AP US History: Chapter 1 Study Outline

Time Line

10 million years ago            North America assumed current form
2 million years ago              Onset of Great Ice Age
35,000 years ago                 Bering isthmus or land bridge available?
10,000 years ago                 End of last ice Age
5,000 B.C.                          Cultivation of maize and transformation from nomadic to sedendary/horticultural lifestyles
A.D. 1000                          Viking/Norse land at Newfoundland
1295                                   Marco Polo returned to Europe
1400s                                 Portuguese naval advances--led by Henry the Navigator--result in breakthroughs around Africa
1488                                  Diaz rounded Africa
1492                                  Columbus first arrived in the Bahamas
1498                                  da Gama reached India by rounding Africa

America: Formation and population

Widely accepted theory holds that early North Americans arrived across the Bering land bridge and slowly moved south.
Exciting controversy surrounds debate behind the original immigrants of the Americas (i.e. boats, Asia, Africa, number, etc.).

Thousands of unique tribes developed with a population in the tens of millions by 1492 (54 million?).
Big 3: Inca in Peru, Aztecs in Mexico, and Mayans in Central America.

  

Unlike the Aztecs, outside of Mexico no heavily populated nation-state or empire of Native Americans existed by 1500.
The Iroquois Confederation came close under Hiawatha. Probably no more than 4 million in what would become the United States by 1492.

Basic tribal distinctions often followed the various ecosystems: Arctic (Inuet/Eskimo), Sub Arctic, Far West, South West (Navajo), Rocky Mountains (Nez Perce), North East (Iroquois), South East (Choctaw), Plains (Mandan), Northwest Coast Chinook), and Mexico (Aztec).

Diversity describes the variety between cultures: technology and development, nomadic vs. sedentary, matrilineal vs. patrilineal, etc.

Europeans

Complex contributions of many--over centuries--combined to lead to the European arrival in the Americas.
The Crusades--and the resulting Renaissance--fueled the European quests.
Why?  Seeking profit, military advantage, national prestige, desired imports, religious conversions...especially a route to Asian trade.

Portugal led the way around Africa and set up trading posts in West Africa--(sub-Saharan).  Trade for gold and slaves emerged.  Portuguese originally built on Arab and African slave practices.  Traditionally, African slaves were prisoners of war, debtors, victims of famine or disaster, or criminals.  They frequently had some rights, families, and a potential for freedom. Slaves were generally used to raise cash crops (especially sugar) to generate more wealth for the European investors.  This was originally done on African islands (e.g. Canary) but would be quickly adopted in the Caribbean and later North America.

Spain was unified under Ferdinand and Isabella in the late 1400s.  Muslims in Spain were conquered, persecuted, and expelled.  Modern nation states in Europe now included England, France, Spain, Holland and Portugal.  Rivalries emerged to gain prestige and establish profitable trade routes with the Indies (i.e. India and other parts of Asia).

Technological ability (established by the Portuguese) combined with the African labor pool (slaves), Asian (and later American) goods and raw materials, European demand, the Renaissance spirit and knowledge, and the rise of competing nation states to lead to the funding and sponsoring of Columbus.

Worlds Collide

From Africa

From Europe

From the Americas

 

 

 

slave labor

wheat

gold

 

sugar

silver

 

rice

 

 

 

corn

 

horses (formerly indigenous?)

potatoes

 

cows

tomatoes

 

pigs

tobacco

 

 

beans

 

smallpox

chocolate

 

measles

 

 

bubonic plague

syphilis

 

influenza

 

 

typhus...

 

Examples of legacies: horse adopted by plains Indians, slave plantations to feed European demands, millions of deaths among American Indians due to new diseases--eventually 90%!

Spanish claims of New World split with Portugal via the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494).  The line would eventually give Portugal Africa and Brazil.  Spain would claim the balance, and her conquistodores would spend decades (especially 1519-1540) exploring and conquering in the Americas.  About 10,000 men sought glory, conversions, profit, and a passage to Asia.

Cortes' defeat of Moctezuma and the Aztecs in 1521 was the extreme example the the impacts of the conquistodores. By the 1600s, the population fell from 20 million to 2 million.  Since most of the early Spaniards were male (e.g. conquistadores), they tended to marry Indian women, and the result was a new group called the mestizos.
 

Balboa

1513

Pacific/Panama

Magellan

1519-1522

circumnavigation of the globe

Ponce de Leon

1513

Florida

Coronado

1540-42

South West

de Soto

1539-42

Florida, South, Mississippi River

Cortes

1519-21

Mexico/Aztecs conquered

Pizarro

1532

Peru/Inca conquered

Cabrillo

1542

California Coast

Onate

1598

Central Southwest

Fr. Junipero Serra

1769(-1823)

California Missions founded

Capitalism emerges: New World bullion flooded the European banking system and provided the capital for further investment. The establishment and expansion of international trade (eventually to become the Triangular Trade) would provide the supply to satisfy the burgeoning demand amongst European consumers.

Caribbean islands were Spain's original test colonies in the Americas--and would therefore test the profitability of the new lands and set examples (e.g. the use of slavery and brutality) for later colonies.  While designed to bring conversion to the indigenous Americans, the encomienda system was Spain's brutal system of enslaving, working, and controlling the native populations (e.g. Arawak).  This was brought by Columbus but vehemently opposed by Bartolome de las Casas.

The Spanish government established tighter control by the 1550s.  Catholic cathedrals, schools, and universities began to give permanence to the Spanish empire in the Americas during the 1500s.  Northern establishments and fortifications (e.g. St. Augustine, Florida--1565--and the California Missions) were set up to protect against English and French encroachments.  The missions changed native cultures, but Native American resistance like Pope's Rebellion (1680) by the Pueblo slowed Spanish control.  200 Spanish towns/cities led by 160,000 Spaniards gave Spain a solid empire and a serious head start on her European rivals.  Spanish dominance would not be seriously challenged until the defeat of her armada to the English in 1588.


 
Other chapter vocabulary: whetted, cataclysmic, epochal, reverberations, pagans, dubious, and quell.