The Mission (Introduction)

As we wrap up our unit on exploration, please watch the following presentation (which you can pause and resume) in preparation for our film viewing. Think carefully about all we have studied so far, including the role of the Church and Restall's "The Myth of Completion" and to what degree the film addresses those issues.

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The information provided makes sense as a whole, but the presentation of it can be unclear and confusing. While a map was visual information of the treaty, it really didn't explain what the treaty was, and there are no slides following it that explain the treaty. I think that a brief summary would've been more informative than a map.

Regarding the slides on the jesuits, the fact that they set up model communities in the new world would have been more helpful in the beginning of the section, as I had no idea what the Jesuits were even trying to do in the Americas. As other facts such as that they studied geography and natural history were informative, they didn't carry much weight; it was very out of context, as I still didn't know what the Jesuits were even trying to accomplish in the New World.

With the slide on the Indians, I think that explaining where they lived would be helpful, as well as explaining which years the 130 years of killing and enslavement were between, and who actually did this to them.

With the characters slides, I think that a phrase describing their role in the film would be more useful than the actor's name, as just the latter was given for some.

Finally, the memorable quotes section was very confusing, as I was not familiar with the character who was saying the quote, or to what the quotes were referring. I couldn't extract a whole lot of meaning from them.

However, I think that having an in class discussion during the presentation, like the most recent one, would solve the problem, as these points would be explained and question would be answered.

— Charlie K
Thanks, Charlie for being the lone commenter on this post!

The point of this "presentation" is to give you some familiarity with what you are going to see in the film (whet your appetite), but it was not intended to be exhaustive or final.

What was the purpose of the Jesuits in America? Based on what we've studied so far in this course, it should be fairly easy to guess.

Finally, I think we'll return to a few of these slides at the end of the film, especially the quote slides you mentioned.

— Spiro Bolos
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