The discovery of Folsom (Clovis) arrowheads and spear points in the Southwest and throughout the West in the early 1900s, similar in material and style to those discovered much earlier in Siberia, led to a theory that Asiatic hunter-gatherers of the Paleolithic Period migrated across a land bridge (Beringia) that linked Sibera with Alaska during the last millennia of the Ice Age, around approximately 15,000 BCE. Art and artifacts collected in Central and South America have led some archeologists to theorize that Paleolithic seafarers from South Asia migrated across the South Pacific through Polynesia toward North and South America approximately 5,000 years earlier. These people are referred to as the Solutrean People. |
Approx. 6000-4000 BCE. |
Hopewell, Solutrean, Hohokam, Chumash, Anasazi, Adena. |
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The Eastern Woodlands |
Pane` was a Spaniard and, since the Spaniards were unfamiliar with any American Indian peoples, could not know how to interpret the Taino stories without some prior experience with them. |
The Book of Genesis in the Old Testament. There is no need for particular care in evaluating American Indian myths and legends, as those who wrote them down did so as accurately and faithfully as possible. |
That by virtue of skin color, darker peoples are far better suited to menial labor, particularly agricultural labor, and thus dark-skinned peoples are “natural slaves.” |
The late medieval and Renaissance periods saw the consolidation of authority by “New Monarchs” who subordinated local nobles, recruited armies funded by national taxation, nationalized their economies, and created effective national justice systems. |
The Indians were immediately hostile, suspecting that the newcomers were in fact invaders bent either upon their subjugation or their destruction. Battles broke out on the beaches, in which the Indians were routinely defeated. |
The Columbian Exchange was an Indian commodities market at the ceremonial center of Cahokia. Constructed by the Mississippian cultures between 900 and 1000 CE, people from throughout North America traveled there to participate in annual trade fairs. |
The Spanish enjoyed an overwhelming technological advantage over the Indians, whose bows and arrows, spears, and wooden armor were no match for the Spaniards’ steel swords and armor, and firearms. |
That the Indians were subject to the Spanish crown and the Roman Catholic Church, and thus should submit to being Spanish subjects and Catholic Christians, otherwise they would be destroyed, and the fault would be theirs, not the Spaniards’. |
In 1517 Pope Gregory IX moved to eliminate corruption in the Catholic Church by ending the sale of Indulgences, drastically lowering papal tithes, and restoring treasure taken from Muslim lands during the Crusades. He liquidated much of the Church’s monetary holdings and distributed it to the peasant and artisan classes, and disengaged the Vatican from European politics. In 1536 an English monk, John Wycliffe, mobilized the peasantry against the wealth and power of the Church, and convinced the Tudor monarchs that the Church had no scriptural warrant to interfere in secular government. He later published his opinions in The Institutes of the Christian Religion, which resulted in schismatic movements throughout central and western Europe that were opposed by the Catholic Counter-Reformation.
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National prestige, and a desire to displace Spain as the most powerful nation in the western hemisphere. |
A. Disease to which the natives had no immunity, such as smallpox, influenza, and tuberculosis. |
Spanghtynere keragh werowance mawmarinough kekate wawghpeyaquangh. |
Virginia was settled by groups of families, mainly of mixed middle- and lower-class origins seeking religious freedom, and hoping to build “godly communities” in a “howling wilderness.” In some cases entire villages and communities transplanted from England toVirginia, which meant that patterns of living in England were replicated in Virginia. The colonists, consequently, did not suffer a long period of privation or “seasoning” that affected other colonists in other parts of America. Settlement patterns tended to be relatively concentrated, as towns and emergent cities—centered on the church and village greens—peppered the landscape. A fairly even sex ratio meant that natural population growth steadily increased after the first several years of Jamestown’s establishment. Relations with the local Indian tribes tended to be cordial, though strained. Virginia was a charitable enterprise spearheaded by James Oglethorpe, who hoped to relocate nonviolent criminals and debtors to America, where he hoped to make Virginia a producer of silk. The colonists were to be reformed through hard work, so slavery was prohibited, as was the possession and sale of alcohol, which was feared would cause the colonists to lapse back into their profligate and idle ways. In addition to these ambitious goals, Virginia sat at the southern edge of English colonization, and was intended to be a buffer area against Spanish Florida, and would be the first line of defense against any prospective Spanish invasion. A scarcity of carpenters, farmers, and artisans among the colonists prevented them from building a stable community. In any case, the vast majority preferred to dig for gold rather than plant crops or build adequate shelters or defenses. A severely imbalanced sex ratio resulted in virtually no natural population growth throughout the seventeenth century. The venture teetered on the brink of collapse until the efforts of Capt. John Smith and Gov. Sir Thomas Dale forced the bickering colonists to work together in planting food crops, building adequate shelters, and repairing relations with the local Indian tribes. The silk enterprise collapsed due to the inclement climate for the mulberry trees and the silkworms imported from China, but the discovery of tobacco rescued the colony from dissolution.
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A. Opechancanough had always opposed his brother Powhatan’s accommodating the English settlers, and resolved to destroy the still fragile colony as soon as his brother was dead. |
Indentured servitude is a system whereby someone contracts with another to work for that person for a modest wage, and food and lodging for a period of years, while slavery was similar except that the term of service was for life. Slavery is a system whereby someone contracts with another to work for that person for a period of years (usually 5 to 7 years) in exchange for passage from Africa to America, while indentured servitude was for all intents and purposes a lifelong condition for Europeans who were brought involuntarily into forced labor.
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A. Relations between slaves, indentured servants, and other poor whites were very close. They often lived in the same quarters, worked side-by-side every day, and in off hours socialized together, leading to illicit sexual relations and marriages between servants and slaves, thus accounting for the growing Mulatto population of the Chesapeake. |
Bacon’s Rebellion began in 1656 when Nathaniel Bacon, an indentured servant abused by his master, rallied his fellow servants and slaves into an army that armed itself in a forceful assault on the Jamestown armory. Vowing to march on the governor’s home and force him to resign and take power for himself, they successfully seized control of Virginia for six months before royal authority was restored. |
Spanish missionaries actively suppressed the Pueblos’ religious beliefs and practices as part of their program to make them into surrogate Spaniards as well as obedient Catholic Christians. The churches and missions built in and near Santa Fe were constructed using forced Indian labor, and Indian slaves tilled the irrigated fields, against which the Pueblos resisted. A leader, known by the Spanish as El Pope`, organized the Pueblo tribes in a successful revolt in 1680 that expelled the Spanish population of Santa Fe for twelve years. |
A. The climate of the Chesapeake was comparatively more pleasant than that of the West Indies. Fewer immigrants sickened and died in Virginia than in Barbados. |
Barbados, being so small and covered with sugar plantations, was unable to cultivate food crops to feed the large slave populations, and a group of proprietors led by John Colleton received a charter from King Charles II in 1663 to establish a colony between the Chesapeake colonies and Spanish Florida. It was hoped that the Carolinians would produce food crops for export to Barbados, as well as a “cash crop” comparable to West Indian sugar. |
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