Chapter 1 – The Collision of Cultures

America Before Columbus

• The Peoples of the Precontact Americas
  • The “Clovis” people
  • Archaeology and population diversity
  • The Archaic period

• The Growth of Civilizations: The South
  • The Inca in Peru
  • Mesoamerican civilizations
    • Maya
    • Aztec, or Mexica 

• The Civilizations of the North
  • Hunting, gathering, and fishing
  • Agricultural societies
  • Cahokia
  • Gender relations

How the Early North Americans Lived

• Like most precommercial peoples, the Native Americans survived largely on the resources available in their immediate surroundings.
• Note, for example, the reliance on the products of the sea of the tribes along the northern coastlines of the continent, and the way in which tribes in relatively inhospitable climates in the North—where agriculture was difficult—relied on hunting large game.
• Most Native Americans were farmers.

Europe Looks Westward

• Commerce and Sea Travel
  • European population growth
  • Strong monarchies
  • Portuguese exploration

• Christopher Columbus
  • Columbus’s first voyage
  • Circumnavigation of the globe

European Exploration and Conquest (1492 – 1583)

• Note how Columbus and the Spanish explorers who followed him tended to move quickly into the lands of Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America, while the English and French explored the northern territories of North America. 

• The Spanish Empire
  • Conquistadores
    • Cortés conquers the Aztecs
    • Brutality and greed
    • Spanish America
    • Ordinances of discovery
    • Catholic missions

Spanish America

• From the time of Columbus’s initial voyage in 1492 until the mid-nineteenth century, Spain was the dominant colonial power in the New World.
• From the southern regions of South America to North America’s Pacific Northwest, Spain controlled one of the world’s vastest empires. Note how much of the Spanish Empire was simply grafted upon the earlier empires of native peoples—the Inca Empire in what are today Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and Bolivia; and the Aztec Empire in Central Mexico.

• Northern Outposts
  • St. Augustine and Santa Fe
  • Popé
    • Pueblo revolt of 1680
  • Assimilation and accommodation

• Biological and Cultural Exchanges
  • Beneficial and catastrophic exchanges
  • Population loss from military brutality
  • New World crops
  • Complex racial hierarchy
    • Intermarriage, mestizos
  • Unfree Indian labor

• Africa and America
  • Trade states of west Africa
    • Ghana and Mali
  • Matrilineal societies
  • African slavery
  • Sugar and the slave trade

The Arrival of the English

• Incentives for Colonization
  • Scarce land
  • Mercantilism
  • Religious motives for colonization
    • The English Reformation
  • Puritans
  • Irish colonization

• The French and the Dutch in America
  • French Traders and Jesuits in Canada
  • Dutch Claims
    • New Amsterdam

• The First English Settlements
  • English naval power
    • The Spanish Armada
  • Gilbert and Raleigh
  • Failed colony of Roanoke