How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe

Published October 15, 2024 at 2:30 PM MDT

History is full of white explorers “discovering” the Americas. But there are stories that flow the other way, too, of Indigenous people who also “discovered” a new land — Europe.

That gets at the premise of Caroline Dodds Pennock’s book, “On Savage Shores.” Christopher Columbus didn’t really discover the Americas; there were already plenty of people living there. But he wrote as if he’d indeed found a new world. And he and others brought people of the New World back to Europe — where they, too, according to Pennock, “discovered” a new country. Her book places at center stage the accounts of Indigenous Americans who came to Europe. Sometimes they came as enslaved people; sometimes they came voluntarily. Once there, they were met with people and cultures every bit as mysterious to them as theirs was to the Europeans. Caroline Dodds Pennock joins us to talk about how Indigenous Americans “discovered” a new land.

GUEST –

Caroline Dodds Pennock | Senior Lecturer in International History at the University of Sheffield. Her book is called “On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe” [Amazon|Bookshop].

Airdate: Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2024, at 9 a.m. and 7 p.m.