Download Honors Summer Assignment 1.) Read the a

Verona High School
Department of History and Social Sciences
United States History I – Honors
Summer Assignment
1.) Read the attached Digital History packet for background information. Answer the provided guided reading and
critical thinking questions. The packet is available on line on the summer assignment website, and those of your
teachers. You may also access by digitalhistory.uh.edu.
2.) Read the following excerpts from primary and secondary sources, and answer all of the corresponding questions.
Once you have done this, you will take a position on the issue.
Your answers should be thorough, insightful, and include specific evidence. You should bring two typed copies to the
first day of class – one to submit and one for your reference.
Upon your return, (first or second day of class) you will write an in-class essay using these sources as well as examples
from the background information from the digital history packet. (Attached) You are required to synthesize information
with at least 8 of the 10 DBQ documents. Do not write the DBQ essay over the summer.
Teacher Contact Information:
Ms. Wallerstein: [email protected]
Mr. Tamburro: [email protected]
To receive the timeliest responses, it is recommended that you send any queries to both teachers!
DUE: THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2014
Academic Integrity: It is expected that students will complete this task independently and in their own words.
Digital History Packet Questions
These readings can be found in PDF on the VHS summer assignment webpage, or by visiting the sites of Mr. Tamburro
and/or Ms. Wallerstein. You may also find the sections at digitalhistory.uh.edu.
The Significance of 1492
1. Why is Columbus’ legacy debated?
2. What were the most important effects of the contact between the eastern and western hemispheres that began with
Columbus’s journey?
3. How did Columbus’s voyage contribute to the development of the modern idea of progress?
European Commercial and Financial Expansion
4. Why did Portugal lead the revolution of sea travel during the 15th century?
5. What were Columbus’s motivations for exploration?
Slavery and Spanish Colonization
6. Why were West African slaves imported to the New World?
The Black Legend
7. What were the 18th century French criticisms of the European discovery of America?
8. What was the “Black Legend” and how did other European countries use it to disparage Spain?
9. Who was Bartolome de las Casas and what was his connection to the “Black Legend”?
European Colonization North of Mexico
10. What were the obstacles Europeans faced in trying to establish permanent colonies north of Mexico?
11. How were English migrations to and settlements in America different from that of other European countries?
12. How were the British colonies different from Britain itself?
Spanish Colonization
13. What were the defining characteristics of Spanish American colonies?
14. What was ‘mercantilism’ and what was its role in Spanish colonization?
15. How was the Spanish view of race and class different from the English?
English Colonization Begins
16. What were the benefits of North American colonies for England?
17. What were the obstacles facing English settlers in Jamestown?
18. Why was Captain John Smith important to the Jamestown colony?
19. Why do people question the accuracy of Smith’s story about Pocahontas?
20. What was the basis of the economic success of the Jamestown colony?
Age of Exploration DBQ
Context:
The time period from 1400 to 1700 C.E. is commonly referred to as the Age of Exploration. Many of the individuals
who accomplished these feats of adventure and exploration, including Columbus, Magellan, and Cortes, have names
that are as recognizable as any in the history of the world. Continents, countries, and cities are named after many of
these men whose actions changed the world permanently. While their efforts and successes are still celebrated by
modern society, the overall impact of those voyages, contacts, and conflicts have created a divided view of their
cultural and historical legacy.
Prompt
Should the European explorers, conquistadors, and settlers from the Age of Exploration still be glorified and
celebrated in modern times?
Those who celebrate these explorers tend to point to the benefits of cultural diffusion in terms of knowledge, skills,
and technology, as well as ideas and religion.
The opposing viewpoint tends to argue that the benefits of exploration were one-sided and came at a heavy cost, that the
explorers/conquerors were greedy and cruel, andthat European settlement led to the destruction of native culture and
populations.or
is assignmen, write your essay as a letter to your g
Document A: Bernal Diaz, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain.
Let us state how most of the Indian natives have successfully learned all the Spanish trades…There are gold and
silversmiths…and carvers also do the most beautiful work with iron tools…Many sons of chieftains know how to read
and write, and to compose books…Now they breed cattle of all sorts, and break in oxen, and plough the land, and sow
wheat, and thresh harvest, and sell it, and make bread, and they have planted their lands with all the trees and fruits, such
as apples and pears which they hold in higher regard than their native plants, which we have brought from Spain.
1.)
To what extent does this passage portray the concept of cultural diffusion?
2.)
What was the effect of European conquest on native populations?
Document B: Hernán Cortés. Excerpt of Letter to Charles V
They have a custom, horrible, and abominable, and deserving punishment…Whenever they ask anything of their gods, in
order for their request to be fulfilled, they take many boys, girls, men, and women, and in the presence of the statues of
their gods they cut open their chests. While they are still alive they take out their hearts and entrails. Then they burn the
organs, offering the smoke as a sacrifice to their gods…No year passes in which they do not kill and sacrifice 50 souls at
each temple in their kingdom… I did everything I could to steer them away from their false gods and to draw them to our
Lord God. Montezuma agreed that I probably knew best…He said that as long as I taught the Aztecs our religion they
would follow my directions. Therefore, I removed the statues of the false gods, cleaned the temples, and taught the people
our religion. The rest of the Aztecs did not accept the new religion that I was giving them. They did make sure, though,
that they did not sacrifice any more humans while I was in the city…
3.)
What was the purpose of human sacrifice in the Aztec religion?
4.)
What did Cortes do to end the practice of human sacrifice?
Document C: William Duiker and Jackson Spielvogel, “The Columbian Exchange” as found in World History.
The European expansion into the Americas began the exchange of plant and animal species that have ultimately been of
widespread benefit to peoples throughout the globe. The introduction of the horse, cow, and various grains vastly
increased food productivity in the Americas. The cultivation of corn, manioc, and the potato, all products of the
Americas, have had the same effect in Asia, Africa, and Europe. The “Columbian Exchange,” as it is sometimes called,
was a process that ultimately brought benefits to all peoples.
From the Western Hemisphere
Corn
Potatoes
Beans
Manioc
Squash
Peanuts
Cocoa
Turkeys
Silver
Quinine (a
drug for
malaria)
5. How did Europeans and Native Americans
benefit from the Columbian Exchange?
From the Eastern Hemisphere
Wheat
Rice Oats
Sugar
Coffee
Horses
Cows Pigs
Chickens
Smallpox
Document D: Christopher Farman, “The Ocean Adventurers, found in Voyages of Discovery
Portugal was the first country in which the new spirit of curiosity had practical results in terms of exploration. The
Portuguese had many motivations to explore. They certainly had a desire for knowledge, but they were also searching
for wealth through trade. A nobler purpose was the belief that it was their duty to bring Christianity to distant lands.
One Portuguese who stands out for his accomplishments is Magellan. Magellan achieved what Columbus first suggested:
connecting Europe with Asia by sailing west. The last great unknown ocean had been crossed. The world itself stood
revealed. Much remained to be mapped, but an outline was in place for future generations to fill in. The explorers of the
fifteenth century and early sixteenth centuries did not set out to make a revolution in knowledge, but that is what they
achieved. The Portuguese not only ended the isolation of Europe; they also set it on the path to worldwide expansion.
Their voyages of discovery stand at the very beginning of the world’s first global culture.
6. To what extent did the Portuguese reflect Western values associated with the Renaissance spirit?
Document E: Arthur M. Schlesinger in Columbus on Trial
European culture, like any other large-scale civilization, has produced its share of monsters and atrocities, but other
civilizations in their conquests did not show anything like the concern for moral behavior and treatment of others that
Europe did in theory if not always in fact. As Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., has rightly pointed out: Whatever the particular
crimes of Europe, that continent is also the source—the unique source—of the liberating ideas of the individual liberty,
political democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and cultural freedom that constitute our most precious legacy and to
which most of the world today aspires. In fact, it was precisely the contact with Americas that stimulated Europe to
develop further some of the principles we take for granted today as constituting the basic minimum of human rights and
proper international conduct.
7.) What is the connection between exploration and the development of human rights both in Europe and the
Americas?
Document F: Geoffrey Cowley in the Great Disease Migration
Many experts now believe that the New World was home to
40 million to 50 million people before Columbus arrived and that most of them died within
decades. In Mexico alone, the native population fell from roughly 30 million in 1519 to 3
million in 1568. There was similar devastation throughout the Caribbean islands, Central
America and Peru. The eminent Yale historian David Brion Davis says this was “the
greatest genocide in the history of man.” Yet it’s increasingly clear that most of the carnage
had nothing to do with European barbarism. The worst of the suffering was caused not by
swords or guns but by germs.
By the time Columbus set sail, the people of the Old World held the distinction of being
thoroughly diseased. By domesticating pigs, horses, sheep and cattle, they had infected
themselves with a wide array of germs. And through centuries of war, exploration, and
city-building, they had kept those agents in constant circulation. Virtually any European
who crossed the Atlantic during the 16th century had battled such illness as smallpox and
measles during childhood and emerged fully immune.
By contrast, the people of the Americas had spent thousands of years in biological isolation. By the time Columbus had
arrived, groups like the Aztecs and Maya of Central America and Peru’s Incas had built cities large enough to sustain
major epidemics. Archeological evidence suggests they suffered from syphilis, tuberculosis, a few intestinal parasites and
some types of influenza. Yet they remained untouched by the diseases that had raged for centuries in the Old World.
When the newcomers arrived carrying mumps, measles, whooping cough, smallpox, cholera, gonorrhea and yellow fever,
the Indians were immunologically defenseless.
8.) Why were the Native Americans particularly vulnerable to European diseases?
Document G: Miguel Léon-Portilla, The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico
[After the Spaniards fled Tenochtitlan after La Noche Triste, a great plague
broke out here in Tenochtitlan.] It began to spread during [the month of
October] and lasted for seventy days, striking everywhere in the city and killing
a vast number of our people. Sores erupted on our faces, our breasts, our
bellies; we were covered with agonizing sores from head to foot.
The illness was so dreadful that no one could walk or move. The sick were so
utterly helpless, they could only lie on their beds like corpses, unable to move
their limbs or even their heads. They could not lie face down or roll from one
side to the other. If they did move their bodies, they screamed with pain. A great
many died from this plague and many others died of hunger. They could not get
to search for food and everyone else was too sick to care for them, so they
starved to death in their own beds. … Their looks were ravaged, for wherever a
sore broke out, it gouged an ugly pockmark in the skin. And a few of the
survivors were left completely blind.
The first cases were reported outside of the city. By the time the danger was recognized, the plague was so well
established that nothing could halt it and spread to all of the region around Lake Texcoco. Then its virulence diminished
considerably, though there were many isolated cases for many months after. The very first victims were stricken during
[early September] and the faces of our warriors were not clean and free of sores until [the end of November].
9.) What were the effects of smallpox on the population of Tenochtitlan?
10.) What was the effect of conquest and settlement on the total population of native civilizations?
11.) To what extent did these effects impact the society and culture of Native Americans?
Document H: “Indians in Latin America,” found in The World Book
During the early 1500’s, Spain established the encomienda system in Latin America. Under this system, the Spanish
king granted colonists the right to collect payments from Indians living in certain areas of land. The Spanish landowners
forced the Indians to farm the land or work in mines. Eventually, the colonists claimed to own the land. Thousands of
Indians died from overwork and harsh treatment.
Spanish threats to Indian ways of life were not limited to forcing them to work for the colonists’ benefit. The Spaniards
also weakened traditional tribal bonds by resettling individual members of tribes far apart so that they would have little
contact with one another. In some cases, Indians were moved to specially designed villages where they would be forced to
give up their customs so they could be taught Christianity and European customs and manners.
During their rule in Latin America, the Spaniards also created a class structure based on race. In general, the Spaniards
and their children were the highest class. Mestizos (people of Indian and Spanish descent) and mulattoes (people of
African and Spanish ancestry) formed the next class. The lowest class was made up of African slaves and Indians.
12.) Explain how the Spanish benefitted from the encomienda system?
13.) What was Spanish colonization like for the natives and other non-Europeans?
Document I: The Oral History of Chief Hatuey
As a witness of the atrocities of the Spanish conquistadors against the Taino Indians, Chief Hatuey rounded up his
people and fled to another island. He was finally captured and sentenced to burn at the stake for having organized
an uprising against the Spanish. A Spanish monk who was present on the day of the execution attempted to convert
him to Christianity. The friar explained to the chief about conversion, baptism, and the Catholic concept of heaven
and hell. He offered to baptize Chief Hatuey.
The chief requested some time to think about the offer. After a few moments he gave his legendary response. Hatuey
first asked the monk, "After being baptized, where does one go after death?" The monk responded, "To Heaven." The
chief then asked, "And where do the Spanish go after death?" The monk replied, "If they are baptized, they will also go
to heaven like all Christians.” Then the chief bravely responded "If the Spaniards go to heaven, then I certainly do not
want to go there. Do not baptize me, I would prefer to go to hell!"
14.) What was Chief Hatuey’s attitude toward the Spanish?
Document J: Bartolomé de las Casas, A Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies
Of all the people of the world, the Indians are naturally the most patient and peaceful. They hold no grudges and do not
start fights. Because they are so weak and willing to please others, though, they are unable to endure heavy labor and
soon die of some disease. They are also poor, possess very little, and have no desire to own more. For this reason they
are not greedy. They are very clean, with intelligent minds. They are ready and willing to learn, so it is very likely they
will accept our Catholic religion and our virtuous customs.
Yet into these sheep came some Spaniards who immediately behaved like
wild wolves. The Spaniards killed and terrorized the native peoples in
order to gain more gold and to make themselves richer. With their horses
and metal weapons, the Spaniards began to carry out massacres and
strange cruelties against Indians. For example, they made bets as to who
could split a man in half or could cut off his head or spill out his entrails
with a single swing of a sword or pike. They took infants by the legs and
pitched them headfirst against rocks or by the arms and threw them into
the river, roaring with laughter the whole time. They made some gallows
where they hanged victims with their feet almost touching the ground …
then set burning wood just under their feet and burned them alive. The
few survivors, if there were any, would then be divided up by the
conquistadors to be slaves.
15.) How did de las Casas view the Native Americans?
16.) Why does he use the phrase “wild wolves” to describe the Spanish?
Rubric for DBQ Guiding Questions
4: Student successfully responds to question using specific documentary evidence that is relevant to the essay prompt.
3: Student answers question correctly, but response is vague or fails to include all necessary evidence.
2: Student fails to answer question correctly but does include some relevant evidence OR student answers question with
no evidence
1: Response is not related to the question, but approaches critical thinking
0: No response
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Exploration and Discovery
The Significance of 1492
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Digital History ID 3567
The four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus's "discovery" of the New World was
commemorated with a massive "Columbian Exhibition" in Chicago in 1893. The exhibition
celebrated Columbus as a man of mythic stature, an explorer and discoverer who carried
Christian civilization across the Atlantic Ocean and initiated the modern age.
The five hundredth anniversary of Columbus's first voyage of discovery was treated quite
differently. Many peoples of indigenous and African descent identified Columbus with
imperialism, colonialism, and conquest. The National Council of Churches adopted a resolution
calling October 12th a day of mourning for millions of indigenous people who died as a result of
European colonization.
More than five hundred years after the first Spaniards arrived in the Caribbean, historians and
the general public still debate Columbus's legacy. Should he be remembered as a great
discoverer who brought European culture to a previously unknown world? Or should he be
condemned as a man responsible for an "American Holocaust," a man who brought devastating
European and Asian diseases to unprotected native peoples, who disrupted the American
ecosystem, and who initiated the Atlantic slave trade? What is Columbus's legacy--discovery
and progress or slavery, disease, and racial antagonism?
To confront such questions, one must first recognize that the encounter that began in 1492
among the peoples of the Eastern and Western Hemispheres was one of the truly epochal
events in world history. This cultural collision not only produced an extraordinary transformation
of the natural environment and human cultures in the New World, it also initiated far-reaching
changes in the Old World as well.
New foods reshaped the diets of people in both hemispheres. Tomatoes, chocolate, potatoes,
corn, green beans, peanuts, vanilla, pineapple, and turkey transformed the European diet, while
Europeans introduced sugar, cattle, pigs, cloves, ginger, cardamon, and almonds to the
Americas. Global patterns of trade were overturned, as crops grown in the New World-including tobacco, rice, and vastly expanded production of sugar--fed growing consumer
markets in Europe.
Even the natural environment was transformed. Europeans cleared vast tracks of forested land
and inadvertently introduced Old World weeds. The introduction of cattle, goats, horses,
sheep, and swine also transformed the ecology as grazing animals ate up many native plants
and disrupted indigenous systems of agriculture. The horse, extinct in the New World for
10,000 years, transformed the daily existence of many indigenous peoples. The introduction of
the horse encouraged many farming peoples to become hunters and herders. Hunters mounted
on horses were also much more adept at killing game.
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Death and disease - these too were consequences of contact. Diseases against which Indian
peoples had no natural immunities caused the greatest mass deaths in human history. Within a
century of contact, smallpox, measles, mumps, and whooping cough had reduced indigenous
populations by 50 to 90 percent. From Peru to Canada, disease reduced the resistance that
Native Americans were able to offer to European intruders.
With the Indian population decimated by disease, Europeans gradually introduced a new labor
force into the New World: enslaved Africans. Between 1502 and 1870, when the Atlantic slave
trade was finally suppressed, ten to fifteen million Africans were shipped to the Americas.
Columbus's voyage of discovery also had another important result; it contributed to the
development of the modern concept of progress. To many Europeans, the New World seemed
to be a place of innocence, freedom, and eternal youth. Columbus himself believed that he had
landed near the Biblical Garden of Eden. The perception of the New World as an environment
free from the corruptions and injustices of European life would provide a vantage point for
criticizing all social evils. So while the collision of three worlds resulted in death and
enslavement in unprecedented numbers, it also encouraged visions of a more perfect future.
The European voyages of discovery of the late fifteenth century played a critical role in the
development of modern conceptions of progress. From the ancient Greeks onward, western
culture tended to emphasize certain unchanging and universal ideas about human society. But
the discovery of the New World threw many supposedly universal ideals into doubt. The
Indians, who seemingly lived free from all the traditional constraints of civilized life--such as
private property or family bonds--offered a vehicle for criticizing the corruptions, abuses, and
restrictions of European society.
In 1516 the English humanist Sir Thomas More (1478-1535) published Utopia, his description of
an ideal society where crime, injustice, and poverty did not exist. Writing just twenty-four
years after Columbus's first voyage to the Caribbean, More located his perfect society in the
Western Hemisphere. More's book, which is written in the form of a dialogue, pointedly
contrasts the simplicity of life in Utopia with contemporary Europe's class divisions. In Utopia,
property is held in common, gold is scorned, and all inhabitants eat the same food and wear
the same clothes. And yet several features of More's Utopia strike a jarring note. For one
thing, his book justifies taking land from the indigenous people because, in European eyes, they
did not cultivate it. And secondly, the prosperity and well-being of More's ideal society
ultimately rests on slave labor.
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Exploration and Discovery
European Commercial and Financial Expansion
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Digital History ID 3568
Christopher Columbus's voyages of discovery were part of a much broader pattern of European
commercial and financial expansion during the fifteenth century. In the span of less than four
decades, European countries revolutionized sea travel. Led by tiny Portugal, fifteenth-century
European mariners adapted from the Arabs a small sturdy ship--known as the caravel--that
was capable of sailing against the wind. They also refined such navigational aids as the
astrolabe and quadrants, allowing sailors to accurately chart their latitude, while mapmakers
and geographers greatly improved the quality of maps. In just a decade, from 1488 to 1498,
European sailors mastered the winds and currents of the south Atlantic, making it possible for
the first time to sail from Western Europe to West Africa and into the Indian Ocean.
With financial support from German and Italian bankers and merchants, Portugal was able to
exploit these discoveries and create a system of long-distance trade and commerce based on
sugar and slavery. As early as 1420, the Portuguese began to settle islands off the West
African coast. In Madeira, the Azores, the Canary Islands, and other islands, the Portuguese
introduced sugar cane. Beginning in 1443, Portugal established a string of trading posts along
the West African coast, which soon became major sources of slave labor for the Iberian
Peninsula and especially for the Atlantic island sugar plantations.
Christopher Columbus was very familiar with this network of Atlantic trade. Born in Genoa in
1451, the son of an Italian wool weaver, Columbus was pushed by his father into trade. In
1476 he settled in a Genoese trading community in Portugal. There, he met his wife, whose
father was the Portuguese governor of an island off Africa's Atlantic coast. For ten years
Columbus lived in Madeira and made voyages to the Azores, the Canary Islands, and western
Africa. Forty-one years old at the time he made his first voyage of discovery, Columbus was
obsessed with the idea of finding a new route to the Far East, which would provide him with
enough wealth to pay for the liberation of the Holy Land from Islamic rule. Personally familiar
with slavery and sugar production when he arrived in the Caribbean, he quickly saw the
opportunity to extract riches from this new land.
Within days of his arrival in the New World, Columbus regarded the Indian population as a
potential labor source. As he and other Europeans would soon discover, the Indians, especially
the Caribs, were not as timid or as easily dominated as Columbus originally thought.
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Exploration and Discovery
Slavery and Spanish Colonization
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Digital History ID 3569
Christopher Columbus believed that Indians would serve as a slave labor force for Europeans,
especially on the sugar cane plantations off the western coast of north Africa. Convinced that
the Taino Indians of the Caribbean would make ideal slaves, he transported 500 to Spain in
1495. Some 200 died during the overseas voyage. Thus Columbus initiated the African slave
trade, which originally moved from the New World to the Old, rather than the reverse.
By the beginning of the sixteenth century, Spain's experiments in enslaving Indians were failing.
To meet the mounting demand for labor in mining and agriculture, the Spanish began to exploit
a new labor force: slaves from western Africa.
Slavery was a familiar institution to many sixteenth-century Europeans. Although slavery had
gradually died out in northwestern Europe, it continued to flourish around the Mediterranean
Sea. Ongoing warfare between Christianity and Islam produced thousands of slave laborers,
who were put to work in heavy agriculture in Italy, southern France, eastern Spain, Sicily, and
eastern Europe near the Black Sea. Most slaves in this area were "white"--either Arabs or
natives of Russia and eastern Europe. But by the mid-fifteenth century, the expansion of the
Ottoman Empire cut off the supply of white slaves. It was during the mid-fifteenth century
that Portugal established trading relations along the West African coast, and discovered that it
was able to purchase huge numbers of black slaves at a low cost.
Several factors made African slaves the cheapest and most expedient labor source. The
prevailing ocean currents made it relatively easy to transport Africans to the Caribbean.
Further, because Africans came from developed agricultural societies, they were already
familiar with highly organized tropical agriculture. The first African slaves were brought to the
New World as early as 1502, where they would mine precious metals and raise sugar, coffee,
and tobacco--the first goods sold to a mass consumer market.
The African slave trade would be an indispensable part of European settlement and
development of the New World. By the mid-eighteenth century, slaves could be found
everywhere in the Americas from French Canada to Chile. Indeed, the number of Africans
forcibly imported into the New World actually exceeded the number of whites who would come
to the Americas before the 1830s. Between 1492 and 1820, approximately ten to fifteen million
Africans were forcibly brought to the New World, while only about two million Europeans had
migrated.
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Exploration and Discovery
The Meaning of America
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Digital History ID 3570
At the time of the first discoveries, Europeans tended to view the New World from one of two
contrasting perspectives. Many saw America as an earthly paradise, a land of riches and
abundance, where the native peoples led lives of simplicity and freedom similar to those
enjoyed by Adam and Eve in the Biblical Garden of Eden.
Other Europeans described America in a much more negative light: as a dangerous and
forbidding wilderness, a place of cannibalism and human misery, where the population lacked
Christian religion and the trappings of civilization. This latter view of America as a place of
savagery, cannibalism, and death would grow more pronounced as the Indian population
declined precipitously in numbers as a result of harsh labor and the ravages of disease and as
the slave trade began transporting millions of Africans to the New World.
But it was the positive view of America as a land of liberty, liberation, and material wealth that
would remain dominant. America would serve as a screen on which Europeans projected their
deepest fantasies of a land where people could escape inherited privilege, corruption, and
tradition. The discovery of America seemed to mark a new beginning for humanity, a place
where all Old World laws, customs, and doctrines were removed, and where scarcity gave way
to abundance.
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Exploration and Discovery
The Black Legend
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Digital History ID 3571
Late in the eighteenth century, around the time of the three hundredth anniversary of
Columbus's voyage of discovery, the Abbé Raynal (1713-1796), a French philosopher, offered a
prize for the best answer to the question: "Has the discovery of America been beneficial or
harmful to the human race?"
Eight responses to the question survive. Of these, four argued that Columbus's voyage had
harmed human happiness. The European discovery of the New World had a devastating impact
on the Indian peoples of the Americas. Oppressive labor, disruption of the Indian food supply,
deliberate campaigns of extermination, and especially disease decimated the Indian population.
Isolated from such diseases as smallpox, influenza, and measles, the indigenous population
proved to be extraordinarily susceptible. Within a century of contact, the Indian population in
the Caribbean and Mexico had shrunk by over 90 percent.
During the sixteenth century, when the House of Habsburg presided over an empire that
included Spain, Austria, Italy, Holland, and much of the New World, Spain's enemies created an
enduring set of ideas known as the "Black Legend." Propagandists from England, France,
Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands vilified the Spanish as a corrupt and cruel people who
subjugated and exploited the New World Indians, stole their gold and silver, infected them with
disease, and killed them in numbers without precedent. In 1580, William I, Prince of Orange
(1533-1584), who led Dutch Protestants in rebellion against Spanish rule, declared that Spain
"committed such horrible excesses that all the barbarities, cruelties and tyrannies ever
perpetrated before are only games in comparison to what happened to the poor Indians."
Ironically, the Black Legend drew upon criticisms first voiced by the Spanish themselves. During
the sixteenth century, observers like Bartolomé de las Casas (1474-1566), the bishop of
Chiapas, condemned maltreatment of the Indians. As a way to protect Indians from utter
destruction, las Casas proposed an alternative labor force: slaves from Africa. Given the drastic
decline of the Indian population and the reluctance of Europeans to perform heavy agricultural
labor, African slaves would raise the staple crops that provided the basis for New World
prosperity: sugar, coffee, rice, and indigo.
Las Casas would come to regret his role in encouraging the slave trade. Although he rejected
the idea that slavery itself was a crime or sin, he did begin to see African slavery as a source
of evil. Unfortunately, las Casas's apology was not published for more than 300 years.
The Black Legend provided powerful ideological sanction for English involvement in the New
World. By seizing treasure from Spanish ships, staging raids on Spanish ports and cities in the
Americas, and enlisting runaway slaves known as Cimarons to prey on the Spanish, Protestant
England would strike a blow against Spain's aggressive Catholicism and rescue the Indians from
Spanish slavery. But it is a pointed historical irony that the very English seamen, like Drake and
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Hawkins, who promised to rescue the Indians from Spanish bondage, also bought and enslaved
Africans along the West African coast and transported them to Spanish America, where they
sold them to Spanish colonists.
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17th Century
European Colonization North of Mexico
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Digital History ID 3572
Prior to the seventeenth century, all European attempts to plant permanent colonies north of
Mexico--with the exception of a Spanish fortress at St. Augustine in Florida and a small
Spanish settlement in New Mexico--failed. Unprepared for the harsh and demanding
environment, facing staunch resistance from the indigenous population, and lacking adequate
financing and supplies, sixteenth-century French and English efforts to establish permanent
North American settlements in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, the St. Lawrence Valley, Florida,
and Roanoke Island off the coast of North Carolina were short-lived failures.
During the early seventeenth century, however, national and religious rivalries and the growth
of a merchant class eager to invest in overseas expansion and commerce encouraged renewed
efforts at colonization. England established its first enduring settlement in Jamestown in 1607;
France in Quebec in 1608; the Dutch in what would become Albany in 1614; and the Swedes a
fur-trading colony in the lower Delaware Valley in 1638. As early as 1625, nearly 10,000
Europeans had migrated to the North American coast. But only about eighteen hundred were
actually living on the continent in that year, due mainly to the staggering number of deaths
from disease during the initial stages of settlement.
Seventeenth-century European settlement took sharply contrasting forms. Perhaps the most
obvious difference was demographic. The English migration was far larger and more genderbalanced than that of the Dutch, the French, or the Spanish. The explanation for the rapid
growth of England's North American colonies lies in the existence of a large "surplus"
population. Early seventeenth-century England contained a large number of migrant farmhands
and unemployed and under-employed workers. Most English migrants to North America were
recruited from the lower working population--farm workers, urban laborers, and artisans--who
were suffering from economic distress, including sharply falling wages (which declined by half
between 1550 and 1650) and a series of failed harvests. Outside of New England, most English
immigrants--perhaps as many as 70 percent or more--were indentured servants, who agreed to
serve a term of service in exchange for transportation across the Atlantic.
Religious persecution was a particularly powerful force motivating English colonization. England
allowed religious dissidents to migrate to the New World. Some 30,000 English Puritans migrated
to New England, while Maryland became a refuge for Roman Catholics and Pennsylvania,
southern New Jersey, and Rhode Island, havens for Quakers. The refugees from religious
persecution included Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and a small number of
Catholics, to say nothing of religious minorities from continental Europe, including Huguenots
and members of the Dutch and German Reformed churches.
Europe's North American settlements differed markedly in their economies. While the Dutch,
French, and Swedish settlements relied mainly on trade in fish and furs, English settlement took
a variety of forms. In New England, the economy was organized largely around small family
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farms and urban communities engaged in fishing, handicrafts, and Atlantic commerce, with
most of the population living in small compact towns. In the Chesapeake colonies of Maryland
and Virginia, the economy was structured largely around larger and much more isolated farms
and plantations raising tobacco, with an average of only about two dozen families living in a
twenty-five square mile area. In the Carolinas and the British West Indies, economic life was
organized around larger but less isolated plantations growing rice, indigo, coffee, cotton, and
sugar.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the population in Britain's North American colonies
was growing at an unprecedented rate. At a time when Europe's population was increasing just
1 percent a year, New England's growth rate was 2.6 or 2.7 percent annually. By the early
eighteenth century, the population was also growing extremely rapidly in the middle Atlantic
and southern colonies, largely as a result of a low death rate and a sex ratio that was more
balanced than in Europe itself.
By 1700, Britain's North American colonies offered an unprecedented degree of social equality
and political liberty for white men. The colonies differed from England itself in the proportion of
white men who owned property and were able to vote, as well as in the population's ethnic and
religious diversity. Yet by the beginning of the eighteenth century, it was also clear that
colonial expansion involved the displacement of the indigenous population and that the colonial
economy depended heavily on various forms of unfree labor, of which the most rapidly growing
form consisted of black and sometimes Indian slaves, who could be found in every one of
Britain's North American colonies.
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17th Century
Spanish Colonization
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Digital History ID 3573
Spain grew rich from the gold and silver it found after conquering native civilizations in Mexico
and South America. However, conflict with Indians and the failure to find major silver or gold
deposits made it difficult to persuade settlers to colonize there. Spanish settlement in that
region was largely confined to religious missions, a few small civilian towns, and military posts
intended to prevent encroachment by Russia, France, and England. It was not until 1749 that
Spain established the first civilian town in Texas, a town that eventually became Laredo; and
not before 1769 did Spain establish permanent settlements in California.
Fixated on religious conversion and military control, Spain inhibited economic development in its
American colonies. Following the dictates of an economic philosophy known as mercantilism,
aimed at protecting its own manufacturers, Spain restricted trade, prohibited manufacturing,
stifled local industry and handicrafts, impeded the growth of towns, and prevented civilians
from selling to soldiers. The government required all trade to be conducted through Veracruz
and levied high excise taxes that greatly increased the cost of transportation. It exercised a
monopoly over tobacco and gunpowder and prohibited the capture of wild horses. Still, Spain
left a lasting imprint on the Southwest.
Such institutions as the rodeo and the cowboy (the vaquero) had their roots in Spanish
culture. Place names, too, bear witness to the region's Spanish heritage. Los Angeles, San
Antonio, Santa Fe, and Tucson were all founded by the Spanish. To this day, the Spanish
pattern of organizing towns around a central plaza bordered by churches and official buildings
is found throughout the region. Spanish architectural styles--adobe walls, tile roofs, wooden
beams, and intricate mosaics--continue to characterize the Southwest.
By introducing European livestock and vegetation, Spanish colonists transformed the
Southwest's economy, environment, and physical appearance. The Spanish introduced horses,
cows, sheep, and goats, as well tomatoes, chilies, Kentucky bluegrass, and a variety of weeds.
As livestock devoured the region's tall native grasses, a new and distinctly southwestern
environment arose, one of cactus, sagebrush, and mesquite. The Spanish also introduced
temperate and tropical diseases, which reduced the Indian population by fifty to ninety
percent.
It is equally important that in attitudes toward class and race Spanish possessions differed
from the English colonies. Most colonists were of mixed racial backgrounds and racial mixture
continued throughout the Spanish colonial period. In general, mestizos (people of mixed Indian
and Spanish ancestry) and Indians were concentrated in the lower levels of the social
structure.
Even in the colonial period, the New Spain's northern frontier served as a beacon of
opportunity for poorer Mexicans. The earliest Hispanic settlers forged pathways that would
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draw Mexican immigrants in the future.
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17th Century
English Colonization Begins
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Digital History ID 3574
During the early and mid-sixteenth century, the English tended to conceive of North America as
a base for piracy and harassment of the Spanish. But by the end of the century, the English
began to think more seriously about North America as a place to colonize: as a market for
English goods and a source of raw materials and commodities such as furs. English promoters
claimed that New World colonization offered England many advantages. Not only would it serve
as a bulwark against Catholic Spain, it would supply England with raw materials and provide a
market for finished products. America would also provide a place to send the English poor and
ensure that they would contribute to the nation's wealth.
During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the English poor increased rapidly in
number. As a result of the enclosure of traditional common lands (which were increasingly used
to raise sheep), many common people were forced to become wage laborers or else to support
themselves hand-to-mouth or simply as beggars.
After unsuccessful attempts to establish settlements in Newfoundland and at Roanoke, the
famous "Lost Colony," off the coast of present-day North Carolina, England established its first
permanent North American settlement, Jamestown, in 1607. Located in swampy marshlands
along Virginia's James River, Jamestown's residents suffered horrendous mortality rates during
its first years. Immigrants had just a fifty-fifty chance of surviving five years.
The Jamestown expedition was financed by the Virginia Company of London, which believed
that precious metals were to be found in the area. From the outset, however, Jamestown
suffered from disease and conflict with Indians. Approximately 30,000 Algonquian Indians lived
in the region, divided into about 40 tribes. About 30 tribes belonged to a confederacy led by
Powhatan.
Food was an initial source of conflict. More interested in finding gold and silver than in farming,
Jamestown's residents (many of whom were either aristocrats or their servants) were unable or
unwilling to work. When the English began to seize Indian food stocks, Powhatan cut off
supplies, forcing the colonists to subsist on frogs, snakes, and even decaying corpses.
Captain John Smith (1580?-1631) was twenty-six years old when the first expedition landed. A
farmer's son, Smith had already led an adventurous life before arriving in Virginia. He had fought
with the Dutch army against the Spanish and in eastern Europe against the Ottoman Turks,
when he was taken captive and enslaved. He later escaped to Russia before returning to
England.
Smith, serving as president of the Jamestown colony from 1608 to 1609, required the colonists
to work and traded with the Indians for food. In 1609, after being wounded in a gunpowder
accident, Smith returned to England. After his departure, conflict between the English and the
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Powhatan confederacy intensified, especially after the colonists began to clear land in order to
plant tobacco.
In a volume recounting the history of the English colony in Virginia, Smith describes a famous
incident in which Powhatan's 12-year-old daughter, Pocahontas (1595?-1617), saved him from
execution. Although some have questioned whether this incident took place (since Smith failed
to mention it in his Historie's first edition), it may well have been a "staged event," an
elaborate adoption ceremony by which Powhatan symbolically made Smith his vassal or
servant. Through similar ceremonies, the Powhatan people incorporated outsiders into their
society. Pocahontas reappears in the colonial records in 1613, when she was lured aboard an
English ship and held captive. Negotiations for her release failed, and in 1614, she married John
Rolfe, the colonist who introduced tobacco to Virginia. Whether this marriage represented an
attempt to forge an alliance between the English and the Powhatan remains uncertain.
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