The marketing of products and ideas influence all people 's lives and has been a part of the human experience for thousands of years. This marketing can take on a number of different forms, but one of the most common forms is propaganda. According to Fleming, propaganda is the use of specific "techniques to influence thinking in whatever direction" the author wants and in most cases to "sell" an idea or product (3). Two of the earliest accounts of this popular marketing method, in Western Hemisphere, come for the letters and reports of both Christopher Columbus and John Smith. Both of which tried to marketed the newly discovered and settled North American continent. They did this by using propaganda to make many different aspects of this "New World" appealing to Europeans. These aspects included landscape, indigenous peoples, and who was meant to settle this "New World".
Both Columbus and Smith present very different descriptions of the New World 's landscape. This was most likely due to the fact that they were describing two completely different sections of the Western Hemisphere. For Columbus, this section was not only the tropical based Island of Hispaniola, but also the Islands that surround it. According to his description this location was a paradises of rivers, mountains, “large tracts of cultivatable land", trees and birds "of a thousand kinds" including nightingales and "there is honey" (Columbus, “Letter to Luis” 33). However, there are a number of problems with