Part 1 - The Americas

Bering Land Bridge

• Nomadic Asian hunting parties (no horses, oxen, or wheels)

South America

• Inca (Peru) - gave us tomatoes and potatoes

• Mayans (Central America / Meso America)

• Aztecs (Mexico - Tenochtitlan) - maize/corn

North America → “Three Sisters” (corn, beans, squash)

• Pueblo

• Iroquois

• Lief Ericson (1000 AD) - “Vinland”

Crusades

• 11th to 14th Century

• created an appetite for spices

• Portugal leads the way (Prince Henry “The Navigator”)

• Caravels → Ships that triangular sails

• Portuguese creep along the coast of Africa (resulted in slavery) → Bartholomeu Dias (1488) and Vaso da Gama (1498)

Spain

• Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile

• expelled “moors” from Spain

• competed with the Portuguese, so the Spanish began to look westward

Christopher Columbus

• Martin Luther ignites the Protestant Reformation with the “95 Theses”

Spanish Explorers (conquistadors)

• Vasco Nunez Balboa

• Ferdinand Magellan

• Juan Ponce de Leon

• Francisco Pizarro

• Hernando de Soto

• Franciso Coronado

Hernan Cortez

• 1519

• Conquers the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan

• Montezuma (priest for the Aztec) believed that Cortez was one of their gods who was told would be fair skinned and come from the east

• Mestizo → mixed ancestry: Spanish and Aztecs

1492

• Treaty of Tordesillas

• People thought there was bias because the Pope was Spanish

Amerigo Vespucci

• 1497

• discovered that is was a new land, not the East Indies

encomienda: labor system for Spanish conquistadors

• laborers were not protected, suffered from the eastern diseases, and had lost their land

“Black Legend”: (Bartolme de las Casas

• St. Augustine, Florida (1565) is the oldest European settlement in the U.S.

Columbian Exchange

• the trade between the new world and the east

• 3/5 of the crops cultivated today was from the Americas

• the population increased in Europe with caused more people to move to the Americas

• 90% of the Native population died from the diseases brought to them from the east

Pueblo Revolt of 1680

• group of Native Americans who drove the Spanish out for 12 years

• were able to keep some of their culture