The Impact of the American Indian on American Culture

H E global expansion of European peoples, beginning in the fifteenth cen-T tury, initiated a series of events whose fateful character for modern history scarcely can be overestimated. Among other things, the historical setting was provided in which Europeans came into contact with the primitive cultures of the world, which led, in time, to the accumulation of the kind of empirical knowledge on which a science of man could be soundly based.