The American Pageant Chapter 1 Vocabulary

Vocabulary flashcards covering key terms, historical figures, and events from Chapter 1 of The American Pageant (18th Edition).

Bering Strait Land Bridge

A land bridge that allowed human travel between Asia and North America until it was submerged 10,000 years ago.

Maize

Corn, the cultivation of which served as the basis for advanced agricultural practices that supported large populations in the early Americas.

Cahokia

A large Mound Builder city-state near present-day St. Louis that was home to 25,000 people in 1100.

Leif Ericsson

The Viking leader who discovered Greenland and Newfoundland around the year 1000.

Marco Polo

An Italian explorer whose tales of his travels sparked European desire for a cheap trade route to Asia.

Bartholomeu Dias

The Portuguese explorer who rounded Africa's southernmost tip in 1488.

Vasco de Gama

The Portuguese explorer who successfully sailed to India in 1498.

Christopher Columbus

An Italian navigator who persuaded Spain to support his westward expedition to find a passage to Asia and landed in the Bahamas on October 12, 1492.

Columbian Exchange

The worldwide transfer of plants, animals, cultures, human populations, and diseases between the New and Old Worlds created by Spanish exploration.

Conquistadors

Spanish military explorers who conquered indigenous empires in the Americas, motivated by gold, glory, and god.

Vasco Nunez Balboa

The Spanish explorer who discovered the Pacific Ocean in 1513.

Hernando de Soto

The Spanish conquistador who explored the southeastern region of North America in the 1540s.

Francisco de Coronado

The Spanish conquistador who explored the southwestern region of North America in the 1540s.

Ferdinand Magellan

The leader of the Spanish expedition from 1519 to 1522 that completed the first circumnavigation of the globe.

Encomienda System

A system in which the Spanish government given or 'commended' Native Americans to select colonists in exchange for a promise to Christianize them, functioning as slavery in practice.

Hernan Cortés

The Spanish conquistador who set sail from Cuba in 1519 with eleven ships and laid siege to Tenochtitlán, leading to the capitulation of the Aztecs on August 13, 1521.

Moctezuma

The Aztec chieftain who sent ambassadors to greet Hernan Cortés and invited his force into the capital city.

Noche Triste

Meaning 'sad night,' June 30, 1520, when the Aztecs attacked Hernan Cortés and his men in Tenochtitlán.

Francisco Pizarro

The Spanish conquistador who crushed the Inca Empire in Peru in 1532.

Mestizos

People of mixed Indian and European heritage.

The Black Legend

The concept or belief that the Spanish invaders only butchered Native Americans and contributed nothing positive to the Americas.

Pueblo Revolt

A 1680 uprising in New Mexico in which Pueblo Native Americans destroyed every Catholic church in the province and killed several priests and hundreds of Spanish settlers.