The American Pageant - Detailed Notes

Founding the New Nation (c. 33,000 B.C.–A.D. 1783)

European explorers and settlers in North America during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries did not initially intend to found a new nation.
Colonists, while seeking refuge or opportunity, still considered themselves Europeans and subjects of the English king.
Life in the New World gradually differentiated the colonists from their European counterparts, leading to the American Revolution and a vision of an independent nation.
The transformation involved colonists overcoming internal conflicts to unite against Britain and declare themselves "American."
Shared traits among colonists:
- Primarily English-speaking.
- Aimed to establish an agricultural society based on English customs.
- New World conditions strengthened common bonds.
- Grew accustomed to freedom from royal authority, official religion, and rigid social hierarchies.
- Valued individual liberty, self-government, religious tolerance, and economic opportunity.
Shared negative traits:
- Willingness to subjugate outsiders.
  - Indians: nearly annihilated through war and disease.
  - Africans: brought as slaves for labor, especially in the southern colonies on tobacco, rice, and indigo plantations.
The thirteen colonies differed significantly:
- New England: Puritans established tight-knit, pious, and relatively democratic communities of small family farms in rocky soil; a largely homogeneous society.
- Southern Colonies: Large landholders, mostly Anglicans, built plantations along the coast, relying on black slave labor and looking down on poor white farmers in the backcountry.
- Middle Colonies (New York to Delaware): Diversity prevailed; merchants influenced New York City, Quakers influenced Philadelphia; a mix of sprawling estates and modest homesteads in the countryside.
Conflicts within colonies arose from economic interests, ethnic rivalries, and religious practices, hindering the idea of a unified people ready to break from Britain.
American colonists initially had little reason to revolt.
- Each colony enjoyed self-governance.
- Many colonists benefited from trade within the British Empire.
The stable arrangement began to deteriorate in the 1760s due to imperial rivalry between France and Britain.
- The French and Indian War (1756-1763) strengthened ties with Britain as colonial militias fought alongside the British army.
- The British removal of the French from North America diminished their indispensability to the colonies.
- After 1763, the British government imposed taxes on the colonies, which had been accustomed to self-governance.
By the 1770s, taxation, self-rule, and trade restrictions escalated the crisis of imperial authority.
- Although most colonists initially sought accommodation with Britain, royal inflexibility propelled them into a war for independence.
The Revolutionary War fostered national unity, but it was not universally embraced.
- One in five colonists sided with the British as "Loyalists."
Americans ultimately won the Revolution with French assistance, united by the belief in unalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” as articulated in the Declaration of Independence.
Two centuries of life in America prepared the colonists to found a new nation.

New World Beginnings (33,000 B.C.–A.D. 1769)

Earth is approximately several billion years old.
Recorded history of the Western world began about 6,000 years ago.
European explorers stumbled upon the American continents 500 years ago, altering the course of history for the Old World, the New World, Africa, and Asia.

The Shaping of North America

225 million years ago, a single supercontinent existed.
The landmasses drifted apart forming the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, narrowing the Pacific Ocean, and creating Eurasia, Africa, Australia, Antarctica, and the Americas.
Evidence for the single continent is found in identical species of fish in freshwater lakes across continents.
Mountain ranges formed through shifting and folding of the earth’s crust.
- The Appalachians formed approximately 350 million years ago.
- The Rockies, Sierra Nevada, Cascades, and Coast Ranges formed between 135 million and 25 million years ago.
About 10 million years ago, North America took its basic geological shape.
The Canadian Shield anchored the continent in the northeast.
The eastern coastal plain sloped upward to the Appalachians.
The midcontinental basin descended to the Mississippi Valley and rose to the Rockies.
The land fell into the intermountain Great Basin from the Rocky Mountain crest.
The Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers and the Willamette-Puget Sound trough seamed the interiors of California, Oregon, and Washington.
The Coast Ranges rose steeply from the Pacific Ocean.

The Great Ice Age

Began about 2 million years ago.
Ice sheets covered parts of Europe, Asia, and the Americas.
In North America, glaciers stretched as far south as Pennsylvania, the Ohio country, the Dakotas, and the Pacific Northwest.
The glaciers retreated about 10,000 years ago.
The Canadian Shield was depressed by the weight of the ice.
Glacial action scoured away topsoil, creating shallow depressions that formed lakes.
The Great Lakes were scooped out and filled by glacial action.
- Originally drained southward through the Mississippi River system to the Gulf of Mexico.
- The water sought the St. Lawrence River outlet to the Atlantic Ocean after the melting ice unblocked the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
- The lake water lowered the Great Lakes’ level and left the Missouri-Mississippi-Ohio system to drain the midcontinental basin.
Lake Bonneville covered much of present-day Utah, Nevada, and Idaho.
- Drained to the Pacific Ocean through the Snake and Columbia River systems.
- Became an inland sea, growing increasingly saline due to diminishing rainfall.
- Evaporated, leaving an arid, mineral-rich desert. Great Salt Lake remained as a relic.
  Lake Bonneville's ancient beaches are visible on mountainsides up to 1,000 feet above the dry floor of the Great Basin.

Peopling the Americas

Some early peoples may have reached the Americas in crude boats.
Most came by land, approximately 35,000 years ago between Eurasia and North America in the area of the present-day Bering Sea between Siberia and Alaska.
Nomadic Asian hunters followed migratory herds of game across the land bridge (Bering isthmus) for about 250 centuries.
The land bridge was inundated about 10,000 years ago due to rising sea levels, isolating the people on the American continents.
Climatic warming opened ice-free valleys, allowing people to move southward and eastward across the Americas.
They reached the tip of South America, about 15,000 miles from Siberia.
By 1492, approximately 54 million people inhabited the two American continents.
The people split into numerous tribes, evolved over 2,000 languages, and developed diverse religions, cultures, and lifestyles.
Incas in Peru, Mayans in Central America, and Aztecs in Mexico developed sophisticated civilizations.
Advanced agricultural practices, primarily maize cultivation, sustained large populations, perhaps as many as 20 million in Mexico alone.
These civilizations built elaborate cities and conducted far-flung commerce despite lacking large draft animals and the wheel.
They possessed talent in mathematics and made accurate astronomical observations.
The Aztecs practiced human sacrifice to appease their gods, often sacrificing captives conquered in battle.

The Earliest Americans

Agriculture, especially corn growing, contributed to the size and sophistication of Native American civilizations in Mexico and South America.
About 5000 B.C., hunter-gatherers in highland Mexico developed a wild grass into corn.
Cultivation of corn spread across the Americas.
Wherever corn was planted, nomadic hunting bands transformed into settled agricultural villagers.
Corn planting reached the American Southwest by about 1200 B.C.
The Pueblo peoples in the Rio Grande valley built intricate irrigation systems.
They dwelled in multistoried, terraced buildings when the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century.
Corn cultivation reached other parts of North America later, explaining the relative rates of development of different Native American peoples.
North America outside of Mexico did not have dense populations or complex nation-states comparable to the Aztec empire at the time of European arrival.
The Mound Builders of the Ohio River valley, the Mississippian culture, and the Anasazi peoples sustained some large settlements after incorporating corn planting.
The Mississippian settlement at Cahokia was home to approximately 25,000 people.
The Anasazis built a pueblo of over six hundred interconnected rooms at Chaco Canyon.
These cultures declined by about A.D. 1300, possibly due to drought.
Maize, beans, and squash cultivation reached the southeastern Atlantic seaboard region of North America about A.D. 1000.
"Three-sister" farming (beans, corn, and squash) fostered high population densities among the Creek, Choctaw, and Cherokee peoples.
The Iroquois in the northeastern woodlands, led by Hiawatha, created the Iroquois Confederacy, a military alliance that menaced its neighbors for over a century.
Most native peoples of North America lived in small, scattered, and impermanent settlements upon European arrival.
In settled agricultural groups, women tended crops while men hunted, fished, gathered fuel, and cleared fields.
This pattern conferred authority on women, and many North American native peoples developed matrilinear cultures.
Native Americans revered the physical world and nature, but sometimes ignited forest fires to create better hunting habitats.
The land did not feel the hand of the Native Americans heavy upon it because they were so few in number.
In 1492, there were probably no more than 4 million Native Americans in North America.

Indirect Discoverers of the New World

Europeans were unaware of the existence of the Americas.
Norse seafarers from Scandinavia reached northeastern North America around A.D. 1000 and landed at Vinland.
The settlements were abandoned due to the lack of support from a strong nation-state.
Other Europeans sought contact with a wider world for conquest or trade.
Christian crusaders sought to wrest the Holy Land from Muslim control from the eleventh to the fourteenth century.
The crusaders acquired a taste for Asian goods, including silk, drugs, perfumes, colorful draperies, and spices.
The luxuries of the East were expensive due to transportation distances and Muslim middlemen.
European consumers sought less expensive routes to Asia or alternate sources of supply.
Marco Polo stimulated European desires for a cheaper route to the treasures of the East with tales of his travels to China.
Portuguese mariners overcame obstacles to sail southward along the coast of West Africa in the fifteenth century developing the caravel.
They discovered that they could return to Europe by sailing northwesterly from the African coast toward the Azores.
The world of sub-Saharan Africa came within reach of Europeans.
The Portuguese set up trading posts along the African shore for the purchase of gold and slaves, adopting Arab and African practices.
Slave brokers separated persons from the same tribes to frustrate organized resistance.
The Portuguese built up their own systematic traffic in slaves to work the sugar plantations on the African coastal islands.
Slave trading became a big business; forty thousand Africans were carried away to the Atlantic sugar islands in the second half of the fifteenth century.
These fifteenth-century Portuguese adventures in Africa were the origins of the modern plantation system.
Bartholomeu Días rounded the southernmost tip of Africa in 1488.
Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498 and returned home with jewels and spices.
Spain unified through the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile and the expulsion of the Muslim Moors.
The Spaniards were eager to outstrip their Portuguese rivals in the race to tap the wealth of the Indies.
Portugal controlled the African coast, so Spain looked westward.

Columbus Comes upon a New World

Europeans wanted cheaper products from beyond the Mediterranean.
Africa became a source of cheap slave labor for plantation agriculture.
Portuguese voyages proved long-range ocean navigation was feasible.
Spain was unified and powerful to take on discovery, conquest, and colonization.
The Renaissance nurtured an ambitious spirit of optimism and adventure.
Printing presses facilitated the spread of scientific knowledge.
The mariner’s compass reduced uncertainty of sea travel.
Christopher Columbus persuaded the Spanish monarchs to outfit him with ships.
On October 12, 1492, the crew sighted an island in the Bahamas.
Seeking a new water route to the Indies, Columbus bumped into a land barrier.
He called the native peoples Indians because he thought he had skirted the rim of the "Indies."
Columbus’s discovery impacted Europe, Africa, and the two Americas.
An interdependent global economic system emerged.
Europe provided the markets, capital, and technology.
Africa furnished the labor.
The New World offered raw materials and soil for sugar cane cultivation.

When Worlds Collide

Two ecosystems commingled and clashed when Columbus landed.
The flora and fauna of the Old and New Worlds had been separated for thousands of years.
European explorers marveled at exotic beasts.
New World plants such as tobacco, maize, beans, tomatoes, and potatoes revolutionized the international economy and the European diet.
About three-fifths of the crops cultivated around the globe today originated in the Americas.
The introduction into Africa of New World foodstuffs may have fed an African population boom that offset the losses inflicted by the slave trade.
The Europeans introduced Old World crops and animals to the Americas.
Columbus returned to Hispaniola in 1493 with men and livestock.
Horses reached the North American mainland through Mexico and spread as far as Canada.
North American Indian tribes adopted the horse, transforming their cultures.
Columbus brought seedlings of sugar cane.
A "sugar revolution" took place in the European diet.
The Europeans also brought organisms such as Kentucky bluegrass, dandelions, and daisies.
They carried germs that caused smallpox, yellow fever, and malaria, which devastated the Native Americans.
Within fifty years of the Spanish arrival, the population of the Taino natives in Hispaniola dwindled from approximately 1 million to about 200.
As many as 90 percent of the Native Americans perished due to Old World sicknesses.
The Indians infected the early explorers with syphilis.

The Spanish Conquistadores

Europeans realized that the American continents held rich prizes, especially gold and silver.
Spain secured its claim to Columbus’s discovery in the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), dividing the "heathen lands" of the New World with Portugal.
Spain became the dominant exploring and colonizing power in the 1500s.
Spanish conquistadores fanned out across the Caribbean and the mainland of the American continents.
Vasco Nuñez Balboa claimed all lands touched by the Pacific Ocean for Spain in 1513.
Ferdinand Magellan started from Spain in 1519 and circumnavigated the globe, although he died in the Philippines.
Juan Ponce de León explored Florida in 1513 and 1521.
Francisco Coronado explored Arizona and New Mexico in 1540–1542.
Hernando de Soto explored the Southeast in 1539–1542 and discovered the Mississippi River.
Francisco Pizarro crushed the Incas of Peru in 1532.
By 1600, Spain was rich in New World silver.
This influx of precious metal touched off a price revolution in Europe.
New World bullion helped transform the world economy.
The islands of the Caribbean Sea served as offshore bases for the staging of the Spanish invasion of the mainland Americas.
The native communities of the West Indies provided laboratories for testing the techniques that would subdue the Indian civilizations of Mexico and Peru.
The most important technique was the encomienda, which allowed the government to "commend" Indians to certain colonists in return for Christianizing them.

The Spanish Conquistadores

In 1492, Granada fell after a ten-year siege.
The Reconquista had a mark on Spanish society.
Centuries of military and religious confrontation nurtured an obsession with status and honor, bred religious zealotry and intolerance, and created a large class of men who regarded manual labor and commerce contemptuously.
With the Reconquista ended, some of these men turned their restless gaze to Spain's New World frontier.
At first Spanish hopes for America focused on the Caribbean and on finding a sea route to Asia.
Between 1519 and 1540, Spanish conquistadores swept across the Americas.
Within half a century of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, the conquistadores had extinguished the Aztec and Incan empires and claimed for church and crown a large territory.
The military conquest of this vast region was achieved by just ten thousand men, organized in a series of private expeditions.
Hernán Cortés, Francisco Pizarro, and other aspiring conquerors signed contracts with the Spanish monarch, raised money from investors, and then went about recruiting an army.
Diverse motives spurred these motley adventurers.
Many hoped to win royal titles and favors by bringing new peoples under the Spanish flag and to ensure God's favor by spreading Christianity to the pagans.
- Almost all shared a lust for gold.
One historian adds that the conquistadores first fell on their knees and then fell upon the aborigines.
Armed with horses and gunpowder and preceded by disease, the conquistadores quickly overpowered the Indians.
The conquistadores lost still more power as the crown gradually tightened its control in the New World.
Nevertheless, the conquistadores achieved a kind of immortality.
Because of a scarcity of Spanish women in the early days of the conquest, many of the conquistadores married Indian women.
Their offspring, the mestizos, formed a cultural and a biological bridge between Latin America’s European and Indian races.

The Conquest of Mexico

In 1519, Hernán Cortés set sail from Cuba with several hundred men aboard eleven ships, bound for Mexico.
He rescued a Spanish castaway.
Cortés now had the advantage of understanding the speech of the native peoples whom he was about to encounter, including the Aztecs, due to the interpreters.
Near present-day Vera Cruz, Cortés made his final landfall and learned of unrest within the Aztec empire among the peoples from whom the Aztecs demanded tribute.
- To quell his mutinous troops, he boldly burned his ships, cutting off any hope of retreat.
As Cortés proceeded, the Aztec chieftain Moctezuma sent ambassadors bearing fabulous gifts to welcome the approaching Spaniards.
The superstitious Moctezuma also believed that Cortés was the god Quetzalcoatl.
Moctezuma allowed the conquistadores to approach his capital unopposed.
As the Spaniards entered the Valley of Mexico, the sight of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán amazed them.
Moctezuma treated Cortés hospitably at first, but soon the Spaniards’ hunger for gold and power exhausted their welcome.
On the noche triste (sad night) of June 30, 1520, the Aztecs attacked, driving the Spanish down the causeways from Tenochtitlán in a frantic, bloody retreat.
Cortés then laid siege to the city, and it capitulated on August 13, 1521.
That same year a smallpox epidemic burned through the Valley of Mexico.
The Aztec empire gave way to three centuries of Spanish rule.
The temples of Tenochtitlán were destroyed to make way for the Christian cathedrals of Mexico City.
The native population of Mexico shrank from some 20 million to 2 million people in less than a century.
He brought his crops and his animals, his language and his laws, his customs and his religion, all of which proved adaptable to the peoples of Mexico.
He intermarried with the surviving Indians, creating a distinctive culture of mestizos.

The Spread of Spanish America

Spain’s colonial empire grew swiftly and impressively.
Within about half a century of Columbus’s landfall, hundreds of Spanish cities and towns flourished in the Americas, especially in the great silver-producing centers of Peru and Mexico.
Some 160,000 Spaniards, mostly men, had subjugated millions of Indians.
There were cathedrals, printing presses and scholars
The upstart English sent Giovanni Caboto (known in English as John Cabot) to explore the northeastern coast of North America in 1497 and 1498.
The French king dispatched another Italian mariner, Giovanni da Verrazano, to probe the eastern seaboard in 1524.
Ten years later the Frenchman Jacques Cartier journeyed hundreds of miles up the St. Lawrence River.
To secure the northern periphery of their New World domain and to convert more Indian souls to Christianity, the Spanish began to fortify and settle their North American borderlands.
In a move to block French ambitions and to protect the sea-lanes to the Caribbean, the Spanish erected a fortress at St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565, founding the oldest continually inhabited European settlement in the future United States.
Led by Don Juan de Oñate, the Spaniards cruelly abused the Pueblo peoples they encountered.
They proclaimed the area to be the province of New Mexico in 1609 and founded its capital at Santa Fe the following year.
The Spanish settlers in New Mexico found a few furs and precious little gold, but they did discover a wealth of souls to be harvested for the Christian religion.
The Pueblo rebels destroyed every Catholic church in the province and killed a score of priests and hundreds of Spanish settlers.
It took nearly half a century for the Spanish fully to reclaim New Mexico from the insurrectionary Indians.
Meanwhile, as a further hedge against the ever-threatening French, who had sent an expedition under Robert de La Salle down the Mississippi River in the 1680s, the Spanish began around 1716 to establish settlements in Texas.
Some refugees from the Pueblo uprising trickled into Texas, and a few missions were established there, including the one at San Antonio later known as the Alamo.
To the west, in California, no serious foreign threat loomed, and Spain directed its attention there only belatedly.
Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo had explored the California coast in 1542, but he failed to find San Francisco Bay or anything else of much interest.
Then in 1769 Spanish missionaries led by Father Junipero Serra founded at San Diego the first of a chain of twenty-one missions that wound up the coast as far as Sonoma, north of San Francisco Bay.
The misdeeds of the Spanish in the New World obscured their substantial achievements and helped give birth to the “Black Legend.”
This false concept held that the conquerors merely tortured and butchered the Indians (“killing for Christ”), stole their gold, infected them with smallpox, and left little but misery behind.
The Spanish invaders did indeed kill, enslave, and infect countless natives, but they also erected a colossal empire, sprawling from California and Florida to Tierra del Fuego.
They are described as genuine empire builders and cultural innovators in the New World.
The Spanish paid the Native Americans the high compliment of fusing with them through marriage and incorporating indigenous culture into their own, rather than shunning and eventually isolating the Indians as their English adversaries would do.