What does John Kouwenhoven think we can learn from studying “things” instead of “words”? Do you think his argument makes sense? Looking at the portraits and objects from Puritan New England, would you say that Puritan populations were attached to worldly goods or dismissive of them? Why?

What are the literal and figurative threats to Winthrop’s community as expressed in “A Model of Christian Charity”? In what ways are they like and unlike those noted by Bradford? What sorts of language and images does Winthrop use in his journal to illustrate these threats?

How would you compare Bradford’s first sight of the continent with other first sightings we have seen, for example, in the accounts of Columbus and Vespucci?  What do the differences among them suggest about the viewers and their purposes in the Americas?  In the absence of cannibals and amazons, what are the primary symbolic and literal threats to Bradford’s colony and how do they change over time?

Would you say that Diaz del Castillo and de Cuneo demonstrate a similar or different ideas about the role of Spanish conquerors in the new world? To what extent are their understandings of conquest informed by particular understandings and ideals of heroic masculinity?

What do these writers see as the central differences between “Indians” and the “Spanish”? How are these differences imagined through sexual and other social practices? How would you characterize the ideas of European masculinity in some of these writings?

In many ways, Vespucci’s portrayal of the new world sounds like Columbus’s, even though they are writing about regions nowhere near each other. What sorts of conventions for representing the new world can we see repeated in these two letters? Why is it important that they are so similar? Are they different in any important ways?