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CHAPTER ONE
The Collision of Cultures
SPRING 2012
BROOKLYN COLLEGE
HISTORY 3401: AMERICA TO 1877
SECTION TR8 (3167)
BRENDAN O’MALLEY, INSTRUCTOR
[email protected]
Chapter One:
The Collision of Cultures
AMERICA BEFORE COLUMBUS
 Scholars now believe that most of the human of the Americas came
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across the Bering Strait from Asia to North America roughly between
16,000 – 14,000 B.C.
New archaeological evidence points to some migrants having come from
Asia by boat to South America, and a few may have even come from
Europe before Columbus.
Nonetheless, the DNA of most Native Americans is mostly similar to
Mongolians and Siberians.
Archaic Period in the Americas (8,000 – 1,000 B.C.): Hunting and
gathering with stone tools at first, and some groups begin to practice
agriculture near the end of the period.
Agricultural areas produce first sedentary populations.
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PRECONTACT CIVILIZATIONS IN THE SOUTH
MESOAMERICA
 Olmecs (1200 – 400 B.C.): Centered on the southern Mexican Gulf Coast and
famed for giant stone heads; not much known about this culture since it did not
have a writing system.
 Teotihuacan (100 B.C. – 700 A.D.) This great city further north than the
Olmecs or Maya, is noted for the largest Mesoamerican pyramidal structures.
 Classical Maya (250 A.D. – 900 A.D.) Complex society featuring large-scale
urbanism, written language, and sophisticated astronomy.
 Mexica or Aztec (ca. 1,400 – 1521 A.D.) This complex “empire” was a network
of city-states that paid tribute to the Mexica capital of Tenochtitlan, which had a
population of 100,000 by 1500 A.D.
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Olmec
Stone
Head
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THE CIVILIZATIONS OF THE NORTH
The ways in which
North American
Natives lived largely
depended on geography and and
and climate.
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THE CIVILIZATIONS OF THE NORTH
 Arctic: Inuit
 Subarctic: Cree, Montagnais, Algonquin, Micmac, Penobscot, Abenaki
 Eastern Woodland: Wampanoag, Mohegan, Pequot, Narragansett,
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Iroquois, Huron, Shawnee, Pamlico, Tuscatora, Cherokee, Chickasaw,
Creek,Yamasee, Choctaw, Natchez (speakers of related Algonquian
language stretched from Canadian East Cost down to Virginia)
Prairie: Winnebago, Sauk, Fox, Pawnee, Sioux, Arapaho, Iowa, Wichita
Great Plains: Flathead, Crow, Shoshone, Blackfeet
Southwest: Pima, Zuni, Pueblo,Yaqui
Far West: Chumash, Nez Perce, Paiute peoples
Northwest Coast: Chinook, Tlingit, Makah, Nootkah
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THE CIVILIZATIONS OF NORTH AMERICA
• Mostly nomadic hunter/gather societies; not as complex as the
Incas or Mexica peoples of South America and Mesoamerica
• Northeast peoples practiced some agriculture, but remained
mobile. Northwest and Arctic people heavily reliant on fishing.
• Some exceptions:
• Pueblo people in the arid Southwest organize agriculture and
irrigation, and live in large complexes of stone and adobe mud.
• Cahokia: Large trading center near modern-day St. Louis on the
Mississippi River that had a population of 40,000 by 1200 A.D., and
was known for building large mounds.
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THE CIVILIZATIONS OF NORTH AMERICA
Artist’s rendition of what Cahokia may have looked like
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QUESTION: HOW MANY PEOPLE LIVED IN THE AMERICAS BEFORE
COLUMBUS? ANSWER: NO ONE KNOWS FOR CERTAIN.
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Nineteenth-century naturalist George Catlin believed there had been 16 million in
North America. Most of Catlin’s contemporaries believed that Indians were too
primitive to sustain such a large population.
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James Mooney, an ethnologist in the early twentieth-century, estimated 1.15 million
natives north of Mexico.
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In 1934, anthropologist Alfred Kroebler estimated 8.4 million in all of the Americas,
with half of this number in each continent.
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In the 1960s, anthropologist Henry Dobyns estimated between 10 and 12 million north
of Mexico, and between 90 and 112 million across the Americas, which most think is too
high.
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A 1970s estimate puts the figure at 55 million total, but only 4 million north of Mexico.
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The lack of any substantial data makes these estimates guesswork at best. One thing is for
sure: smallpox and other diseases had a devastating effect on Indian populations.
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WHY DID EUROPEANS BEGIN REACHING OUT
INTO THE BROADER WORLD AROUND 1500?
• Sizeable increase in population since the Black Death ca. 1350.
• Revival of commerce: rise of a new merchant class looking to
meet the growing demand for goods from abroad.
• Emergence of stronger governments that wished to enhance the
commercial development of their countries.
• Improvements in maritime technology and navigation techniques
made sea voyages to East Asia begin to look safer and cheaper than
the tough and expensive overland journey.
• Why were the Portuguese the early maritime leaders?
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LURE OF THE EAST
 Ever since the Venetian merchant Marco Polo traveled to China in the
late 1200s, European elites were fascinated by East Asian luxury goods
like silk and spices.
 Europeans wanted to find a better alternative to get to the Far East than
Marco Polo’s treacherous route.
Marco Polo Leaves for the Far East
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EARLY PORTUGUESE EXPLORERS
• Prince Henry the Navigator (1394 – 1460): Encouraged
Portuguese maritime efforts and the exploration of the
African coast.
• Bartholomeu Dias (1451 – 1500): Rounded the Cape of
Good Hope of Africa into the Indian Ocean in 1488
• Vasco da Gama (ca. 1460 – 1524): First European to sail all
the way to India, landing there in 1498.
• Portuguese thought Columbus’s idea to sail west across the
Atlantic to get to Asia was not worth their time as they were
already making progress by going East around Africa.
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CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS (1451 – 1506)
• Turned to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain when the
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Portuguese turned him down.
Columbus thought the distance from the Canary Islands to
Japan was about 2,300 miles, when in fact is about 12,200
miles, a distance beyond the capacity of ships at that time.
Most educated contemporaries thought Columbus’s idea
was wrong and that his voyage was dangerous and stupid.
Sailed from Spain with ninety men and three ships in
August 1492, and landed in the Bahamas ten weeks later.
Columbus first thought that he had found islands near
Japan; he called the natives “Indians” since he thought he
was in the East Indies.
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SPANISH EXPLORATION
 Columbus’s voyages triggers greater Spanish exploration.
 On his second voyage in 1493, he created a temporary colony on the
island of Hispaniola, and on the third voyage in 1498, Columbus
finally realized he had found a new continent.
 Spaniard Vasco de Balboa sees the Pacific Ocean in 1513 after crossing
the Isthmus of Panama.
 Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan is employed by the Spanish
to circumnavigate the world; he dies on the voyage, but a small
number of his crew survives to complete it.
 Italian merchant Amerigo Vespucci observed and published accounts
about several Portuguese voyages to the New World, leading a well
known mapmaker, Martin Waldseemüller, to name the new continent
“America.”
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Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 Universalis Cosmographia, the map that named
“America” and first showed it as a separate continent from Asia.
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SPANISH CONQUEST AND EMPIRE
 After 1500, the Spanish begin to see the New World as a source of
potential profit in itself rather than just an obstacle to Asia.
 Spanish claimed the whole New World except for the portion that
became Brazil, which was given to the Portuguese by papal decree.
THE CONQUISTADORES
 Hernando Cortés led an expedition of 600 men against the
Aztec/Mexica in 1518, assaulting their capital of Tenochtitlán.
 Francisco Pizarro completed the conquest of the Incan Empire in
what is now Peru in 1533.
 By the end of the 1500s, the Spanish Empire included Carribbean
Islands, Mexico, souther North America, and what is now Chile,
Peru, and Argentina.
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Artist’s rendering of Tenochtitlán right before conquest
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SPANISH OUTPOSTS IN WHAT WOULD BECOME
THE UNITED STATES
• St. Augustine: Small fort in
Florida established in 1565.
• Santa Fe: Outpost among the
Pueblo Indians in what is now
New Mexico established in 1609.
Priests began converting natives to
Christianity. A bloody revolt took
place in 1680 when the priests
tried to stop the Pueblos from
practicing their old religious
rituals. The Spaniards bloodily
repressed the revolt by 1696.
St. Augustine - Promontory of Florida, 1565
(Library of Congress)
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BIOLOGICAL AND CULTURAL EXCHANGES
• DISEASE: Europeans gave Indians diseases to which they had no
resistance: influenza, typhus, measles, and especially smallpox.
Disease and harsh treatment reduced the Taino of Hispaniola
from roughly 1 million to 500 over the 1500s. What disease did
the Indians give to the Europeans?
• CROPS AND LIVESTOCK FROM THE OLD WORLD: Sugar,
and sugar; cattle, pigs, and sheep
• CROPS FROM THE NEW WORLD: Maize, pumpkins, beans,
squash, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, and peppers
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SOCIAL RELATIONS AND LABOR
• MIXING OF EUROPEANS AND NATIVES: In the Spanish and
Portuguese colonies, there were few European women. Men
often had sex with native women, producing mixed-race
children known as mestizos.
• COERCIVE LABOR: Spaniards often forced natives to serve as
laborers for a fixed term, working in mines or plantations, for a
small wage.
• SLAVE LABOR: Indian labor was not reliable, so as early as
1502, Europeans began importing African slaves to work on
sugar plantations.
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AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS
• Over half of immigrants to the New World between 1500 and 1800 were
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enslaved Africans.
West African states traded with the Mediterranean and became early converts
to Islam; traded gold, ivory, and slaves for finished goods; further South there
was less trade and contact.
African societies tended to be matrilineal: they traced heredity and property
through mothers.
Slavery existed well before the Europeans arrived; slaves often were war
captives, criminals, or debtors. They served fixed terms and children did not
inherit their condition.
Europeans wanted slaves for growing sugar cane: first in the Mediterranean,
then the Atlantic islands, and then the Caribbean.
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THE SLAVE TRADE
• 1500s: Portuguese dominated the African slave trade.
• 1600s: Dutch come to dominate the trade.
• 1700s: English dominate the trade.
Elmina Castle, built in 1482 by the
Portuguese on the coast of what is
now Ghana as a fortress where
slaves would be kept to await
transport across the sea.
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THE ARRIVAL OF THE ENGLISH
• First English exploration of the New World by Genoan
John Cabot, hired by Henry VII in 1497.
• Journey was a failed attempt to find a “Northwest
Passage” through the New World and on to Asia.
• A serious English attempt at colonization would not start
for over a century, in the 1580s.
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WHAT PROMPTED ENGLISH COLONIZATION?
• England’s population was growing rapidly in the 1500s while its
land and food resources became more scarce.
• Dominance of Mercantilist Ideology: Idea that one nation could
only become wealthy at the expense of another spread across
Europe and influenced England’s desire to challenge Spain in the
New World.
• Religion: Separatist Puritans were looking for a refuge to practice
a “pure” form of Protestantism; they saw the Church of England as
too much like the Roman Catholic Church, and were persecuted.
• Success of Irish Colonization: English colonizers made
considerable progress in conquering Ireland in the 1500s. They
believed that they should keep a rigid separation between
themselves and the natives, a practice that was imported to the
New World (unlike the Spaniards, who mixed freely).
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FRENCH AND DUTCH IN THE NEW WORLD
• First French permanent settlement founded at Quebec in
1608, mainly to trade for furs with Indians.
• By 1624, the Dutch set up a colony of New Netherlands,
with trading posts up the Hudson, Delaware, and
Connecticut Rivers.
• The capital of the new Dutch colony was New Amsterdam,
on the southern tip of Manhattan.
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FIRST ENGLISH SETTLEMENTS
 Roanoke: Sir Walter Raleigh, a favorite of Queen Elizabeth I,
financed and organized an attempt to set up a colony on an
island off what is now North Carolina in 1585 and again in
1587.
 War with Spain cut off Roanoke from England for three years,
but when Raleigh returned in 1590, he found that he colonists
had disappeared, leaving one mysterious word carved on a post:
“Croatoan.” Raleigh fell from favor with this failure.
 In 1606 King James I issued a new charter that divided North
America between two groups; this would lead to the founding
of Jamestown in Virginia in 1607.
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Queen Elizabeth I and Sir Walter Raleigh