period:1491-1607

do my eyes deceive me or do you have the anxiety sweats about learning everything you need to know about a push unit one well this video is about to dry up all that flop sweat so if you're ready to get them brain cows milked let's get to it first of all let me give you the big picture of this unit so you know where everything is headed the time period is 1491 to6007 which is to say a year before Columbus arrived in the New World until the establishment of Jamestown the first British colony in North America now we're going to start by exploring the social and political landscape of the indigenous peoples in the Americas and then we'll talk about why those rascally Europeans even showed up to begin with and then we'll consider the effects of the European intrusion in the Americas and let me just tell you it gets saucy so huh buckle up okay now before we go meeting all these indigenous groups and explore how they lived let me just tell you what you cannot afford to forget about this topic the native populations in the Americas were diverse and varied and of equal importance geography played a significant role in the development of those differences i cannot overestimate how important that point is write it down tattoo it on your forehead if you must but do not forget it the reason I'm flapping my mouth hole so vehemently about it is that there's this persistent misunderstanding about exactly who populated the Americas before European content and here to tell us about it is our new friend dimwitted Derek now I thought all Native Americans was the same what was all their teepeees and whatnot oh Derek my dim-witted cod no other way to say this but uh you basic it's a devastating insult you're devastated right now no indigenous societies were every bit as varied and diverse as societies on any other continent italians and Germans not the same chinese and Japanese emphatically not the same and so it is with many indigenous societies in the Americas okay so with that established let's go ahead and meet some of these groups but first a word from the sponsor of the creation of many of these diverse societies namely Maze now this tasty crop that we know as corn was first cultivated in what is today southern Mexico by at least 5,000 B.CE CE and then spread throughout the Americas via trade networks and migration routes and this is important because as maze became the staple crop of various peoples throughout the Americas that led to the creation of larger and more complex society for example there in central Mexico you have the Aztec Empire with its giant honking capital city of Tennos Titlon and without maze cultivation that massive urban dwelling probably would have been impossible to create and why says you well says I because for societies that adopted maze cultivation four effects usually follow but first let me mention that this video is part of a larger resource that's going to help you get an A in your class and a five on your exam in May it's my A pushheimly review guide and it's got everything you need to study as fast as possible including exclusive videos that are not here on YouTube practice questions practice exams and all the rest so if that's something that you're into that link is in the description below okay back to the effects of maze cultivation the first effect is economic development you see since larger societies typically trade with other societies that typically leads to more boom boom for all involved because surplus food frees up more of the population to specialize in other kinds of work that can be traded with others second maze cultivation leads to permanent settlements in case you never grown a crop in your life you might not know that in order to do it you kind of have to stick around and tend to those crops so for many societies that adopted maze cultivation they became what we call sedentary which is to say located in one place instead of moving around so when people get all sedentary like more complex political and social structures can develop that aren't possible in a nomadic society third it led to the development of advanced irrigation techniques now irrigation is just the process of diverting natural water sources like rivers or streams towards crops and fourth maze cultivation led to social diversification which was also the case in early civilizations all across the world now social diversification is just a fancy way of saying that when a settlement or society becomes more complex labor becomes more specialized and social hierarchies developed to organize the people into more powerful and less powerful groups all right now I know we're all having a blast talking about maze cultivation but I reckon it's high time that we meet some of these native societies and see how geography shaped their way of life so just for poops and giggles let's start over here and meet the societies of the Northeast Mississippi River Valley and the Atlantic coast but hey make sure you know at least one specific example from each of these regions even if they're not the ones that I mentioned okay here in the Northeast let me introduce you to the Irakcoy now they were semi-sedentary and relied on maze and other staple crops for survival because there are metric butloads of trees in this region that determined the kind of infrastructure they built for their society namely the long house now this is a structure in which multiple generations of a family would live together sometimes up to 200 of them then further south meet the Cherokee now maze cultivation reached them about a th000 B.CE along with beans and squash which meant that their society was built around agriculture however they would also qualify as semi-edentary because men still hunted for meat while women usually tended the crops and they moved around according to the seasons to gather wild crops in fact like many other indigenous groups Cherokee women had far more social capital than their European counterparts and that means that many of their cultures were matrinal meaning that power and possessions were passed down through generations on the mother's side not the fathers well that don't sound right well yeah Derek not in Europe where everything was real patriarchal and focused on the men folk but that's how it was here in the Americas and then moving west let me introduce you to a group of societies known as the Mississippian cultures now because of the abundance of rich soil around the Mississippi and Ohio river valleys these people were able to exist in large towns about 4,000 to 6,000 in population also since they live near complex river systems they traded extensively with other groups and all of this meant like I said before that these societies became more complex with the development of social hierarchies and the largest of the Mississippian settlements was Cahokia in which something like 10 to 20,000 people lived now that is a lot of teepeees derek they did not live in teepee it was like an urban environment like a city whatever let's just keep moving west into the Great Basin and Great Plains regions now because the climate of these regions is real hot and dry indigenous groups living here responded to their environment by developing nomadic lifestyles which is to say they moved around instead of staying in one place and a good example here is our friends the Ute now they lived in groups of 20 to 100 extended family groups and moved through the region on a seasonal basis while living in mobile shelters like animal skin tepeees i knew it yeah some indigenous groups did live in teepeees and the ute were one of them ute men were typically responsible for hunting animals like deer analopee and most of all buffalo while women gathered berries and roots and finally let's move all the way to the northwest and present day California and in general these societies did not practice agriculture and that might make you think that they were nomadic like the Great Basin and the Great Plains groups don't be crazy no groups like the Chinook and the Schumash built permanent settlements not because they were farmers but because they were able to find metric butloads of food in the ocean and the surrounding environment that made sedentary societies possible so that's just a sampling of what everything was like in the Americas up to 1491 but hold on to your buts because it's 1492 and here come the Europeans and they didn't just show up for poops and giggles no there were in fact many causes which I will consolidate here under the headings of gold God and glory and let's look at each in turn so the Europeans showed up to the Americas for gold which is to say they had economic motives a long story short prior to this period Europe was kind of like the hei of world powers just sort of along for the ride not really contributing anything meaningful to the story and good for a chuckle now and then but then came the Renaissance with all of its innovations and cultural changes and all of a sudden Europeans wanted to get fitted for some power pants now the first problem they had was that in 1453 the Ottoman Empire went ahead and gained control over the land routes that connected Europe to Asia for trade and that meant that Europeans couldn't get the goods they wanted anymore on their own terms without going through an annoying middleman so they got cranking to figure out how to get to the Asian and Southeast Asian markets via the sea to cut out the aforementioned annoying middleman now they were able to do this because of two developments first was new techniques in ship building and the adoption of maritime technology the Portuguese for example developed a new kind of ship called the Caravl which was fast and highly navigable thanks to its use of the Latin sail which could take wind from both directions and European navigators made use of older Arab and Chinese technologies like the magnetic compass which reckoned direction and the astrolab which reckoned latitude all right now the second development was the rise of joint stock companies to fund exploration among several European powers basically a joint stock company was funded by several investors as opposed to a single source of funding like a government it turned out that when these explorations went well it was fabulously profitable but when they failed everything was lost so joint stock companies made it so that many investors could pull their wealth in order to fund an expedition and if it failed they would only lose their portion but if it succeeded then huh we going to Disney World y'all anyway it turned out that Portugal would be the first to try out their sea legs and that ended up paying handsomely under the leadership of Prince Henry the Navigator the Portuguese decided to try sailing around Africa to access the riches of the Indian Ocean trade and as they sailed around Africa they established permanent trading posts along the coast where they would trade goods with various African groups in doing so they established what's known as a trading post empire which was really about controlling these small strategic posts as opposed to establishing full-blown colonies so this was going real good for Portugal and they were gaining embarrassing amounts of wealth so Spain was like "Dang we got to get us some of that." But Spain had a problem you see Portugal had already gotten control of the strategic points around Africa and into the Indian Ocean so the only option was to sail west across the Atlantic but they couldn't do it cuz the Earth was all flat no Derek everybody knew that the earth was round during this period mainly because that problem had been solved by the ancient stinking Greeks anyway that's when an Italian sailor named Christopher Columbus showed up to the Spanish corps looking for money to fund an expedition westward to reach Asian markets and at that the monarchs of Spain Ferdinand and Isabella were like and so off Columbus went and in October of 1492 he reached an island in the Caribbean and thinking he had reached the East Indies he called the indigenous people Indians now even after returning three more times he never stopped believing that he had reached Asia it fell to other Spanish explorers like Amergo Vaspuchcci to confirm that what Columbus had stumbled upon was in fact a new world hitherto unknown to Europeans anyway Spain started colonizing the Americas quick fast and in a hurry and since we're still talking about economic motives for exploration let's focus on that spain sent concistadors to the Americas to subdue populations and find wealth and as it turns out they very much did for example Hernand Cortez toppled the Aztec Empire with only a few hundred men and I'll get to the reasons for that later and then Francisco Pizaro did the same thing down with the Inca Empire and both ventures resulted in metric butloads of gold and silver being sent back to Spain which made them wealthy beyond belief but that wealth also fundamentally transformed European social and economic realities the biggest effect of this influx of wealth was that it hastened the end of feudalism and replaced it with capitalism and essentially the difference between the two is this in feudalism land equals wealth and status in capitalism capital or owning the means of production equals wealth so this was a pretty big change although to be fair feudalism was already on the way out but these developments definitely helped it out the door anyway we need to spend a little more time with Spain's economic motives because they were very much winning the imperialism game in the Americas it's pretty easy to argue that Spain would not have continued to fund voyages to the Americas if it were not for the prodigious amounts of wealth coming in as was reflected in a common proverb from the time as long as y'all got the G's we'll keep sending the C sees are sure for concisadors i'm sure it's a lot more elegant in the Spanish anyway it's true that initially Spain's wealth came in the form of gold and silver however they soon found that agriculture and the export of cash crops would be a massive money maker in addition to the export of precious metal and so they imposed various labor systems onto their colonies only one of which I'm going to tell you about it was called incomend and by definition it was a system of coerced labor in which the Spanish crown granted tracks of land to Spanish colonists known as incomanderos who forced indigenous people within its borders into plantation-based agriculture and mining more said in simpler terms the Spanish government gave their colonizers a plot of land to farm and whatever indigenous people happened to live on that land became the farmer's band of slave labor but you know in return for that labor the incomanderos were supposed to provide protection and Christian education to the indigenous populations but as these things go it really just became a form of communal slavery and on these plantations they grew highly profitable crops like sugarcane and tobacco and cotton etc and now that this colonial machine was just printing cash for the Spanish it became a real problem when indigenous laborers kept running away or dying from disease and I'll talk more about that in a moment anyway in order to keep the wealth flowing Spain gradually replaced indigenous slaves with enslaved African laborers spanish merchants and other colonial powers as well partnered with West African groups in order to trade goods guns being the most desirable good for enslaved Africans from the interior of the continent who were often captured in wars or raids many of the African groups involved in the trade of people became wealthy and also powerful owing to the superior weaponry they gained in trading with the Europeans and so gradually enslaved Africans became the dominant labor system in Spanish America and Spanish wealth only continued to increase okay now the last thing you need to know under this heading in reference to Spain is how they kept control of their American colonies and one of the most significant means of control was the Spanish cast system which was a complete reorganization of the social structure of societies in the Americas according to a race-based hierarchy now to be clear this kind of structure was not in place among indigenous peoples before the Spanish came it was wholesale slapped upon them by the invading Spanish in an attempt to maintain control of their wealth producing opportunities and I'll keep it real simple the folks on top of the hierarchy were Spaniards especially those who were actually born in Spain at the bottom were indigenous and African people and then there were various levels in the middle that represented mixed race people who were the result of European you know contact basically the more white blood a person had the purer they were considered to be and therefore higher on the hierarchy and vice versa and that brings us to the second cause of European exploration namely God which is to say there were also religious motivations now to really understand this you have to know that during this time much of Europe was in the middle of a religious crisis and lots of instability that came along with it so the dominant belief system in Europe since the dang Roman Empire was Christianity which was represented by the Roman Catholic Church and yes there was a major split in the church in the 11th century but we're going to leave that to the side for our purposes all you really need to know is that after that split Western Europe became the bastion of Roman Catholicism but in 1517 a saucy Catholic monk by the name of Martin Luther went ahead and started the Protestant Reformation which split the Christian church in Europe once again the point is European states were choosing sides as Catholic or Protestant the conflict was highly charged as religious conflicts tend to be and during that time in Europe the church and state were about as close together as a can of sardines in a hydraulic press which is to say the church and the state were not separate entities at all therefore since there were now two belief systems fighting for dominance and since those belief systems were tied very closely to the state European leaders were very concerned to show that their particular version of Christianity was better than the other and what better way to do that than to gobble up a bunch of colonies around the world and convert folks to your particular flavor of belief case in point Spain in 1469 Christian Spain was unified when Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon got married and then they got busy leading the Reconista which by 1492 had reconquered all areas formerly under Muslim control uniting Spain as a Catholic state sacramento high fives all around y'all and so the glory of that victory got them real itchy to spread Catholic Christianity as far as they could and I hope you're starting to connect the dots by now because what else happened in Spain in 1492 christopher Columbus showed up before the Spanish court looking for money to sail west and so as the Spanish got their American empire running they sent metric butloads of Catholic missionaries right along with the concistadors in order to convert the native populations to Christianity now keep that in your back pocket because we're going to come back to it in a minute but for now let's consider the final cause of European exploration which is say it with me glory or if you're not that sassy you could say that these are the political motives so once contact was made between the old and new worlds it quickly became a competition between European states to acquire colonial possessions in order to shift the balance of power in their favor additionally political change was occurring in some European states in which large multithnic empires were breaking apart while some kingdoms were becoming united and more powerful and that new political reality in which a state ruled over a people with similar language and culture and history was known as the nation state anyway these political changes meant that European powers were eager to be the greatest on the world stage and the way to become great was to build maritime empires and as you might expect that eventually caused some tension and a good example here would be the spat between Portugal and Spain over their respective New World claims long story short Portugal was getting a little saucy over the fact that Spain was gobbling up colonial territory in the Americas that belonged to Portugal so they did what any Christian state would do and geared up a fleet of ships to go blow Spain's crap up but since they were both Catholic states the Pope got involved and settled their dispute by drawing a line of demarcation which settled the question of which new world territories belong to whom in 1494 the line was moved slightly and codified in the Treaty of Tores which established Portugal's claim over a part of Brazil and Spain's claim to dang near every other part of the Americas much of which they didn't even know was there yet now conspicuously absent from these negotiations were the indigenous Americans themselves and I think it's safe to say that they were not nearly as stoked about the treaty as were the Spanish and the Portuguese and I'll get back to that but for now I need to tell you about perhaps one of the most significant effects of European exploration during this period that's right it's everybody's favorite inter oceanic transfer the Columbian Exchange and let's start with a definition the Columbian Exchange refers to the transfer of plants animals minerals diseases and people between the old and new world and in case you don't know the old world is how Europeans refer to their world namely Afrourasia new world is how Europeans refer to the Americas despite the fact that the Americas were every bit as old as the old world but you know whatever anyway maybe the transfer of stuff between old and new worlds doesn't sound like much of a big deal to you those guys got a potato those guys got a turkey who cares well my dear pupil allow me to explain because the Columbian exchange was arguably the most significant demographic and environmental and ecological change that you'll have the pleasure of studying in all of world history so let's start with a transfer of disease now because folks throughout Afroureurasia or if you're sassy the old world because they had been in contact for millennia they had developed immunities to each other's nasty cooties however because of the isolation of indigenous peoples of the Americas the diseases Europeans introduced were devastating small pox was the most devastating disease and it was first introduced to the Caribbean by Spanish explorers eventually it spread throughout Mexico and Central America and killed around half the indigenous population there and then spread into South America with similar devastating results in fact evidence suggests that by 1600 some indigenous populations were reduced by 90% so now tying it all together you can see why Spanish concistadors were able to conquer such massive empires with relatively few men when they introduced smallox it weakened resistance significantly and also this is a big reason the encoma system was replaced by African slavery like many of the indigenous slaves were dying of smallpox okay the second major transfer that occurred during the colombian exchange included food and plants and this transfer had major effects on both old and new world so for example European settlers brought wheat and olives and grapes which were staple of European diets eventually they also introduced African and Asian foods like rice and bananas and sugar and then new world crops were also transferred to Europe foods like maize and potatoes and mania and so the introduction of these nutrient-rich foods contributed to healthier populations in Europe which led to a population explosion after 1700 okay third on the transfer list was animals and by far the most significant were the animals introduced by Europeans into the Americas livestock like pigs and sheep and cattle were introduced and because they had no natural predators in the Western Hemisphere they multiplied rapidly as a result indigenous farmers were faced with the destruction of their environment as freeranging animals trampled and grazed on their crops but by far the most impactful animal to be introduced to the Americas by the Spanish was the horse indigenous groups in the great plains like the Apaches and the Comanches and the Kyas used the horse to more effectively hunt large herds of buffalo which was a staple food item for them additionally horses also significantly changed warfare tactics and bonus that change had the effect of increasing violent conflict between various tribes and between European and indigenous groups the introduction of the horse was a change that fundamentally altered their way of life and then the fourth item to know in the Columbian exchange was minerals mainly gold and silver now before the Spanish discovered that cash cropping would earn them a great deal of wealth in the Americas their main focus was on extracting gold and silver from their colonial holdings and I already talked about this when we talked about the gold motivation for exploration so you know I'll just leave it at that and finally the fifth major transfer was people now some indigenous Americans were brought back to Europe but by far the bigger impact was the millions of enslaved Africans transferred to colonial America in order to work the cash crop plantation after having to endure the brutality of the dreaded middle passage across the Atlantic Ocean they were met with equally brutal conditions as they were forced to work the fields okay here in the last section let's tie it all up by considering a handful of effects that occurred as a result of this interaction between the old and new world and right out of the gate you need to know that as contact between Europeans and the various indigenous peoples of the Americas increased it became clear that their worldviews were very different or to say it plainly these two groups saw the world completely different from each other and you're going to need to know four examples first Europeans and indigenous people held drastically differing views on land use europeans believed that land could be owned by individuals but the dominant indigenous belief was that land was a resource available to all and had a kind of spiritual quality to it like a source of life not a commodity available for private ownership second they held different views on religion as I mentioned before Europeans were on the whole Christian and adhered to a complex set of dogmas and doctrines most notably the doctrine of a single God and although indigenous belief systems varied many of them believed in multiple gods and spirits that inhabited and connected all living things and therefore they did not separate the spiritual and material realms as was common in European Christianity and then third we've got differing views on gender roles europeans tended to be patriarchal whereas indigenous people tended to be more egalitarian even to the extent that some family and power structures were matrinal and while indigenous men and women often held different roles in society every individual played a vital role and fourth they held different views on family european's concept of family especially in Western Europe emphasized the nuclear family whereas indigenous peoples lived together in extended families which emphasized the importance of shared responsibility in child raising and respect for elders and cultural transmission and so all that to say most of the early years of contact between Europeans and indigenous groups were full of misunderstandings as they sought to make sense out of each other but eventually in some cases Europeans and Native Americans adopted some useful aspects of each other's culture for example due to the Spanish effort to establish Christian missions in southwest North America many indigenous peoples converted to Christianity now it's certainly arguable that these conversions occurred due to the heavy-handed and sometimes brutal tactics of the Spanish missionaries you better give your heart to Jesus cuz your but is mine however being polytheists the indigenous people saw no conflict in adding the Christian God to the worship of their other gods for example the Virgin of Guadalupe incorporates important aspects both of Christian and Aztec religious traditions or maybe it was enticing for the indigenous people to convert to Christianity when they observed that the Spanish remained largely unaffected by the epidemics killing large portions of the indigenous population so maybe they were like "What's the harm of adding our boy Jesus to the mix of our other gods?" Well as it turned out the Spanish missionaries could not abide Jesus being honored among other gods as an equal and so some of them resorted to brutal tactics to bring indigenous people into Christian orthodoxy okay now on the other side European settlers adopted useful aspects of indigenous culture for example the English settlers in North America just about died before natives of the region taught them local agricultural techniques and French settlers mostly interested in the robust American fur trade often intermarried with indigenous women in order to firm up trade relations which I maintain is about the most fairy tale reason to get married that I've ever heard but big but massive but you have to know that even though the invading Europeans turned out to be a pretty powerful bunch that got much of what they wanted in the Americas indigenous people did resist their intrusion and that basically happened in two ways first some indigenous groups engaged in diplomatic negotiations by allying with certain European groups in order to protect themselves this occurred when several groups under Aztec power allied with the Spanish in order to topple the Aztecs and second there was military resistance now the Pueblo revolt won't happen till the next period but it is a great example of indigenous people getting fed up with Spanish efforts to erase their culture and full-on defeating them in battle but in this period a good example is the Tino Rebellion so in 1511 the native people of modern-day Puerto Rico rebelled against the Spanish because they had grown tired of the brutal conditions of the Encomienda system and the threat to their cultural traditions as the Spanish attempted to convert them to Christianity now the Tino were much greater in number than the Spanish and initially they had some success but ultimately the superior Spanish weaponry won the day and then the last effective contact that I need to mention is this debate over the status of Native Americans and Africans so after this prolonged contact between Europeans and Native Americans and Africans a debate rose among Europeans about whether the brutal conditions of slavery either through the incoming system or African slavery was justified and in Spain the status of indigenous people was argued in the viadelid debates on one side was Barthole de lasas upon his arrival to the Americas he actually owned indigenous slaves and even fought a war against them however over time he became one of their chief advocates in Spain he argued that indigenous people were fully human and thus ought not to be subject to the inhumane ravages of systems like incomienda on the other side was Juan Guin de Seepovveda who argued that indigenous people were in fact less than human and as such benefited from service to Europeans and so it's important to realize that this debate among the religious folk revealed that there was no singular agreement on exactly who these indigenous people were since they were not mentioned in the Bible and therefore there's no clear instruction on how they ought to be treated and ultimately that question remained but Europeans were able to develop novel justifications for their harsh treatment of Africans and indigenous people for example in order to justify the brutality of African slavery Christians turned to the Bible specifically an event known as the curse of Ham in the story God curses Noah's son Ham to be a servant of his brothers and it was said that God put a mark on him to signify his servitude now the story doesn't say what the mark was but Christians seeking to justify slavery decided that the mark must be dark skin and that was enough for them to continue their brutal policies toward African and indigenous people all right click here to watch my other unit one videos and click here to get your hands on my A push Himler review guide which is the fastest way to study and hey I'll catch you on the flip-flop