Uses the life of Christopher Columbus as a backdrop to present the history of people in America from the time the Native Americans arrived until 1585.

"In the early 1800s, President Thomas Jefferson chose Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the land beyond the western boundaries of the United States. Their goals: to search for the elusive Northwest Passage through North America, to open communications with Native American cultures, to claim and clarify new borders and territories, and to return with maps and detailed observations of the natural resources that they sighted along the way....

Professor Marshall C. Eakin of Vanderbilt University delivers twenty-four lectures examining both the unity and diversity in the early history of the Americas. He discusses how Christopher Columbus's voyage to the Americas in 1492 created a collision between three distinct peoples and cultures, European, African, and Native-American, and gave birth to the distinctive identity of the Americas today.