You're listening to an AirWave Media Podcast.

Ben Franklin's World is a production of Colonial Weemsburg Innovation Studios.

Hello and welcome to episode 358 of Ben Franklin's World.

The podcast dedicated to helping you learn more about how the people and events of our early American past

have shaped the present-day world we live in.

And I'm your host, Liz Covart.

When we think about early America, many of our minds generate maps of the eastern seaboard of North America.

And our eastern and middle-state school systems, this is how we're taught to think about early America as English and later British America.

But as we know from listening to this podcast and from our West Coast educations,

looking upon early America as a period that only took place on the eastern seaboard of North America,

paints an incomplete picture.

It conceals the existence of indigenous peoples who lived in North America for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans.

And it leads to the notion that the English were the first Europeans to establish colonies in North America.

But in reality, the English were actually late-comers to the continent.

Before the English came the French and the Dutch, and before the French and the Dutch came the Spanish.

Now Spain claimed almost the entirety of the North American continent as its territory,

and it established large colonial administrative units to govern that territory, at least on paper.

One administrative unit was new Spain, which included all lands north of the isthmus of Panama,

that continued north to about the Oregon border, and then east from California to Louisiana.

A second administrative unit that Spain created was called La Florida,

which on maps might encompass all lands east of Louisiana, inclusive of the Caribbean islands and north to Newfoundland.

But in practice, actually just encompassed the Florida Peninsula and the Gulf Coast region from Florida through Louisiana.

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