

welcome back. our guest today is professor kevin starr. author of the book, continental ambitions. let me ask you this, about your title. you say there are many fine histories of catholics in america that have a regional and national perspective and you have taken the perspective of continental. why did you adopt this perspective and where does it take you? >> i adopted this perspective because it was adopted by two very strong catholic civilizations in the 14th, 15th and 16th century, new spain and

new friends. and i adopted it because i wanted to get that mixture of approaching the continent of north america in terms of exploration, settlement and in certain cases, conquest and terrible misbehavior toward the north americans. at the same time, the other side that was submerged and surfacing in the evangelization of coming into this new world, in north america and bringing catholic peoples there, encountering the indigenous people and trying to create some kind of catholic civilization in this magnificent game and unfolding continent. >> from your book i was reminded how huge north america is. from the bottom of panama to the top of greenland and from newfoundland east to the bering strait, that is north america.

>> and if you tilt your globe of the world, the bering strait is about 40 miles and on the other side, north america was only a 6 to 10 day voyage away. the settlement begins as early as that in the year roughly 1000. you have the north, from iceland establishing a colony from greenland that lasted to the middle of the 15th century. >> you say that in your book, 1000 year catholic history. >> yes and the colony in greenland that the north selected to become catholics as their own free will. they voted themselves in as catholics by the encouragement of leif erickson. and at that time they

had a bishop that arrived in the 1130s, they had a cathedral and a diocesan clergy. there was a 6 to 10 day voyage from finland, which they eventually got over to him may be as far south as the chesapeake bay, there was the north american continent beckoning them. they sailed off of it and they knew it was there to read >> your book is structured to tell three main stories, three different catholic nationalities coming in, the spanish, the french and the english. what were the ambitions of these three different groups? different, similar, do they compete? >> they began to meet in louisiana in the 18th century in the florida's. but in the first phase of it, they came up from

the caribbean. the caribbean is not technically north america but it is the staging for new spain. in the 1520s they come into florida, and he and three companions are shipwrecked on north america and walk all the way from florida to mexico city, a very long multiyear pilgrimage. then you move into st. augustine or st. augustine and in 60 -- 1565 you have a creation of the fully realized spanish-style city. then i move it over to new mexico with the great pueblo revolt, also the coming of the christians and i look at the conquest of acoma and i am using these ambitions,

they are not always noble ambitions, sometimes they are ambitions to clear way native americans who get in the way. but as time goes on there is a deepening of relationship to the continent itself, a deepening of relationship and to the indigenous people themselves and the possibilities of creating catholic place. >> the ambition to care for the natives whom they met, and what was striking in all of this is that the ambition to care for the native americans seems to have been ordered. >> as early as 1810, a dominican father rises up and it in front of the whole establishment says, god will punish us for what we are doing. we must change our

ways and make atonement. he was a planter and an adventurer and then became a priest and finally joined the dominicans because they were standing up for the rights of the native americans. >> he has left us a record of his encounter. >> i don't know how he did as much as he did. >> you used many of what they call primary sources. chronicles of those that were in the activities in the 16th and 17th century. so we feel as if we're really on the spot with these people and you developed a real understanding of the environment and show a lot of interesting characters. >> first of all, those documents are there. for instance, when acoma was massacred, there was a

hearing back in mexico city that said, why did this happen? in the case of new friends, the relations have over 75 reports that the judges were on missionaries. and i try to move through the interaction of biographies and people as individuals. the landscape and the catholic tradition coming to pull these things together into a new way of being an american and possibly also a new way of being an american catholic. >> we will come back after this break and talk more with professor kevin starr about his book, continental ambitions.

we are back with professor kevin starr talking about catholic history in america. the new world had new people, a wide

array of cultures and these three distinct catholic perspectives, can you compare how the three different sorties into this country dealt with the native people and how the native people dealt with them? maybe i can pose it this way, if you were made of america watching and approaching of a band of americans, who would you have liked to see coming? >> spaniards at the difficulty getting started. they came to enrich themselves. when columbus went back to spain after the first voyage, he brought 200 slaves and queen isabella said , bring them back. i sent you out there to evangelize these people, not enslave them. spain had to come to a realization that it was not behaving correctly and it took about 30

to 50 years to get going. the french had an instinct ability to deal diplomatically with native americans. the first tribes encountered along the maritime provinces are catholic to this day. and in the case of the huron's, you hold -- had a hold nation. they were devastated by the iroquois invasion. and the north american martyrs, all those jesuit martyrs. and the french understood it better, the spaniards also had trouble having women come over and over

time through christian marriage, catholic marriage, a new race was born, a mixed race. in new mexico by the time you reach them 1860s, you have people, and i look at the santos people as a way of looking into blending hispanic and indigenous forms. >> this is of interest, because the expeditions are mostly males and may include females but i believe there is difficulty getting women and wives into the colonies. how was that solved? >> by the time we developed the mexican people, like a colonel who brought them from tucson into california in the

mid-1770s. in the case of france there was initially an idea that we could educate the native americans and have a mixed race develop. and then later, the 14th and his minister set up a program, daughters of the king, as young women without dowries who would have had to otherwise have a cinderella life, they go out to canada and mary and within 100 years they have a great french-canadian people. as for catholics going into maryland, they intend to have men, women and children. >> i'm not aware if there was a high rate of intermarriage with various native american peoples or if there wasn't. >> the further you got out to the frontier, the more you had mixed populations grow. you also had mixed population in the maritime provinces. in the case

of new spain, that took about 100 years for fully new people to appear on the planet. in the case of maryland, they were anglo-americans from the beginning, men, women and children. >> the jesuits are a leading character in your book and i wanted to ask you in detail about them. they may be the most important characters of your book. >> they are very important along with the franciscans and recollect franciscans. but the jesuits are the ones who took catholicism into her bonia. then down the mississippi valley. you also have diocese and clergy teaching in seminaries and then you have the parish formed

mission society. in the case of new spain it is almost exclusively into skin from florida to texas, new mexico and arizona. arizona was an exception. father kino found some of your dell bok in 1700. and once the jesuits are suppressed, but is turned over to the franciscans and americans. >> and they play a critical role on the seaboard, don't they? >> absolutely. the priests and north america and then what becomes the united states, each isn't x jesuit because the society was suppressed in 1773. >> it was suppressed by? >> it was suppressed, basically

the supine that was the ruling families of france, spain and portugal. they felt that they became too powerful and threaten their own continental ambitions. i don't know if you saw the movie, the mission, where the jesuits organize the native americans to descend themselves. >> you give a detailed picture of jesuits protecting native americans. we will take a break and come back soon to talk with professor kevin starr.

hello, and welcome back to mosaic. we will turn to a more local angle of professor starr and californians and i'd like to ask about this. can i say you are the leading historian in california history. you spend a great deal of time describing how the spanish came from the south into california and also

occasionally the english filling up the coast and the russians were pushing down. in that long history, what were the spanish ambitions and how did california come to be? >> there is a remarkable partnership between father sarah and frei, he was the vice role of new spain and boca really alaska is named in his honor. any sponsors this in the coast, and a competition begins between the english, russian and americans for anchorage in alaska. and i also realized how late california was. if you have efforts to settle florida as early as the 1520s and we wait in california for the franciscans to come in 1769, why

this long delay? and i work with that in the book and i suggest also the fact that this is the first of the colonies to attain their own bishop and what is the present-day united states. the bishop is established in the early 1840s. he is not necessarily received that well by a lot of the californians because they know he will insist for justice for the native americans and there will be conflict. >> the discovery of san francisco bay was more or less accidental? >> yes. the point was that monterey bay would be the big bay because it was described as having more capacity than it really did. so in 1769, coming up on those hills, when they

look at that bay and begin to explore that, it is a moment of power like when the greeks see the sea. i have a beautiful painting in the book by arthur mathews, the great san francisco-based painter who was lent to me by the widow of a good friend of mine who owned that painting. >> i believe, as you remind us in your book, all of these people wanted to get to california because it is the gateway to the east. >> spaniards were obsessed by the pacific. when they first went into new mexico , he had rights to have ports on the pacific as if it was going to come down into northern new mexico. they believe there might be a river that would flow westward into the sea and even gave it a name. they wanted that

pacific connection because from the 1560s onward they were in contact with the philippines. the first voyage. can you imagine the heroic nature of that event, sailing in that connection and the one that would come each year in the japanese current and then sailed down to mexico. they had a sense of the unity way ahead of everybody else. >> let me ask you this, i can assure all the viewers that the book is wonderful to read. it has 16 or 18 gorgeous place, maps, and it is a pleasure. not a bad sentence. who is your audience for this book, what you hope it will accomplish and i think you said this is the first portion of a grand narrative. >> i wrote this book for my fellow catholics. that's why i was thrilled to have the book

with ignatius press. they are a leading catholic publisher in san francisco. my other books i did with oxford university press and random house and those that were aimed toward a different audience. i want my fellow catholics to have a sense that we were not just an immigrant church. indeed, we have played a foundational role in the euro-american encounter. that's number one. secondly, as you notice, i give myself a narrative and tell stories on how people encounter things as a look at the interaction of that person, event in the catholic implication. i got up to 1774. i and with john carroll. he was the first bishop, consecrated in 1790. i'm on the second volume now, halfway through and it

deals with the revolutionary war and the early republic. >> how many volumes do you project? >> i would say at my age i don't buy a green banana but maybe i'm sort of trying to deal with god saying, if you keep me on the planet i will keep writing these books. thank you so much for being here. again, can't initial -- continental ambitions, kevin starr, thank you for joining us on mosaic. i hope you will enjoy this book and its successors when they come out.

♪♪ the best summer plans come from the back seat. let's go camping! i want to see a dinosaur! let's rescue a puppy... a real one. let's go on a big family road trip! volvo plug-in hybrids. short trips on electric, longer trips on gas. mom, can we drive until we see the stars? the volvo xc60 and xc90 plug-in hybrid. visit your local volvo retailer to explore plug-in hybrid vehicles during the summer safely savings event. from