You're listening to an airwave media podcast.

Ben Franklin's world is The podcast dedicated to helping you 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 Kovart. 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 East from California to Louisiana.

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