Chapter 1 - The Meeting of Cultures

1.       12,000 to 14,000 years ago migration from an ancient land bridge over the Bering Strait from Asia to North America.

2.       By as early as 9,000 B.C. migrations reached to the southern tip of South America.

 

A)      America Before Columbus

B)      The Civilization of the South

a.       In Peru, the Incas created a powerful empire of 6 million people. They developed a complex political system and a large network of paved roads.

b.       The Yucatán peninsula of Mexico, the Mayas built a sophisticated culture with a written language, a numerical system, an accurate calendar, and an advanced agricultural system.

c.       The Aztecs established a precarious rule over much of central and southern Mexico and built elaborate administrative, educational, and medical systems comparable to the most advanced in Europe at the time. The Aztecs also developed a harsh religion that required human sacrifice.

d.       The economies of these societies were based primarily on agriculture, but there were also substantial cities.

C)      The Civilizations of the North

a.       The people north of Mexico did not develop empires as large or political systems as elaborate as those of the Incas, Mayas, and Aztecs but they did build complex civilizations of great variety.

b.       Some societies that subsisted on hunting, gathering, fishing or some combination of the three emerged in the northern regions of the continent.

c.       Another group of tribes spread through relatively arid regions of the Far West and developed successful communities based on fishing, hunting small game, and gathering.

d.       The people of the Southwest region built large irrigation systems to allow farming on their relatively dry land and they constructed substantial towns that became centers of trade, craft, and religious and civic ritual.

e.       In the Great Plains region most tribes were engaged in sedentary farming (corn and other grain) and lived in substantial permanent settlements, although they were some small nomadic tribes that subsisted by hunting buffalo.

f.         Only in the 18^th century after Europeans had introduced the horse to North America, did buffalo hunting began to support a large population in the region; at that point, many once-sedentary farmers left the land to pursue the great migratory buffalo herds.

g.       The eastern third of what is now the United States, known as the Woodland Indians, had the greatest food resources of any region of the continent.

h.       Many tribes lived tribes lived in the eastern third of the United States and most of them engaged simultaneously in farming hunting, gathering, and fishing.

i.         As in the Southwest, cities emerged as trading and political centers.

j.         The agricultural societies of the Northeast were more mobile than those in other regions.

k.       Farming techniques there were designed to exploit the land quickly rather than to develop permanent settlements.

l.         Natives often cleared the land by setting forest fires or cutting into trees to kill them. They then planted crops—corn, beans, squash, pumpkins, and others—among the dead or blackened trunks. After a few years when the land became exhausted or the filth from the settlement began to accumulate, they moved on and established themselves elsewhere.

m.     Some settlements in the northwest dispersed every winter and families foraged for themselves in the wilderness until warm weather returned; those who survived then reassembled to begin farming again.

n.       The Iroquois included at least five distinct northern “nations—the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk—and had links as well with the Cherokees and the Tuscaroras farther south in the Carolinas and Georgia.

o.       Alliances among the various Indians societies were fragile because the people of the Americas did not think of themselves as members of a single civilization. Only rarely did tribes unite in opposition to challenges from whites.

D)      Tribal Cultures

a.       The enormous diversity of economic, social, and political structures among the North American Indians makes large generalizations about their cultures difficult.

b.       The last centuries before the arrival of Europeans, Native Americans were experiencing an agricultural revolution. In all regions of the United States tribes were becoming more sedentary and were developing new sources of food, clothing, and shelter and most regions were experiencing significant population growth.

c.       Religion was as important to Indian society as it was to most other cultures and was usually closely bound up with the natural world on which the tribes depended.

d.       The societies of North America tended to divide tasks according to gender. All tribes assigned women the jobs of caring for children, preparing meals, and gathering certain foods. Some tribal groups reserved farming tasks almost entirely for men. Among others women tended the fields, while men engaged in hunting, warfare, or clearing land. Iroquois women and children were often left alone for extended periods while men were away hunting or fighting battles. As a result, women tended to control the social and economic organization of the settlements and played powerful roles within families.

E)      Europe Looks Westward

a.       Europe in the Middle Ages was not an adventurous civilization. Divided into innumerable small duchies [the territory of a duke] and kingdoms, its outlook was overwhelmingly provincial.

b.       Subsistence agriculture predominated, and commerce was limited; few merchants, looked beyond the boundaries of their own regions.

c.       Only rarely could a single leader launch a great venture. Gradually, conditions in Europe changed so that by the late 15^th century interest in overseas exploration had grown.

F)      Commerce and Nationalism

a.       Two important and related changes provided the first incentive for Europeans to look toward new lands.

1)       Significant growth in Europe’s population in the 15^th century. A century and a half after the Black Plague a population growth almost came a rise in land values, a reawakening of commerce, and a general increase in prosperity. Affluent landlords were becoming eager to purchase goods from distant regions, and a new merchant class were emerging to meet their demand. As trade increased, and as advances in navigation and shipbuilding made longdistance sea travel more feasible, interest in developing new markets, finding new products, and opening new trade routes rapidly increased.

2)       The rise of new governments – strong new monarchs were emerging there and creating centralized nation-states, with national courts, national armies and national tax systems. As these ambitious kings and queens consolidated their power and increased their wealth, they became eager to enhance the commercial growth of their nations.

b.       Ever since the 14^th century when Marco Polo and other adventurers had returned from Asia bearing exotic goods (spices, fabrics, dyes) and even more exotic tales, Europeans who hoped for commercial glory had dreamed above all of trade with the East.

c.       The Portuguese were the preeminent maritime power in the 15^th century, in large part because of the work of one man, Prince Henry the Navigator. Henry’s own principal interest was not in finding a sea route to Asia but in exploring the western coast of Africa.

d.       Some of Henry’s mariners went as far south as Cape Verde, on Africa’s west coast.

e.       In 1497-1498 Vasco da Gama proceeded all the way around the cape to India.

G)     Christopher Columbus

a.       Christopher Columbus was born and reared in Genoa, Italy obtained an interest with the possibility but reaching Asia by not going East but by going west.

b.       Columbus’s hopes rested on several basic misconceptions. He believed that the word was far smaller than it actually was. He assumed that the Atlantic Ocean was narrow enough to be crossed on a relatively brief voyage. It did not occur to him that anything lay to the west between Europe and Asia.

c.       Columbus appealed to Queen Isabella for support for his proposed westward voyage. In 1492, having consolidated the monarchy’s position within Spain itself, Isabella agreed to Columbus’s request.

d.       Columbus left Spain in August 1492 with ninety men and three ships (The Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María) and sailed westward into the Atlantic on what he thought was a straight course for Japan. Then weeks later, he sighted land and assumed he had reached his target. He landed on an island in the Bahamas.

e.       Only until Columbus’s third voyage in 1498 did Columbus realize that he had discovered a different continent altogether.

f.         The name of the New World was named after the Florentine merchant, Amerigo Vespucci, a member of a later Portuguese expedition to the New World who wrote a series of vivid descriptions of the lands he visited and who recognized the Americas as new continents.

g.       Columbus believed “God made … [Columbus] … the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth.”

h.       Partly as a result of Columbus’s initiative, Spain devoted greater resources and energy to maritime exploration and eventually replaced Portugal as the leading seafaring nation.

i.         The Spaniard Vasco de Balboa fought his way across the Isthmus of Panama in 1513 and became the first known European to gaze westward upon the great ocean that separated America from China and the Indies.

j.         Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese, found the strait that now bears his name at the southern end of South America, struggled through the stormy narrows and into the ocean, then proceeded to the Philippines. There Magellan died in a conflict with the natives, but his expedition went on to complete the first known circumnavigation of the globe (1519-1522).

k.       By 1550, Spaniards had explored the coasts of North America as far north as Oregon in the west and Labrador in the east, as well as some of the interior regions of the continent.

H)      The Conquistadores

a.       The Spanish claimed for themselves the whole of the New World, except for a piece of it (today’s Brazil) that was reserved by a papal decree for the Portuguese.

b.       In 1519, Hernando Cortés led a small military expedition of about 600 men into Mexico. Cortés had been a Spanish government official in Cuba for fourteen years and to that point had achieved little success. But when he heard stories of great treasures in Mexico, Cortés decided to go in search of them. He met strong and resourceful resistance from the Aztecs and their powerful emperor, Montezuma.

c.       The first assault on Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital, failed. But Cortés and his army had, unknowingly, unleashed an assault on the Aztecs far more devastating than military attack: they had exposed the natives to smallpox. A smallpox epidemic decimated the population and made it possible for the Spanish to triumph in their second attempt at conquest. Through his ruthless suppression of surviving natives, Cortés established a lasting reputation as the most brutal of the Spanish conquistadores (conquerors).

d.       The news that silver was to be found in Mexico attracted the attention of other Spaniards. A wave of conquistadores descended on the mainland in search of fortune.

e.       Francisco Pizzaro, conquered Peru (1532-1538) and revealed to Europeans the wealth of the Incas, opened the way for other advances into South America. His one-time deputy Hernando de Soto, in a futile search for gold, silver, and jewels, led several expeditions (1539-1541) through Florida west into the continent and became the first white man known to have crossed the Mississippi River. Francisco Coronado traveled north from Mexico (1540-1542) into what is now New Mexico in a similarly fruitless search for gold and jewels.

f.         The conquistadores subjugated and in some areas almost exterminated the native populations. In this horrible way, they made possible the creation of a vast Spanish empire in the New World.

I)         The Spanish Empire

a.       Spanish exploration, conquest, and colonization in America was primarily a work of private enterprise, carried on by individual leaders, with little direct support from the government at home.

b.       Those who wished to launch expeditions to the New World had first to get licenses from the crown. Those who obtained licenses were permitted to exact labor and tribute from the natives in specific areas, a system the Spanish had first used in dealing with the Moors in Spain itself. Settlers did not receive actual land grants, but the control of the labor in a territory in effect gave them control of the land.

c.       A license did no more than confer rights; colonizers had to equip and finance their expeditions on their own and assume the full risk of loss or ruin. They might succeed and make a fortune; they might fail—through shipwreck, natural disaster, incompetence, or bad luck—and lose everything, including their lives, as many adventurers did.

d.       The first Spaniards were only interested in getting rich.

e.       In the 16^th century, the mines in Spanish America yielded more than 10 times as much gold and silver as the rest of the world’s mines put together.

f.         Other settlers traveled to America in hopes of creating a profitable agricultural economy. These settlers helped establish elements of European civilization in America that permanently altered both the landscape and the social structure. Other Spaniards went to America to spread the Christian religion.

g.       The era of the conquistadores came to a close in the 1540s.

J)       Northern Outposts

a.       The Spanish fort established in 1565 at St. Augustine, Florida, became the first permanent European settlement in the present-day United States.

b.       In 1598, Don Juan de Oñate traveled north from Mexico with a party of 500 men and claimed for Spain some of the lands of the Pueblo Indians that Coronado had passed through over fifty years before. The Spanish migrants began to establish a colony, modeled roughly on those the Spanish had created farther south, in what is now New Mexico. Oñate distributed encomiendas, and the Spanish began demanding tribute from the local Indians.

c.       Spanish colonists founded Santa Fe in 1609.

d.       Oñate’s harsh treatment of the natives threatened the stability of the new colony and led to his removal as governor in 1606. Over time, relations between the Spanish and the Pueblos improved. Substantial numbers of Pueblos converted to Christianity under the influence of Spanish missionaries. Others entered into important trading relationships with the Spanish.

e.       By 1680, there were over 2,000 Spanish colonists living among about 30,000 Pueblos.

f.         In 1680, the colony was nearly destroyed when the Pueblos rose in revolt. The Spanish priest and colonial government launched one of their periodic efforts to suppress these rituals. In protest, the Indian religious leader named Pope led an uprising that killed hundreds of European settlers captured Santa Fe and drove the Spanish temporarily from the region. 12 years later the Spanish returned, resuming seizing Pueblo lands, and crushed a last revolt in 1696.

g.       After the revolts many Spanish colonists realized they could not prosper in New Mexico if they remained in conflict with the Indians because they outnumbered them greatly. They used two methods:

1)       Baptized Indian children at birth and enforcing observance of Catholic rituals.

2)       Permitted the Pueblos to own land; they stopped commandeering Indian labor; they replaced the encomienda system with a less demanding and oppressive one, and they tacitly tolerated the practice of tribal religious rituals.

h.       These efforts were at least partially successful. After a while, there was significant intermarriage between Europeans and Indians. Increasingly, the Pueblos came to consider the Spanish their allies in the continuing battles with the Aoaches and Navajos.

i.         By 1750, the Spanish population had grown modestly to about 4,000. The Pueblo population had declined to about 13,000, less than half what it had been in 1680.

K)      The Empire at High Tide

a.       The Spanish Empire became one of the largest empires in the history of the world including the islands of the Caribbean, the Coastal areas of South America, Mexico and southern North America, and southward and westward into the vast landmass of South America.

b.       Colonists had few opportunities to establish political institutions independent of the crown.

c.       The Spanish were far more successful than the British would be in extracting great surface wealth from their American colonies but they concentrated less energy on making agriculture and commerce profitable.’

d.       To enforce the collection of duties and to provide protection against pirates, the government established rigid and restrictive regulations.

e.       Almost from the beginning, the English, Dutch, and French colonies in North America concentrated on establishing permanent settlement and family life in the New World.

L)       Biological and Cultural Exchanges

a.       The arrival of whites launched a process of interaction between different people that left no one unchanged.

b.       Europeans would not have been exploring the Americas at all without their early contacts with the natives. From them, they learned of the rich deposits of gold and silver. After that, the history of the Americas became one of increasing levels of exchange among different peoples and cultures.

c.       The first and perhaps most profound result of this exchange was the importation of European diseases to the New World. It would be difficult to exaggerate the consequences of the exposure of Native Americans to such illnesses and diseases to which Europeans had over time developed at least a partial immunity but to which Native Americans were tragically vulnerable. Millions died. Native groups inhabiting some of the large Caribbean islands and some areas of Mexico were virtually extinct within fifty years of their first contact with whites.

d.       The decimation of the native population was not just because of infection but by deliberate subjugation and extermination.

e.       By the 1540s, the combined effects of European diseases and European military brutality had all but destroyed the empires of Mexico and South America and had largely eliminated native resistance to the Spanish.

f.         The Europeans introduced new crops, domestic livestock, and especially the horse which became central to the lives of many natives and transformed their societies.

g.       White people learned new agricultural techniques from the natives that is better adapted to the new land. The natives also introduced new crops like maize or corn which became an important staple among the settlers. The natives also introduced squash, pumpkins, beans, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and potatoes and brought it to Europe and revolutionized the European agriculture.

h.       Many natives learned Portuguese and Spanish but some combined it with their own dialects. Also with Catholicism, natives tended to connect the new creed with features of their old religion, creating a hybrid of faiths that were Christian.

i.         European men outnumbered European women by at least 10 to 1 therefore the Spanish immigrants had substantial sexual contact with native women. Intermarriages became so frequent that mixed race or mestizos became dominant.

j.         A successful or powerful person could become “Spanish” regardless of his or her actually racial ancestry.

k.       The frequency of intermarriage shows the men living alone craved female companionship and the satisfactions of family life that could only be furnished by among the native people.

l.         Intermarriage was allowed by native women because male populations were so depleted or that intermarried among some Indian tribes formed or cemented alliances.

m.     Natives were the principal labor source for the Europeans. Virtually all the commercial, agricultural, and mining enterprises of the Spanish and Portuguese colonists depended on an Indian work force.

n.       The need for native labor was so great European settlers were less interested in acquiring land than they were in gaining control over Indian villages, which could become a source of labor and tribute to landlords.

o.       The native population could not meet all the labor needs of the colonists—particularly since the native population had declined (or vanished) because of disease and war. As early as 1502, therefore, European settlers began importing slaves from Africa.

M)     Africa and America

a.       Most of the black men and women who were forcibly taken to America came from a large region in west Africa below the Sahara Desert, known as Guinea.

b.       Europeans and white Americans came to portray African society as primitive and uncivilized but most Africans, were in fact, civilized people with well-developed economies and political systems.

c.       The residents of upper Guinea had substantial commercial contact with the Mediterranean world—trading ivory, gold, and slaves for finished goods.

d.       After the collapse of Ghana around 1100 A.D. the even larger empire of Mali emerged and survived will into the 15^th century. Its great city, Timbuktu, became fabled as a trading center and a seat of education.

e.       The African civilization naturally developed economies that reflected the climates and resources of their lands. In upper Guinea, fishing and rice cultivation, supplemented by the extensive trade with Mediterranean lands, were the foundation of the economy. Farther south, Africans grew wheat and other food crops, raised livestock, and fished.

f.         African societies tended to be matrilineal—which means that people traced their heredity through, and inherited property from, their mothers. When a couple married, the husband left his own family to join the family of his wife.

g.       Women played a major role if not a dominant role in trade. They definitely managed child care and food preparation. Most tribes chose leaders and systems for managing what they defined as male affairs and women chose parallel leaders to handle female matters. Tribal chiefs generally were men but in some places they are female but customarily the position was passed down to the son of the chief’s eldest sister.

h.       African societies had small elites of priests and nobles stood at the top. Most people belonged to a large middle class group of farmers, traders, craft workers, and others. At the bottom of the society were slaves.

i.         As early as the 18^th century A.D., west Africans began selling slaves to traders from the Mediterranean. They were responding to a demand from affluent families who wanted black men and women as domestic servants.

j.         In the 16^th century, the market for slaves grew dramatically as a result of the rising demand for sugar cane.

k.       As the demand increased, African kingdoms warred with one another in an effort to capture potential slaves to exchange for European goods.

l.         By the 17^th century the Dutch had won control of most of the slave market. In the 18^th century the English dominated it.

N)      The Arrival of the English