RPTM Podcast Episode Five: Muslims, the French, Cortes, and Filipinos

Pay attention: this next part is crucial for you to understand the nuances of history. This is most likely my most important rule. Ultimately, I tell my students at the beginning of every semester. Rule Number Five of History is History is not monolithic. It is told through countless eyes and countless lenses. Unfortunately, this is the first thing to go when organizing historical thoughts. When building a timeline of events, the historian needs to separate the vital and essential from the trivial and mundane. However, this becomes challenging to do objectively. Like it or not, our worldview decides what is important to us. And our world view is formed from our backgrounds and our values. Knowing this, we tend to have our history spoon-fed to us from a specific demographic, generally upper-class white Christian men. Before you cancel me, I need to stress that this not an attack, but merely an observation. Those stories are important. That history must be preserved and retold. But what about other demographics? When drudging through American history, we spend much of our time dissecting the slave economy of the 19th century, the butchering and abuses against the native Americans, and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Again, all pivotal moments in time and critical for understanding our past. But there is so much more out there that needs to be addressed.

Asian American history and Latino history are, for the most part, nonexistent. Gay and Trans accounts are forgotten. Who was the first Muslim in the new world? The first Asians? Heck, what about the sports and games people played in the 17th century? All these concepts and stories beg to be addressed. I knew that publishers are limited to what they can include, especially at the hands of special interest groups and federal mandates in a textbook format. I am not tethered to that. This podcast can be whatever we shaped it into. It can grow and breathe as needed. And it will speak for the voiceless. 

Man…. Goosebumps! I sound way cooler than I actually am.

HIGHLIGHTS

• One of the first Arabs in the Americas may have been Moroccan slave Al-Zammouri, brought in 1528. 
• Due to the lack of women, intermarriages between French and Indians were frequent, giving rise to the Métis people. 
• Hernán Cortés is a controversial figure, especially in Mexico, because of his treatment of natives. Unfortunately, Cortés was not unique in his treatment and mindset when it came to the indigenous people. 
• St. Augustine  is the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the United States.
• The 1587 event of the landing of the Luzonians marks the first documented instance of Asians in California, or anywhere in the United States, North America, and the Americas.​

​CHAPTERS
0:00 Start
0:37 Intro
3:16 Al Zammouri
9:36 French Colonization Part One
14:31 Hernan Cortes
22:22 St. Augustine
27:27 Luzonians
35:00 Outro

RESOURCES:
Estevanico
French colonization of the Americas
Hernán Cortés: Conqueror of the Aztecs
St. Augustine, Florida
St. Augustine
Landing of the first Filipinos

Episode 4

RPTM Podcast

Episode 6