AP U.S. History Chapter 1 Vocabulary

Roanoke

Humphrey Gilbert's half brother, Sir Walter Raleigh, the thirty-one-year-old favorite of Queen Elizabeth, inherited Gilbert's royal patent and continued the quest; he dispatched ships to explore North America and named the land there Virginia in honor of Queen Elizabeth, "the virgin queen"; in 1585, he was behind a short-lived attempt to form a colony on this island on present-day North Carolina's Outer Banks; in 1586, Sir Francis Drake found the colonists hungry and ready to return to England; in the following year, Raleigh sent another group of one hundred seven men, women, and children to this; it was an ill-planned and ill-fated expedition; this swampy island was inhospitable, and so were the local Indians; supply ships, delayed by the attack of the Spanish Armada, failed to reach this in 1588, and when ships finally did arrive in 1590, the pioneers left by Raleigh had disappeared without a trace; all that was found was some rusted debris and the word "croatoan", the Indian name for the nearby island on which Cape Hatteras is located, carved on a tree; over the years, there has been much speculation about what happened to this so-called Lost Colony, but its exact fate remains a mystery; starvation and Indian raids probably killed off most of the unlucky colonists, with any survivors being adopted by the Indians, the descendants of whom still claim Raleigh's colonists as their ancestral kin; in his book "Set Fair for Roanoke", historian David Beers Quinn suggests that the Lost Colonists made their way north toward Virginia, settled among peaceable Indians, and were surviving at nearly the time Jamestown was planted but were slaughtered in a massacre by Powhatan, an Indian chief whose name becomes prominent in the annals of Jamestown

Quebec

Jacques Cartier's explorations took him to Newfoundland, discovered by Cabot almost forty years earlier, and up the Gulf of St. Lawrence, sailing as far as the Huron Indian villages of Stadacona, modern this, and Hochelaga, Montreal; Samuel de Champlain founded this in 1608, the year after Jamestown was settled; in 1629, an English pirate briefly captured this

Popé's Rebellion

Popé was a Tewa Pueblo who led this all-Indian revolt in 1680 against the Spanish invaders in what is now the southwestern United States, driving them out of Santa Fe and temporarily restoring the old Pueblo way of life; after his release from being imprisoned in 1675 by Spanish authorities on suspicion of witchcraft and of killing several missionaries, Popé hid in Taos Pueblo to plan and organize what came to be known as the Pueblo Revolt, or this; since the expedition led by Francisco Vázquez de Coronado that had begun Spanish colonization of the Southwest in 1540, hundreds of Pueblo individuals had been impressed into virtual slavery or, if they dared open resistance, executed, and Popé believed that he was commanded by tribal ancestral spirits, kachinas, to restore traditional native customs, and other villages enthusiastically responded to news of this planned uprising; on August 10, 1680, Popé led this united attack of almost all the Pueblo Indian tribes on the Spanish capital of Santa Fe, killing nearly five hundred; after ten days nearly one thousand besieged residents abandoned the city ravaged by this and fled to El Paso del Norte; for a time Popé was accorded great honor for this, but success made him despotic, and, after a few years, drought, enemy tribe forays, and internal dissension combined to depose him; although Spanish rule was reestablished in 1692, the alien domination was never as strong as before this

Demarcation Line

Spain and Portugal eventually agreed on this that enabled Portugal to claim Brazil, which is why Brazilians speak Portuguese and the rest of South and Central America and Mexico are principally Spanish-speaking countries; in 1493, after reports of Christopher Columbus' discoveries had reached them, Ferdinand and Isabella enlisted papal support for their claims to the New World in order to inhibit the Portuguese and other possible rival claimants; to accommodate them, the Spanish-born pope Alexander VI issued bulls setting up this from pole to pole one hundred leagues, about three hundred twenty miles, west of the Cape Verde Islands; Spain was given exclusive rights to all newly discovered and undiscovered lands in the region west of this; Portuguese expeditions were to keep to the east of this; neither power was to occupy any territory on either side of this already in the hands of a Christian ruler; no other European powers facing the Atlantic Ocean ever accepted this or the Treaty of Tordesillas; King John II of Portugal was dissatisfied because Portugal's rights in the New World were insufficiently affirmed, and the Portuguese would not have sufficient room at sea for their African voyages; meeting at Tordesillas, in northwestern Spain, Spanish and Portuguese ambassadors reaffirmed this, but this was moved to three hundred seventy leagues, one thousand one hundred eighty-five miles, west of the Cape Verde Islands, or about 46°30′ W of Greenwich; Pope Julius II finally sanctioned the change of this in 1506; this enabled Portugal to claim the coast of Brazil after its discovery by Pedro Álvares Cabral in 1500; Brazilian exploration and settlement far to the west of this in subsequent centuries laid a firm basis for Brazil's claims to vast areas of the interior of South America

Juan Ponce de León

Spanish adventurer who conquered Boriquén, Puerto Rico, making a fortune in gold and slaves; the distinction of being the first European to set foot on what would become United States soil usually goes to him; investigating rumors of a large island north of Cuba that contained a legendary "fountain of youth", a spring with restorative powers whose waters could restore youth and vigor, he found and named Florida in 1513, claiming it for Spain, and "discovered" Mexico on that same trip; he had been on Christopher Columbus's second voyage; he died after suffering arrow wounds during a fight with Indians; he set out to find Bimini; he started his exploration in Puerto Rico; he was a page in the royal court of Aragon; he took part in a campaign against Native Americans in the Dominican province of Higüey and was named provincial governor of eastern Hispaniola; he found traces of gold in Puerto Rico and when he returned with settlers, he founded Capara, the colony's oldest settlement near modern-day San Juan, and was named governor, he discovered the Gulf Stream, which opened a new route from Spain to North America; he arrived in present-day Charlotte Harbor, Florida, where he was hit by an oncoming volley of arrows by a large force of Native Americans; he was taken aboard a flagship and sailed back to Cuba where he died give months later on July 1, 1521

Pánfilo de Narváez

Spanish conquistador, colonial official, and explorer; he entered military service as a youth and arrived in Jamaica as one of the island's first settlers; later he commanded a company of archers during Diego Velázquez's campaign to conquer and pacify Cuba; he was rewarded for his services with public offices and extensive land grants on the island; in March 1520 he left Cuba, commanding a fleet of ships and about nine hundred men with orders from Velázquez to capture and replace Hernán Cortés as ruler of Mexico; Cortés, who had been charged with treason and disloyalty, defeated his expedition; he was taken prisoner with most of his men; he was released the next year on orders from Spain and returned to Cuba; in 1526 he received authorization and numerous governing titles from Charles V to subdue and colonize vast lands from Florida westward; he sailed from Spain on June 17, 1527, with five ships and about six hundred soldiers, sailors, and colonists; in Santo Domingo one hundred forty men deserted his expedition, and in Cuba a hurricane sank two of the ships, killing fifty men and several horses; he remained in Cuba until late February 1528, then sailed with five ships and four hundred followers to the region around Tampa Bay in Florida; after claiming the land for Spain, he began an overland expedition in May with about three hundred men; the force made a difficult and distressing march northward, continually fighting Indians, until the survivors reached the area of present-day St. Marks, Florida, near the end of July; since the vessels from the expedition failed to come to their aid, his suffering survivors had to construct additional ships; they built five vessels, and in late September, two hundred forty-five men sailed along the coast, hoping to reach Mexico; his ships drifted along the northern part of the Gulf of Mexico, passing Pensacola Bay and the mouth of the Mississippi River; as the journey progressed, the boats were gradually lost, and at about the beginning of November 1528, he disappeared when his own vessel was suddenly blown out to sea; only four men survived his expedition

Conquistador

Spanish explorer; the tens of millions of what might be called First Americans or Amerindians occupying the two continents of the Americas were divided into hundreds of tribal societies, the most advanced of which were the Mayas, and later the Aztecs in Mexico and the Incas of Peru, all of whom became fodder for the Spanish under the reign of terror wrought by these; these amassed enormous wealth for themselves and the Spanish Crown, while also decimating the native populations they encountered; many of these died as they lived: violently, at the hands of either Indians they battled or their fellow Spaniards eager to amass gold and power; Spain offered grants to these who led expeditions to find riches in lands that Spain had claimed; early these included Hernán Cortés and Francisco Vázquez de Coronado; other these included Juan Ponce de León and Hernando de Soto

Martin Waldseemüller

a German cartographer who, in 1507, published the first map with the name "America" for the New World; educated at Freiburg im Breisgau, he moved to Saint-Dié, where in 1507 he published one thousand copies of a woodcut world map, made with twelve blocks and compiled from the tradition of Ptolemy and the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci; his later Carta marina, 1516, was drawn in chart style; he published the first map that showed the New World separate from Asia; he and Matthias Ringmann are credited with the first recorded usage of the word "America", on the 1507 map Universalis Cosmographia in honor of Vespucci; on April 25, 1507, as a member of the Gymnasium Vosagense at Saint Dié in the duchy of Lorraine, today Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, France, he produced a globular world map and a large twelve-panel world wall map using the information from Christopher Columbus and Vespucci's travels, Universalis Cosmographia, both bearing the first use of the name "America"; in 1513, he appeared to have had second thoughts about the name, probably due to contemporary protests about Vespucci's role in the discovery and naming of America, or just carefully waiting for the official discovery of the whole northwestern coast of what is now called North America, as separated from East Asia; in his reworking of the Ptolemy atlas, the continent is labeled simply "Terra Incognita", or "Unknown Land"; despite the revision, one thousand copies of the world maps had since been distributed, and his original suggestion took hold

Eastern Woodlands Native Americans

aboriginal peoples of North America whose traditional territories were east of the Mississippi River and south of the subarctic boreal forests; these were located in the southern region between the Mississippi River and the Atlantic Ocean, the place of the moundbuilders and Cahokia; these are associated with the Seminoles and Cherokee; these hunted small game and foraged in the forests; these put an emphasis on sedentary life and the importance on cultivation; these settled, thus creating towns and villages; these lived in the eastern United States; many of these established populous villages and complex confederations well before adopting full-time, maize-based farming; these were the first to be assimilated by Europeans; these were characterized by the raising of corn, beans, and squash, the fashioning of particular styles of pottery, and the building of burial mounds

Treaty of Tordesillas

agreement between Spain and Portugal signed on June 7, 1494, that aimed at settling conflicts over lands newly discovered or explored by Christopher Columbus and other late fifteenth-century voyagers; no other European powers facing the Atlantic Ocean ever accepted the 1493 line of demarcation or this deriving from it; considering King John II of Portugal was dissatisfied because Portugal's rights in the New World were insufficiently affirmed, and the Portuguese would not have sufficient room at sea for their African voyages, Spanish and Portuguese ambassadors met at Tordesillas, in northwestern Spain, to reaffirm the papal division, but the line itself was moved to three hundred seventy leagues, one thousand one hundred eighty-five miles, west of the Cape Verde Islands, or about 46°30′ W of Greenwich; Portugal and Spain ignored an order from Pope Julius II in enacting this but all was reconciled when the pope agreed to the change in 1506; this enabled Portugal to claim the coast of Brazil after its discovery by Pedro Álvares Cabral in 1500; Brazilian exploration and settlement far to the west of the line of demarcation set in this in subsequent centuries laid a firm basis for Brazil's claims to vast areas of the interior of South America; this gave Portugal more claim to South America and automatic control over most of the Indian Ocean; while it would be several hundred years before the line of this could be accurately determined, due to problems determining longitude, Portugal and Spain kept to their sides of the line quite well; Portugal colonized places like Brazil in South America and India and Macau in Asia; Brazil's Portuguese-speaking population is a result of this

Leif Erikson

among a number of voyagers who may have reached the Americas, either by accident or design, well before Christopher Columbus reached the Bahamas; the one best supported by archaeological evidence is the credit given to Norse sailors, led by this Norse captain, who not only reached North America but established a colony in present-day Newfoundland around A.D. 1000, five hundred years before Columbus; while he gets the credit in history and the roads and festivals named after him, it was another Norseman, Bjarni Herjolfsson, who was the first European to sight North America in 985 or 986; it was him who supposedly built some huts and spent one winter in this land where wild grapes, more likely berries, since there are no grapes in any of these places, grew before returning to Greenland; a few years later, another Greenlander named Thorfinn Karlsefni set up housekeeping in his spot, passing two years there; among the problems he and Karlsefni faced were unfriendly local tribes, whom the Norsemen called "skrelings", a contemptuous term translated as "wretch" or "dwarf"

Mestizos

any people of mixed blood; in Central and South America, as well as Mexico, this denotes people of combined Native American and European extraction; in some countries, such as Ecuador, this has acquired social and cultural connotations; a pure-blooded Native American who has adopted European dress and customs is called this, or cholo; in the Philippines this denotes people of mixed foreign, such as Chinese, and native ancestry; an elaborate hierarchy was created because of these; the Spanish were at the top, these were in the middle, and natives were at the bottom

Jamestown

even though the Spanish dominated the New World for almost a century before the English settlers arrived in this, the Spanish were eventually supplanted in North America, and the new era of English supremacy began; in his book "Set Fair for Roanoke", historian David Beers Quinn suggests that the Lost Colonists made their way north toward Virginia, settled among peaceable Indians, and were surviving at nearly the time this was planted but were slaughtered in a massacre by Powhatan, an Indian chief whose name becomes prominent in the annals of this; the colonists reached Chesapeake Bay in May 1607, and within a month, had constructed a triangle shaped wooden fort and named it James Fort, only later this, the first permanent English settlement in the New World; in one of the most significant finds in recent archaeology, the site of James Fort was discovered in 1996; this has been long celebrated as the "birthplace of America," an outpost of heroic settlers braving the New World; while the difficulties faced by the first men of this were real: attacks by Algonquian Indians, rampant disease, many of the problems, including internal political rifts, were self-induced; the choice of location was a bad one; this lay in the midst of a malarial swamp; the settlers had arrived too late to get crops planted; many in the group were gentlemen unused to work, or their menservants, equally unaccustomed to the hard labor demanded by the harsh task of carving out a viable colony; in a few months, fifty-one of the party were dead; some of the survivors were deserting to the Indians whose land they had invaded; in the "starving time" of 1609 and 1610, these settlers were in even worse straits; only sixty of the five hundred colonists survived the period; disease, famine brought on by drought, and continuing Indian attacks all took their toll; crazed for food, some of the settlers were reduced to cannibalism, and one contemporary account tells of men "driven through insufferable hunger to eat those things which nature abhorred," raiding both English and Indian graves; in one extreme case, a man killed his wife as she slept and "fed upon her till he had clean devoured all parts saving her head"; John Smith, in January 1608, from Smith's famed memoir in which he writes of himself in the third person: "Having feasted after their best barbarous manner they could, a long consultation was held, but the conclusion was, two great stones were brought before Powhatan: then as many as could laid hands on him [Smith], dragged him to them, and thereon laid his head, and being ready with their clubs to beat out his brains, Pocahontas, the king's dearest daughter, when no entreaty could prevail, got his head in her arms, and laid her own upon his to save him from death; whereat the emperor was contented he should live...Two days after, Powhatan having disguised himself in the most fearfulest manner he could, caused Captain Smith to be brought forth to a great house in the woods, and there upon a mat by the fire to be left alone. Not long after, from behind a mat that divided the house, was made the most dolefulest noise he ever heard; then Powhatan, more like a devil than man, with some two hundreds more as black as himself, came unto him and told him now they were friends..."; Captain John Smith, the fearless leader of the Jamestown colony, was captured by Powhatan's Indians; Powhatan's real name was Wahunsonacock; he was called Powhatan after his favorite village, which was near present-day Richmond, Virginia; Smith's head was on a stone, ready to be bashed by an Indian war ax, when Pocahontas, a nickname loosely translated as "frisky", her real name was Matowaka, the eleven-year-old daughter of Chief Powhatan, "took his head in her arms" and begged for Smith's life; the basis for that legend is Smith's own version of events, which he related in the third person in his memoirs; David Beers Quinn speculates that Smith learned of Powhatan's massacre of the Lost Colonists from the chief himself, but kept this news secret in order to keep the peace with the Indians; this "execution" was actually an initiation ceremony in which Smith was received by the Indians; Captain John Smith was an English adventurer whose life before this was an extraordinary one; he was instrumental in saving this from an early extinction; when this party fell on hard times, Smith became a virtual military dictator, instituting a brand of martial law that helped save the colony; he became an expert forager and was a successful Indian trader; without the help of Powhatan's Indians, who shared food with the Englishmen, showed them how to plant local corn and yams, and introduced them to the ways of the forest, these colonists would have perished; in a pattern that would be repeated elsewhere, the settlers eventually turned on the Indians, and fighting between the groups was frequent and fierce; once respected by the Indians, Smith became feared by them; Smith remained in this for only two years before setting off on a voyage of exploration that provided valuable maps of the American coast as far north as the "over-cold" lands called North Virginia; in 1614, he had sailed north hoping to get rich from whaling or finding gold; finding neither, he set his crew to catching fish, once again the lowly cod; after exploring the inlets of the Chesapeake Bay, he also charted the coastline from Maine to Cape Cod and gave the land a new name, New England; Smith apparently also made a fortune in the cod he had caught and stored; he had also lured twenty-seven natives on to the ship and took them back to Europe to be sold as slaves in Spain; his mark on the colony was indelible; after Smith's departure, his supposed savior, Pocahontas, continued to play a role in the life of the colony; during the sporadic battles between settlers and Indians, Pocahontas, now seventeen years old, was kidnapped and held hostage by the colonists; while a prisoner, she caught the attention of the settler John Rolfe, who married the Indian princess, as one account put it, "for the good of the plantation," cementing a temporary peace with the Indians; besides this notable marriage, Rolfe's other distinction was his role in the event that truly saved this and changed the course of American history; in 1612, he crossed native Virginia tobacco with seed from a milder Jamaican leaf, and Virginia had its first viable cash crop; London soon went tobacco mad, and in a very short space of time, tobacco was sown on every available square foot of plantable land in Virginia; Powhatan to John Smith, 1607: "Why will you take by force what you may have quietly by love? Why will you destroy us who supply you with food? What can you get by war?...In these wars, my men must sit up watching, and if a twig breaks, they all cry out 'Here comes Captain Smith!' So I must end my miserable life. Take away your guns and swords, the cause of all our jealousy, or you may all die in the same manner"; despite the tobacco profits, controlled in London by a monopoly, this limped along near extinction. Survival remained a day-today affair while political intrigues back in London reshaped the colony's destiny; Virginia Company shareholders were angry that their investment was turning out to be a bust, and believed that the "Magazine," a small group of Virginia Company members who exclusively supplied the colony's provisions, were draining off profits; a series of reforms was instituted, the most important of which meant settlers could own their land, rather than just working for the company; the arbitrary rule of the governor was replaced by English common law; in 1619, new management was brought to the Virginia Company, and Governor Yeardley of Virginia summoned an elected legislative assembly, the House of Burgesses, which met in this that year; the House of Burgesses was not an instant solution to the serious problems still faced by these settlers; despite years of immigration to the new colony, the rate of attrition of this during those first years was horrific; lured by the prospect of owning land, some six thousand settlers had been transported to Virginia by 1624; a census that year showed only one thousand, two hundred, seventy-seven colonists alive; a Royal Council asked, "What has become of the five thousand missing subjects of His Majesty?"; many of them had starved; others had died in fierce Indian fighting, including some three hundred fifty colonists who were killed in a 1622 massacre when the Indians, fearful at the disappearance of their lands, nearly pushed the colony back into the Chesapeake Bay; responding to the troubles at this and the mismanagement of this, the king revoked the Virginia Company's charter in 1624, and Virginia became a royal colony; under the new royal governor, Thomas Wyatt, the House of Burgesses survived on an extralegal basis and would have much influence in the years ahead; before 1619, there were few women in this, and in that year a shipload of "ninety maidens" arrived to be presented as wives to the settlers; the going price for one of the brides: one hundred twenty pounds of tobacco as payment for her transport from England; in the same year that representative government took root in America, an ominous cargo of people arrived in the port of this; these new arrivals couldn't vote, and they brought a price; these were the first African slaves to be sold in the American colonies; by 1600, the Dutch and French were also caught up in the "traffick in men," and by the time those first twenty Africans arrived in this aboard a Dutch slaver, a million or more black slaves had already been brought to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Caribbean and South America; like the first arrivals at this, the Pilgrims and "strangers" had come to Plymouth at a bad time to start planting a colony; Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec in 1608, the year after this was settled

Bullion and Its Mercantile Restrictions

gold or silver in bulk before coining, or valued by weight; this helped transform the world economy; this paid for much of the burgeoning international trade with Asia whose sellers had little use for any European goods except silver; this made Spain fabulously wealthy but its mercantile restrictions stifled commercial development in its American empire; in 1540, a number of mercantile restrictions were imposed by the French on the export of this

Hernán Cortés

in 1519, he entered Tenochtitlán, Mexico City; thought to be the returning Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, he captured Emperor Montezuma, beginning the conquest of the Aztec Empire in Mexico; his triumph led to three hundred years of Spanish domination of Mexico and Central America; he wanted gold in the land of the Aztecs

Francisco Vásquez de Coronado

in 1541, he explored from New Mexico across Texas, Oklahoma, and eastern Kansas; he wanted to find a golden family; he used African Americans to find the cities of gold; he traveled the longest distance on land compared to Juan Ponce de León, Hernán Cortés, Hernando de Soto, and him; he reached the Arkansas River; he traveled the farthest north compared to Ponce de León, Cortés, de Soto, and him; he traveled through present-day Mexico

Jesuit Missionaries

in 1549 these arrived in South America; the missionaries, especially these, explored much of what is now southern Ontario

Northwest Passage

in 1576, Sir Humphrey Gilbert first used this phrase to describe a sea route around North America, and he continued to search for this to China; in 1578 another Englishman, Martin Frobisher, set off for this and reached the northeast coast of Canada, exploring Baffin Island; among the others who searched for this through the Arctic from Europe to Asia was Henry Hudson, an Englishman sailing for the Dutch, who embarked on his voyage aboard the Half Moon to North America in 1609, the voyage on which he discovered the bay, river, and strait later named after him; Hudson realized that sailing as far north as present-day Albany was not this to China; while this to the East does exist, it requires sailing through far northern waters that are icebound much of the year, although global warming may be changing that, many scientists fear; England based its claim to the vast Hudson Bay region on Hudson's last voyage and the Hudson Bay Company soon began the fur trade that would bring the wealth that this to Asia was supposed to deliver; European rulers wanted to find this to get to Asia for great riches; Giovanni da Verrazano sailed to North America to find this, but never did; Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence River hoping to find this, but never did; during another of Hudson's four voyages in search of this, Hudson's crew mutinied in 1611 and put their captain into an open boat in Hudson Bay

New Amsterdam

in 1626 the trading village of this, later to be renamed New York, was established at the mouth of the Hudson; from its inception, Dutch this was far less pious and more rowdy than Puritan New England; as a trading outpost this attracted a different breed of settler, and unlike Boston, taverns in this quickly outnumbered churches; as few Dutch settlers were lured to this by the promise of low pay to work on West India Company farms, the company welcomed settlers from any nation, and by 1640, at least eighteen languages were spoken in this, a polyglot tradition that was to continue throughout the history of this; the Dutch got this cheap; the English took this for nothing; Dutch rule in America was not long-lived, but it was certainly influential in the stamp it put on this future New York; it was the Dutch who erected, as a defense against Indians, the wall in lower Manhattan from which Wall Street takes its name; besides this on Manhattan island, the Dutch had also established villages, such as Breukelen and Haarlem; this developed far differently from the English colonies, which held out the promise of land ownership for at least some of its settlers; promising to bring over fifty settlers to work this land, a few wealthy Dutch landholders, or patroons, were able to secure huge tracts along the Hudson in a system that more closely resembled medieval European feudalism than anything else, a system that continued well after the Revolution and that contributed to the reputation of this as an aristocratic and, during the Revolution, loyalist, stronghold; this became New York in one of the only truly bloodless battles in American history; Charles II granted his brother, the Duke of York, the largest and richest territorial grant ever made by an English monarch; it included all of present New York, the entire region from the Connecticut to Delaware rivers, Long Island, Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, and the present state of Maine; in 1664, four English frigates carrying one thousand soldiers sailed into New York Harbor; the Dutch and other settlers there, unhappy with the administration of the West India Company, gladly accepted English terms despite Peter Stuyvesant's blustery call to resist; without a shot fired, this became New York; the Duke of York in turn generously created a new colony when he split off two large tracts of land and gave one each to two friends, Sir George Carteret and Lord John Berkeley, an area that would become New Jersey; the English exercised a surprisingly tolerant hands-off policy in ruling the former this; life as it had been under Dutch rule continued for many years; Jacques Cartier (1491-1557), French explorer, on the Hurons: "The tribe has no belief in God that amounts to anything; for they believe in a god they call Cudouagny, and maintain that he often holds intercourse with them and tells that what the weather will be like. They also say that when he gets angry with them, he throws dust in their eyes. They believe furthermore that when they die they go to the stars and descend on the horizon like the stars...After they had explained these things to us, we showed them their error and informed them that Cudouagny was a wicked spirit who deceived them, and that there is but one God, Who is in Heaven, Who gives everything we need and is the Creator of all things and that in Him alone we should believe. Also that one must receive baptism or perish in hell..."; like the Dutch in this, the French explorers who started New France were primarily interested in trading, as opposed to the English settlers of New England and Virginia, who were planting farms and permanent communities

Amerigo Vespucci

in a letter to Lorenzo Medici, in 1504: "In days past, I gave your excellency a full account of my return, and if I remember aright, wrote you a description of all those parts of the New World which I had visited in the vessels of his serene highness the king of Portugal. Carefully considered, they appear truly to form another world, and therefore we have, not without reason, called it the New World. Not one of all the ancients had any knowledge of it, and the things which have been lately ascertained by us transcend to all their ideas."; he was another Italian who found his way to Spain and, as a ship chandler, actually helped outfit Christopher Columbus' voyages; in 1499, he sailed to South America with Alonso de Hojeda, one of Columbus' captains, reaching the mouth of the Amazon; he made three more voyages along the coast of Brazil; in 1504, letters supposedly written by him appeared in Italy in which he claimed to be captain of the four voyages and in which the words "Mundus Novus", or "New World", were first used to describe the lands that had been found; his travels became more famous in his day than those of Columbus; some years later, in a new edition of Ptolemy, this new land, still believed to be attached to Asia, was labeled America in his honor; in 1502, he, after his second voyage, concluded South America was not part of India and named it Mundus Novus; he knew that John Cabot was wrong about Cabot thinking that he had reached Asia; he realized that Cabot and other explorers had found a continent that Europeans did not know about

Native Americans of the Northwest Coast

members of any of the Native American peoples inhabiting a narrow belt of Pacific coastland and offshore islands from the southern border of Alaska to northwestern California; these were the most sharply delimited culture of native North America; the area of these covered a long narrow arc of Pacific coast and offshore islands from Yakutat Bay in the northeastern Gulf of Alaska south to Cape Mendocino in present-day California; the eastern limits of these were the crest of the Coast Ranges from the north down to Puget Sound, the Cascades south to the Columbia River, and the coastal hills of what is now Oregon and northwestern California; although the sea and various mountain ranges provide the region with distinct boundaries to the east, north, and west, the transition from these to the California culture area is gradual, and some scholars classify the southernmost tribes as California Indians; these spoke a number of North American Indian languages; from north to south the following linguistic divisions occurred: Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, northern Kwakiutl, Bella Coola, southern Kwakiutl, Nuu-chah-nulth, Nootka, Coast Salish, Quileute-Chimakum, Kwalhioqua, and Chinook; along the Oregon coast and in northwestern California, a series of smaller divisions of these occurred: Tillamook, Alsea, Siuslaw, Umpqua, Coos, Tututni-Tolowa, Yurok, Wiyot, Karok, and Hupa; these can be classified into four units or "provinces"; the northern province of these included speakers of Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, and the Tsimshian-influenced Haisla, northernmost Heiltsuq or Kwakiutl; the Wakashan province included all other Kwakiutl, the Bella Coola, and the Nuu-chah-nulth. The Coast Salish-Chinook province extended south to the central coast of Oregon and included the Makah, Chinook, Tillamook, Siuslaw, and others. The northwestern California province included the Athabaskan-speaking Tututni-Tolowa as well as the Karok, Yurok, Wiyot, and Hupa; the Northwest Coast was densely populated by these when Europeans first made landfall in the eighteenth century; early historic sources indicate that many winter villages had hundreds of these inhabitants

Plains Native Americans

members of any of the Native American peoples inhabiting the Great Plains of the United States and Canada; the culture area of these comprises a vast grassland between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains and from present-day provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan in Canada through the present-day state of Texas in the United States; the area of these is drained principally by the Missouri and Mississippi rivers; the valleys in this watershed are the most reliable sites from which these obtained fresh water, wood, and most plant foods; perhaps because these were among the last indigenous peoples to be conquered in North America, some bands continued armed resistance to colonial demands into the 1880s, these are often regarded in popular culture as the archetypical American Indians; the view of these was heavily promoted by traveling exhibits such as George Catlin's Indian Gallery, "Wild West shows" such as the one directed by William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody, and a multitude of toys, collectibles, pulp novels, films, television shows, and other items marketed to consumers; six distinct American Indian language families or stocks were represented in these tribes; the Blackfoot, Blackfeet, tribe of these included three independent bands: the Piegan, Blood, and Blackfoot proper, Northern Blackfoot; these speakers of Algonquian languages included the Blackfoot, Arapaho, Atsina, Plains Cree, Saulteaux, and Plains Ojibwa, all in the northern Plains, while Cheyenne, also an Algonquian language, was spoken in the central Plains; these speakers of Siouan languages included the Mandan, Hidatsa, Crow, Assiniboin, Omaha, Ponca, Osage, Kansa, Iowa, Oto, and Missouri; Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota were spoken by these bands of the Santee, Teton, and Yankton Sioux tribes, respectively; the Pawnee, Arikara, and Wichita of these were Caddoan-speakers, whereas the Wind River Shoshone and the Comanche were of the Uto-Aztecan language family; the Athabaskan, Na-Dené, stock of these was represented by the Sarcee in the northern Plains, while the Kiowa-Tanoan stock was represented by the Kiowa; the Métis of these on the Canadian Plains spoke Michif, a trade dialect that combined Plains Cree, an Algonquian language, and French; Michif was spoken by these over a wide area; in other areas many of these tribes used Plains Indian sign language (PISL) as a means of communication; the introduction of the horse had a profound effect on the material life of these; horses greatly increased human mobility and productivity in this region: so much so that many scholars divide the history of these into two periods, one before and one after the arrival of the horse; horses became available gradually to these over the course of at least a century; by approximately A.D. 850, some of these of the central Plains had shifted from foraging to farming for a significant portion of their subsistence and were living in settlements comprising a number of large earth-berm homes; as early as 1100, and no later than about 1250, most of these Plains residents had made this shift and were living in substantial villages and hamlets along the Missouri River and its tributaries; from north to south these groups eventually included the Hidatsa, Mandan, Arikara, Ponca, Omaha, Pawnee, Kansa, Osage, and Wichita; some of these villages reached populations of up to a few thousand people; such groups, known as Plains Village cultures, or these, grew corn, beans, squash, and sunflowers in the easily tilled land along the river bottoms; women in these tribes were responsible for agricultural production and cultivated their crops using antler rakes, wooden digging sticks, and hoes made from the shoulder blades of elk or buffalo; women collected medicinal plants and wild produce such as prairie turnips and chokecherries for these; men of these grew tobacco and hunted bison, elk, deer, and other game; whole communities of these would participate in driving herds of big game over cliffs; fish, fowl, and small game were eaten by these; because of the limitations inherent in using only dogs and people to carry loads, these did not generally engage in extensive travel before the horse; Francisco Vázquez de Coronado's expedition in 1541 reported encounters with these fully nomadic buffalo-hunting tribes on the southern Plains who had only dogs for transport; before horses became available, intertribal warfare among these was relatively rare and few battles were deadly; a period of exceptional conflict occurred in the fourteenth century, probably due to the same kinds of drought-induced crop failure in these tribes that caused the dispersal of the Ancestral Pueblo and Hohokam cultures of the Southwest at approximately the same time

Basin-Plateau Native Americans

members of any of the Native American peoples inhabiting the high plateau region between the Rocky Mountains and the coastal mountain system or any of the indigenous North American peoples inhabiting the traditional culture area comprising almost all of the present-day states of Utah and Nevada as well as substantial portions of Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, and Colorado and smaller portions of Arizona, Montana, and California; this culture area comprises a complex physiographic region that is bounded on the north by low extensions of the Rocky Mountains, such as the Cariboo Mountains, on the east by the Rocky Mountains and the Lewis Range, on the south by the Blue Mountains and the Salmon River, excepting a narrow corridor to present-day California, and on the west by the Canadian Coast Mountains and the Cascade Range; this culture area includes the watersheds of the Columbia and Fraser rivers; anthropologists sometimes refer to these jointly as the Intermontane culture area; this region was originally home to peoples representing two widely divergent language families: the Washoe, whose territory centred on Lake Tahoe, spoke a Hokan language related to those spoken in parts of what are now California, Arizona, and Baja California; the remainder of the Great Basin was occupied by these speakers of Numic languages; Numic, formerly called Plateau Shoshonean, is a division of the Uto-Aztecan language family, a group of related languages widely distributed in the western United States and Mexico. Linguists distinguish Western, Central, and Southern branches of Numic. Western Numic languages are spoken by the Owens Valley Paiute (Eastern Mono), several Northern Paiute groups, and the Bannock. Central Numic languages are spoken by the Panamint (Koso) and several Shoshone groups, including the Gosiute, Timbisha, Western Shoshone, and Comanche. Although they originated in the Great Basin, the Comanche acquired horses during the early colonial period, moved to present-day Texas, and became nomadic buffalo hunters; they are thus typically regarded as Plains Indians. Southern Numic languages are spoken by the Kawaiisu and a number of Ute and Southern Paiute groups including the Chemehuevi. The distinction between Southern Paiute and Ute is cultural rather than linguistic; Ute speakers who had horses in the early historic period are regarded as Ute, and those who did not readily adopt horses are regarded as Southern Paiute. The Numic peoples called themselves "Numa," "Nungwu," or "Numu," meaning "people" or "human beings"; the various tribal names such as Paiute and Shoshone were designations given them by other tribes. The Washoe called themselves "Washoe," a true self-name. Linguistic and archaeological evidence indicates that the Washoe separated from other California Hokan-speaking groups as long as several millennia ago. Similar evidence indicates that the Numic peoples may have been spreading across the Great Basin from southeastern California for the last two thousand years, reaching their northernmost areas less than one thousand years ago

Native Americans of the Southwest

members of any of the Native American peoples inhabiting the southwestern United States; some scholars include the peoples of northwestern Mexico within these; more than twenty percent of Native Americans in the United States live in this region, principally in the present-day states of Arizona and New Mexico; this culture area is located between the Rocky Mountains and the Mexican Sierra Madre; the people of the Cochise culture were among the earliest of these; a desert-adapted hunting and gathering culture whose diet emphasized plant foods and small game, the group of these lived in the region as early as circa 7000 B.C.; farming became important for subsequent these including the Ancestral Pueblo, Anasazi, circa A.D. 100 to A.D. 1600, the Mogollo, circa A.D. 200 to A.D. 1450, and the Hohokam, circa A.D. 200 to A.D. 1400; these groups lived in permanent and semipermanent settlements that they sometimes built near, or even on, sheltering cliffs; these developed various forms of irrigation; these grew crops of corn, beans, and squash; these had complex social and ritual habits; it is believed that the Ancestral Pueblo were the ancestors of the modern Pueblo Indians, that the Hohokam were the ancestors of the Pima and Tohono O'odham, Papago, and that the Mogollon dispersed or joined other communities of these; the Southwest was home to representatives of these from several North American Indian language families, including Hokan, Uto-Aztecan, Tanoan, Keresan, Kiowa-Tanoan, Penutian, and Athabaskan; the Hokan-speaking Yuman peoples were the westernmost residents of this region; these lived in the river valleys and the higher elevations of the basin and range system there; the so-called River Yumans, including the Quechan, or Yuma, Mojave, Cocopa, and Maricopa, resided on the Lower Colorado and the Gila Rivers; their cultures combined some traditions of these with others of the California Indians; the Upland Yumans, including the Havasupai, Hualapai, and Yavapai, lived on secondary and ephemeral streams in the western basins and ranges of these; two groups of these that spoke Uto-Aztecan languages resided in the southwestern portion of this culture area, near the border between the present-day states of Arizona and Sonora; this tribe, the Tohono O'odham, were located west of the Santa Cruz River; the closely related tribe of these, the Pima, lived along the middle Gila River; these were linguistically diverse; these living along the Rio Grande and its tributaries are generally referred to as the eastern Pueblos, while these on the Colorado Plateau are assigned to the western division; the eastern group of these included the Keresan-speaking Zia, Santa Ana, San Felipe, Santo Domingo, and Cochiti, and representatives of three members of the Kiowa-Tanoan language family: the Tewa-speaking San Ildefonso, San Juan, Santa Clara, Tesuque, and Nambe, the Tiwa-speaking Isleta, Sandia, Taos, and Picuris, and the Towa-speaking Jemez; these western Pueblo tribes included the Hopi, Hano, who spoke Tanoan, Zuni, who spoke Penutian, and Acoma and Laguna, who spoke Keresan; the Navajo and the closely related Apache tribes of these spoke Athabaskan languages; the Navajo tribe of these lived on the Colorado Plateau near the Hopi villages; the Apache tribe of these traditionally resided in the range and basin systems south of the plateau; these major Apache tribes included the Western Apache, Chiricahua, Mescalero, Jicarilla, Lipan, and Kiowa Apache; these Athabaskan-speaking groups migrated from northwestern North America to the Southwest and probably did not reach the area until sometime between A.D. 1100 and A.D. 1500; most of these engaged in both farming and hunting and gathering; a number of domesticated resources were more or less ubiquitous throughout this culture area, including corn, beans, squash, cotton, turkeys, and dogs; during the period of Spanish colonization, horses, burros, and sheep were added to the agricultural repertoire of these, as were new varieties of beans, plus wheat, melons, apricots, peaches, and other cultigens; most of these coped with the desert environment by occupying sites on waterways, which ranged in quality and reliability from large permanent rivers such as the Colorado, through secondary streams, to washes or gullies that channeled seasonal rainfall but were dry most of the year; precipitation was unpredictable and fell in just a few major rains each year, compelling many of these to engage in irrigation; while settlements along major waterways could rely almost entirely on agriculture for food, these whose access was limited to ephemeral waterways typically used farming to supplement hunting and gathering, relying on wild foods during much of the year

California Native Americans

members of any of the Native American peoples who have traditionally resided in the area roughly corresponding to the present states of California and northern Baja California The peoples living in the California culture area at the time of first European contact in the 16th century were only generally circumscribed by the present state boundaries. Some were culturally intimate with peoples from neighbouring areas; for instance, California groups living in the Colorado River valley, such as the Mojave and Quechan (Yuma), shared traditions with the Southwest Indians, while those of the Sierra Nevada, such as the Washoe, shared traditions with the Great Basin Indians, and many northern California groups shared traditions with the Northwest Coast Indians. A mosaic of microenvironments—including seacoasts, tidewaters, rivers, lakes, redwood forests, valleys, deserts, and mountains—provided ample sustenance for its many residents and made California one of the most densely populated culture areas of Northern America. The indigenous peoples of this region were considerably more politically stable, sedentary, and conservative and less in conflict with one another than was generally the case in other parts of North America; within the culture area neighbouring groups often developed elaborate systems for the exchange of goods and services. In general, the California tribes reached levels of cultural and material complexity rarely seen among hunting and gathering cultures. The California culture area was occupied by a large number of tribes, each of which had distinct linguistic, social, and cultural traditions. Except for the Colorado River peoples (Mojave and Quechan) and perhaps some Chumash groups, California peoples avoided centralized governmental structures at the tribal level; instead, each tribe consisted of several independent geopolitical units, or tribelets. These were tightly organized polities that nonetheless recognized cultural connections to the other polities within the tribe; they were perhaps most analogous to the many independent bands of Sioux. Tribelets generally ranged in size from about a hundred to a few thousand people, depending on the richness of locally available resources; tribelet territories ranged in size from about 50 to 1,000 square miles (130 to 2,600 square km). Within some tribelets all the people lived in one principal village, from which some of them ranged for short periods of time to collect food, hunt, or visit other tribelets for ritual or economic purposes. In other tribelets there was a principal village to which people living in smaller settlements traveled for ritual, social, economic, and political occasions. A third variation involved two or more large villages, each with various satellite settlements; in such systems, a designated "capital" village would be the residence of the principal chief as well as the setting for major rituals and political and economic negotiations. In most of California the tribelets established permanent villages that they occupied all year, although small groups routinely left for periods of a few days or weeks to hunt or collect food. In areas with sparse economic resources, people often lived in seminomadic bands of 20 to 30 individuals, gathering together in larger groups only temporarily for such activities as antelope drives and piñon-nut harvests. As a rule, riverine and coastal peoples enjoyed a more settled life than those living in the desert and foothills. Traditional house types varied from permanent, carefully constructed homes occupied for generations to the most temporary types of structures. Dwellings could be wood-framed (northern California), earth-covered (various areas), semisubterranean (Sacramento area), or made of brush (desert areas) or thatched palm (southern California). Communal and ceremonial buildings were found throughout the region and were often large enough to hold the several hundred people who could be expected to attend rituals or festivals. Houses ranged in size from five or six feet (almost two metres) in diameter to apartment-style buildings in which several families lived together in adjoining units. Sweat lodges were also common; these earth-covered permanent structures were used by most California tribes (the Colorado River groups and the northern Paiute, on the margins of California, were exceptions), with sweating a daily activity for most men. Traditional subsistence in native California centred on hunting, fishing, and collecting wild plant foods. Typically, men hunted and fished while women and children collected plant foods and small game. Hunting and fishing equipment such as bows and arrows, throwing sticks, fishing gear, snares, and traps were made by men; women made nets, baskets, and other gathering implements as well as clothing, pots, and cooking utensils. Food resources varied across the landscape. Shellfish, deep-sea fish, surf fish, acorns, and game were the main subsistence staples for coastal peoples. Groups living in the foothills and valleys relied on acorns, the shoots and seeds of weedy plants and tule (a type of reed), game, fish, and waterfowl. Desert-dwellers sought piñon nuts, mesquite fruit, and game (especially antelope and rabbit) and engaged in some agriculture. Native Californians developed a variety of specialized technological devices to help them maximize the productivity of the region's diverse environments. The Chumash of southern coastal California made seaworthy plank canoes from which they hunted large sea mammals. Peoples living on bays and lakes used tule rafts, while riverine groups had flat-bottom dugouts made by hollowing out large logs. Traditional food-preservation techniques included drying, hermetic sealing, and the leaching of those foods, notably acorns, that were high in acid content. Milling and grinding equipment was also common. Traditional concepts of property tended to vary in degree rather than kind in native California. In general, larger groups such as clans and villages owned the land and protected it against infringement from other groups. Individuals, lineages, and extended families usually did not own land but instead exercised exclusive use rights (usufruct) to certain food-collecting, fishing, and hunting areas within the communal territory. Areas where resources such as medicinal plants or obsidian, a form of volcanic glass used to make very sharp tools, were unevenly distributed over the landscape might be owned by either groups or individuals. Particular articles could be acquired by manufacture, inheritance, purchase, or gift. Goods and foodstuffs were distributed through reciprocal exchange between kin and through large trading fairs, which were often ritualized. Both operated similarly in that they served as a redistribution and banking system for easily spoiled food; a group with surplus edibles would exchange them for durable goods (such as shells) that could be used in the future to acquire fresh food in return. Most California groups included professional traders who traveled long distances among the many tribes; goods from as far away as Arizona and New Mexico could be found among California's coastal peoples. Generally, shells from the coastal areas were valued and exchanged for products of the inland areas, such as obsidian. Medicines, manufactured goods such as baskets, and other objects were also common items of exchange.

Presidios

military forts built by the Spanish in the southwestern United States where soldiers who were sent to protect Spanish missions and other holdings were housed; these were controlled by Spanish military officers; these were established in areas under Spanish control or expansion between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries; these were built to protect against pirates, hostile Native Americans, and colonists from enemy nations; later in western North America, with independence, the Mexicans garrisoned these on the northern frontier and followed the same pattern in unsettled frontier regions like the Presidio de Sonoma, at Sonoma, California, and the Presidio de Calabasas, in Arizona; in western North America, a rancho del rey, or king‍ '​s ranch, would be established a short distance outside this; a rancho del rey was a tract of land assigned to this to furnish pasturage to the horses and other beasts of burden of the garrison

Pre-Columbian

of or relating to the history and cultures of the Americas before the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492; one of the earliest documented signs of syphilis in humans dates to about two thousand years ago, in remains found in North America; there is evidence of pre-Columbian syphilis in the Old World; pre-Columbian skeletons recently unearthed in England show distinctive signs of syphilis; there is plenty of evidence to bolster the claims made on behalf of a number of voyagers who may have reached the Americas, either by accident or design, well before Columbus reached the Bahamas; the claim best supported by archaeological evidence is the credit given to Norse sailors, led by Norse captain Leif Erikson, who not only reached North America but established a colony in present-day Newfoundland around A.D. 1000, five hundred years before Columbus; the site of a Norse village has been uncovered at L'Anse Aux Meadows, near present-day St. Anthony, and was named the first World Heritage site by UNESCO, an educational and cultural arm of the United Nations; most of what is guessed about the Norse colony in North America is derived from two Icelandic epics called "The Vinland Sagas"; there are three locations: Stoneland, probably the barren coast of Labrador, Woodland, possibly Maine, and Vinland, which the Norse visited; another Norseman, Bjarni Herjolfsson, was the first European to sight North America, in 985 or 986; it was Leif who supposedly built some huts and spent one winter in this land where wild grapes, more likely berries, since there are no grapes in any of these places, grew before returning to Greenland; a few years later, another Greenlander named Thorfinn Karlsefni set up housekeeping in Erikson's spot, passing two years there; among the problems they faced were unfriendly local tribes, whom the Norsemen called "skrelings", a contemptuous term translated as "wretch" or "dwarf"; during one attack, a pregnant Norse woman frightened the skrelings off by slapping a sword against her bare breast; terrified at this sight, the skrelings fled back to their boats; fishermen in search of cod had been frequenting the waters off North America for many years; basque fishing boats fished in these waters; they had decided it was a nice fishing spot but not a place to stay for good; they were slow to catch on that the coastal land they were fishing near was not Asia; even though cod fishermen were the Europeans who discovered "America", they, like generations of anglers who keep their best spots to themselves, wanted to keep their fishing grounds secret, and the distinction of being the first European to set foot on what would become United States soil usually goes to Juan Ponce de León, the Spanish adventurer who conquered Puerto Rico; America had been "discovered" long before any of these voyages; the true "discoverers" of America were the people whose culture and societies were well established here while Europe was still in the Dark Ages, the so-called Indians, who, rather ironically, had walked to the New World from Asia; new evidence suggests that the people who would eventually come to be called Indians may have arrived in America some thirty to forty thousand years ago; radiocarbon dating of charcoal found in southern Chile and the 1997 discovery of a skeleton in present-day Washington State have not only bolstered the argument that humans lived in America much earlier than had been widely accepted, but also shaken the foundations of who they were and how they got here; the version of events generally accepted and long supported by archaeological finds and highly accurate carbon testing is that the prehistoric people who populated the Americas were hunters following the great herds of woolly mammoths; during an ice age, when sea levels were substantially lower because so much water was locked in ice, these early arrivals into the Americas walked from Siberia across a land bridge into modern-day Alaska; once here, they began heading south toward warmer climates, slaughtering the mammoth as they went; eventually, as the glaciers melted, the oceans rose and covered this land bridge, creating the present-day Bering Strait, separating Alaska from Russia; a growing body of evidence suggests several more complex and surprising possibilities: the Pacific coastal route (in which people from northern Asia migrated along the western coast of America on foot and by skin-covered boat before the Bering land bridge existed, which is based partly on artifacts found in coastal Peru and Chile, dated as far back as twelve thousand five hundred years ago, that provide early evidence of maritime-based people in the Americas, and the discovery of the so-called Kennewick man in Washington State further clouded the issue, as it was dated between eight thousand and nine thousand three hundred years old, raising the question of whether this early American was from Asia at all); the North Atlantic route (which the discovery of several sites on the North American east coast have suggested, and artifacts at these sites in present-day Pennsylvania, Virginia, and South Carolina are dated between ten thousand and sixteen thousand years old, well before the Clovis, New Mexico, artifacts, and in which early Europeans in boats followed the ice surrounding modern Iceland and Greenland down to North America); and the Australian route (more controversial and generally less accepted is the modification of the theory propounded by the late Thor Heyerdahl in his book "Kon Tiki", which Heyerdahl contended that the Americas could have been settled by people from southeast Asia who crossed the Pacific to South America, and while many scientists consider this farfetched, a skeleton found in Brazil gives some support to the idea, but some scientists think it more likely that the skeleton belonged to some branch of southeast Asian people who moved north along the coast of Asia and then across the Bering Strait); it is also possible that more than one group of people migrated into the New World; some of them might have become extinct, replaced by later groups, or they may have undergone significant physical changes over the many thousands of years since their arrival; the First Americans or Amerindians occupying the two continents of the Americas were divided into hundreds of tribal societies, the most advanced of which were the Mayas, and later the Aztecs in Mexico and the Incas of Peru, all of whom became fodder for the Spanish under the reign of terror wrought by the conquistadores; there were many cultures spread over the two Americas, from the Eskimo and Inuit of the North down to the advanced Mexican and South American societies; while none of these developed along the lines of the European world, substantial achievements were made in agriculture, architecture, mathematics, and other fields; on the other hand, some basic developments were lacking; few of these societies had devised a written language; nor were some of these Indians free from savagery, as best witnessed by the Aztec human sacrifice that claimed as many as one thousand victims a day in Tenochtitlàn, near the site of present-day Mexico City, or the Iroquois who had raised torture of captured opponents to a sophisticated but ghastly art; the Maya built their civilization in the rainforests of present-day Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras; the Maya developed a form of hieroglyphics; they worked to increase their knowledge of mathematics; they created a three-hundred-sixty-five-day calendar using their knowledge of astronomy; settled in present-day Mexico were the Aztec; the Inca founded their capital city of Cuzco around 1200; they were the largest of the earliest civilizations; they built a vast system of roadways to help control the large empire; Quechua was the official language; most of the Incan empire was mountainous and not well-suited to farming; in order to produce the large amount of food needed to support the large empire, farmers cut terraces into the steep slopes so they could plant crops

St. Augustine

oldest permanent settlement established by Europeans in the United States; in 1565, this was founded by explorer Pedro Menéndez de Avilés; this was razed by Francis Drake in 1586; Spain ruled this until 1763, when the British gained control of it; Spain again ruled this from 1783 until 1821, when Florida became a territory of the United States; this is the oldest continuously settled city in the United States, seat, as of 1822, of St. Johns county, northeastern Florida, about forty miles, sixty-five kilometers, southeast of Jacksonville; this is situated on a peninsula between two saltwater rivers, the San Sebastian to the west and Matanzas to the east, and on the mainland west of the San Sebastian, just inland from the Atlantic coast on the Intracoastal Waterway; in 1565, in order to maintain Spanish sovereignty over Florida, Menéndez de Avilés destroyed the French colony thirty-five miles, fifty-five kilometers, north of the St. Johns River, of Fort Caroline and founded this, which he named for St. Augustine, bishop of Hippo, upon whose feast day he had sighted the coast; except for the twenty years, from 1763 to 1783, that Florida belonged to England, throughout the following two hundred fifty-six years this was the main northern outpost of the Spanish colonial empire; since 1821 this has been a part of the United States; a remaining symbol of former Spanish power here is the massive Castillo de San Marcos, the oldest masonry fort standing in the United States, built in 1672 to 1695 near the southern tip of the peninsula, and is now a national monument; this was plundered in 1586 by the English sea raider Sir Francis Drake, burned in 1702 by Governor James Moore of Carolina, and besieged in 1740 by the British general and leader of the Georgia colony, James Edward Oglethorpe; this became a refuge for loyalists during the American Revolution and during the Seminole Wars provided a prison for captured Seminole Indians, including Osceola; Union troops occupied this the last three years of the American Civil War; the economy of this is based on tourism, first promoted in the 1880s by the financier-railroad magnate Henry M. Flagler, a pioneer in Florida development, services, industry, including aircraft modification and the manufacture of aluminum products and boats, and commercial and sport fishing; the parent company of the Florida East Coast Railway has its headquarters here; many Spanish colonial buildings and sites have been restored here, including the cathedral of 1791, Oldest House, begun in 1723, Ximenez-Fatio House, circa 1797, and the Spanish Quarter, a restored eighteenth-century village

Mission

religious settlement established to convert people to a particular faith; in 1549, Jesuit missionaries arrived in South America; Roger Williams went on missionary journeys among the Indians and compiled a dictionary of their language; Samuel de Champlain persuaded the Huron to allow Roman Catholic missionaries to work among them and introduce them to Christianity; the missionaries, especially the Jesuit order, explored much of what is now southern Ontario; Jacques Marquette was a French explorer and Roman Catholic missionary in North America; in 1674, Marquette set out from near present-day Green Bay, Wisconsin, to establish this among the Kaskaskia Indians near Ottawa, Illinois; the Catholic Church wanted to spread its power to the Americas, so it sent missionaries to convert Native Americans to the Catholic Church; New France grew because missionaries had slowly come to the area; the Franciscan monk that founded this at San Diego in 1769 and eight other places in California was Junípero Serra; these enabled the Spanish to lay claim to California; Spanish missionaries founded Santa Fe in 1609/1610

Middle Passage

sea journey undertaken by slave ships from West Africa to the West Indies; in the same year that representative government took root in America, an ominous cargo of people arrived in the port of Jamestown; these new arrivals couldn't vote, and they brought a price; these were the first African slaves to be sold in the American colonies; in 1562 the English seaman John Hawkins began a direct slave trade between Guinea and the West Indies; by 1600, the Dutch and French were also caught up in the "traffick in men," and by the time those first twenty Africans arrived in Jamestown aboard a Dutch slaver, a million or more black slaves had already been brought to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Caribbean and South America; in 1621, the Dutch West India Company was formed with the aim of taking over trade between Europe and the New World, and the Dutch soon took from the Portuguese control of the lucrative slave and sugar trades; this was the inhumane part of a large and cruel slave-trade business, the triangular trade; gold and slaves were sent from Africa to the West Indies; twenty to thirty percent of slaves brought from Africa to the Americas through this died during the trip

Puritans and The Church of England

some English felt that the Church of England was too "popish" and wished to push it further away from Rome, to "purify" it, so they were called Puritans; even among Puritans strong differences existed, and there were those who thought the Church of England too corrupt; they wanted autonomy for their congregations, and wished to separate from the Anglican church; this sect of Separatists, viewed in its day the same way extremist religious cults are thought of in our time, went too far for the taste of the authorities, and they were forced either underground or out of England; John Winthrop was the well-educated leader of the group of these who settled Boston, chosen by the Massachusetts Bay Company to be the colony's governor and led about nine hundred people to Massachusetts Bay in 1630; Roger Williams believed that church should be separate from the colony's government; these were punished for not attending church on Sunday; these encouraged one another to work hard and to save; many of these leaders kept strict control and did not allow any dissent; this was the most common religion in the New England Colonies but was not practiced in the Middle Colonies or the South; these differed from the Separatists because these were still part of the Anglican Church but the Separatists completely broke off; these established the Massachusetts Bay Company; the movement that drove more than fifteen thousand of these to Massachusetts to escape persecution and a bad economy in the 1630s was the Great Awakening; Anne Hutchinson dared to question the religious authority of these ministers; during the English Civil War, these left Old England for New England; these were Protestants and wanted to "purify" the Anglican Church by reforming it and wanted to get rid of all the old Catholic ways; these arrived in New England second; these had the least amount of tolerance for religions other than their own; dissenters were people unhappy with the church of these; the Quaker religion was different from that of these because the Quakers were tolerant of other religions and believed that church was unnecessary; the Quakers believed in equality, whereas these had social classes and slaves; the Quakers were pacifists, while these led the war with England by beheading King Charles I; these formed the New England Company and received a royal charter to establish the Massachusetts Bay Company; these were against slavery; New England these came to America to worship and practice their religion freely; the Massachusetts these passed the first public education law in 1647

Christopher Columbus

the impression of him was left as the intrepid sailor and man of God (his given name, christened Cristoforo Colombo, means "Christ-bearer") who was the first to reach America, disproving the notion of a flat world while he was at it; Italian Americans who claim him as their own treat Columbus Day as a special holiday, as do Hispanic Americans who celebrate El Día de la Raza as their discovery day; his voyage yields importance and demanded incredible heroism and tenacity of character; after trying to sell his plan to the kings of Portugal, England, and France, he doggedly returned to Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain, who had already given him the thumbs-down once; convinced by one of their ministers that the risks were small and the potential return great, and fueled by an appetite for gold and fear of neighboring Portugal's growing lead in exploration, the Spanish monarchs later agreed; he set sail on August 3, 1492, from Palos, Spain, aboard three ships: Niña, Pinta, and Santa María, the last being his flagship; he had been promised a ten-percent share of profits, governorship of newfound lands, and an impressive title: Admiral of the Ocean Sea; on October 12, at 2:00am, just as his crews were threatening to mutiny and force a return to Spain, a lookout named Rodrigo de Triana aboard the Pinta sighted moonlight shimmering on some cliffs or sand; having promised a large reward to the first man to spot land, he claimed that he had seen the light the night before, and kept the reward for himself; he named the landfall, Guanahani to the natives, San Salvador; while it was long held that his San Salvador was Watling Island in the Bahamas, recent computer-assisted theories point to Samana Cay; later on that first voyage, he reached Cuba and a large island he called Hispaniola, presently Haiti and the Dominican Republic; although he found some naked natives whom he christened "indios" in the mistaken belief that he had reached the so-called Indies or Indonesian Islands, the only gold he found was in the earrings worn by the Indians; as for spices, he did find a local plant called "tobacos", which was rolled into cigars and smoked by the local Arawak; still believing that he had reached some island outposts of China, he left some volunteers on Hispaniola in a fort called Natividad, built of timbers from the wrecked Santa María, and returned to Spain; while he never reached the mainland of the present United States of America on any of his three subsequent voyages, his arrival in the Caribbean signaled the dawn of an astonishing and unequaled era of discovery, conquest, and colonization in the Americas; although his bravery, persistence, and seamanship have rightfully earned him a place in history, his arrival marked the beginning of one of the cruelest episodes in human history; driven by an obsessive quest for gold, he quickly enslaved the local population; under him and other Spanish adventurers, as well as later European colonizers, an era of genocide was opened that ravaged the native American population through warfare, forced labor, draconian punishments, and European diseases to which the Indians had no natural immunities; on October 12, 1492, on encountering the Arawak, from his diary as quoted by Bartolomé de las Casas: "They must be good servants and very intelligent, because I see that they repeat very quickly what I told them, and it is my conviction that they would easily become Christians, for they seem not to have any sect. If it please our Lord, I will take six of them that they may learn to speak. The people are totally unacquainted with arms, as your Highnesses will see by observing the seven which I have caused to be taken in. With fifty men all can be kept in subjection, and made to do whatever you desire."; rather than a new world, he was actually searching for a direct sea route to China and the Indies; like others of his day, he believed that a direct westward passage to the Orient was not only possible, but would be faster and easier; in spite of what his public relations people later said, the flat earth idea was pretty much finished by the time he sailed; in the year he sailed, a Nuremberg geographer constructed the first globe; he believed a course due west along latitude twenty-eight degrees north would take him to Marco Polo's fabled Cipangu (Japan); knowing that no one was crazy enough to sponsor a voyage of more than three thousand miles, he based his guess of the distance on ancient Greek theories, some highly speculative maps drawn after Marco Polo's return, and some figure fudging of his own; he arrived at the convenient estimate of two thousand four hundred miles; the distance he was planning to cover was ten thousand six hundred miles by air; one of the most persistent legends surrounding him is an idea that got its start in Europe when the return of he and his men coincided with a massive outbreak of syphilis in Europe; over the centuries, this "urban legend" acquired a sort of mystique as an unintended form of "revenge" unwittingly exacted by the Indians for what he and the arrival of Europeans had done to them; there is plenty of evidence to bolster the claims made on behalf of a number of voyagers who may have reached the Americas, either by accident or design, well before he reached the Bahamas; among these, the one best supported by archaeological evidence is the credit given to Norse sailors, led by Norse captain Leif Erikson, who not only reached North America but established a colony in present-day Newfoundland around A.D. 1000, five hundred years before him; a British navigation expert has studied ancient Chinese maps and believes that a Chinese admiral may have circumnavigated the globe and reached America one hundred years before him; a significant discovery belongs to another of his countrymen, Giiovanni Caboto, John Cabot, who was sailing for the British; by the time he arrived, there were tens of millions of what might be called First Americans or Amerindians occupying the two continents of the Americas; during the past few decades, estimates of the Indian population at the time of his arrival have undergone a radical revision, especially in the wave of new scholarship that attended the 1992 marking of five hundred years since his first voyage; Amerigo Vespucci was another Italian who found his way to Spain and, as a ship chandler, actually helped outfit his voyages; in 1499, Vespucci sailed to South America with Alonso de Hojeda, one of his captains, reaching the mouth of the Amazon; Vespucci's travels became more famous in his day than those of him; following the first voyage, he arrived in Spain in March 1493 after a troubled return trip; he was given a grand reception by Ferdinand and Isabella, even though he had little to show except some trinkets and the Taino Indians who had survived the voyage back to Spain; he was then given seventeen ships for a second voyage, with about one thousand five hundred men who had volunteered in the hopes of finding vast riches; when he returned to Hispaniola, he discovered that the men he had left behind at a fort were gone, probably killed by the Taino; he established a second fort, but it was clear that this was not the land of gold and riches that the Spaniards expected; he sailed on to Cuba, still believing that he was on the Asian mainland, and then landed on Jamaica; returning to Hispaniola, he then began to set the Taino to look for gold, with harsh quotas established and harsher punishments for failing to meet those quotas; soon the Indians began to drop from the infectious diseases brought over by him and the Spanish; reports of the disastrous situation in the colony reached Spain, and he had to return to defend himself; his reputation sank but he was given a third voyage; on May 30, 1498, he left Spain with six ships and fewer enthusiastic recruits; he sailed south and reached the coast of present-day Venezuela; following a rebellion on Hispaniola, there were now so many complaints about him that he was brought back to Spain in shackles; although the king and queen ordered his release, his pardon came with conditions, and he lost most of his titles and governorship of the islands; he was given one more chance at a voyage, which he called the High Voyage; in 1502, he left Spain with four ships and his fourteen-year-old son, Ferdinand, who would record events during the trip; although he reached the Isthmus of Panama and was told that large body of water, the Pacific Ocean, lay a few days' march away, he failed to pursue the possibility; he abandoned the quest for Asia, exhausted, and suffering from malaria, sailed to Jamaica; starving and sick, he here supposedly tricked the locals into giving him food by predicting an eclipse of the moon; after being marooned for a year, he left Jamaica, reaching Spain in November 1504; Isabella had died, and Ferdinand tried to convince him to retire; he spent his last days in a modest home in Valladolid, and died on May 20, 1506; he was not impoverished at the time of his death, as legend had it; his remains were moved to Seville and later to Santo Domingo, present-day Dominican Republic; some believe his bones were then taken to Cuba; others believe his final resting place is on Santo Domingo; following his bold lead, the Spanish and, to a lesser extent, the Portuguese, began a century of exploration, colonization, and subjugation, with the primary aim of providing more gold for the Spanish Crown; in 1513, Ponce de León, who had been on his second voyage and had conquered Boriquén, Puerto Rico, making a fortune in gold and slaves, reached and named Florida, claiming it for Spain; almost a century after his first voyage, Europeans remained convinced that a faster route to China was waiting to be found and that the New World was just an annoying roadblock, although Spain was proving it to be a profitable one, that could be detoured; Portugal probably started the slave trade, where ten black Africans were taken about fifty years before he sailed; like other explorers, he was an entrepreneur

Eskimos

there were many cultures spread over the two Americas, from these and Inuit of the North down to the advanced Mexican and South American societies; while none of these developed along the lines of the European world, substantial achievements were made in agriculture, architecture, mathematics, and other fields; on the other hand, some important developments were lacking

Inca

these of Peru were among the most advanced of the hundreds of tribal societies that the millions of the First Americans occupying the two continents of the Americas were divided into; these became fodder for the Spanish under the reign of terror wrought by the conquistadores; there were many cultures spread over the two Americas, from the Eskimo and Inuit of the North down to these; while these didn't develop along the lines of the European world, substantial achievements were made in agriculture, architecture, mathematics, and other fields; on the other hand, some important developments were lacking; in 1531 Francisco Pizarro, an illiterate orphan and one of Vasco Nuñez de Balboa's lieutenants, invaded Peru, killed thousands of natives, and conquered this empire, the most powerful native empire in South America; these, already devastated by civil war, were decimated by smallpox brought by the Spanish; Pizarro captured and executed the ruler of these, Atahualpa; in 1539 Hernando de Soto, a veteran of the war against these in Peru, explored Florida; these founded their capital city of Cuzco around 1200; these were the largest of the earliest civilizations; these built a vast system of roadways to help control this large empire; Quechua was the official language of these; most of this empire was mountainous and not well-suited to farming; in order to produce the large amount of food needed to support this large empire, farmers cut terraces into the steep slopes so they could plant crops

Maya

these were among the most advanced of the hundreds of tribal societies that the millions of the First Americans occupying the two continents of the Americas were divided into; these became fodder for the Spanish under the reign of terror wrought by the conquistadores; there were many cultures spread over the two Americas, from the Eskimo and Inuit of the North down to these; while these didn't develop along the lines of the European world, substantial achievements were made in agriculture, architecture, mathematics, and other fields; on the other hand, some important developments were lacking; these built their civilization in the rainforests of present-day Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras; these developed a form of hieroglyphics; these worked to increase their knowledge of mathematics; these created a three-hundred-sixty-five-day calendar using their knowledge of astronomy

Aztec

these were among the most advanced of the hundreds of tribal societies that the millions of the First Americans occupying the two continents of the Americas were divided into; these became fodder for the Spanish under the reign of terror wrought by the conquistadores; there were many cultures spread over the two Americas, from the Eskimo and Inuit of the North down to these; while these didn't develop along the lines of the European world, substantial achievements were made in agriculture, architecture, mathematics, and other fields; on the other hand, some important developments were lacking; these were not free from savagery, as best witnessed by the human sacrifice of these that claimed as many as one thousand victims a day in Tenochtitlán, near the site of present-day Mexico City; in 1519 Hernán Cortés entered Tenochtitlán; thought to be the returning god of these, Quetzalcoatl, Cortés captured Emperor Montezuma, beginning the conquest of this empire in Mexico

Columbian Exchange

this is an idea that got its start in Europe when the return of Christopher Columbus and his men coincided with a massive outbreak of syphilis in Europe; syphilis in epidemic proportions first appeared during a war being fought in Naples in 1494; the army of French king Charles VIII withdrew from Naples, and the disease was soon spreading throughout Europe; later, Portuguese sailors during the Age of Discovery carried syphilis to Africa, India, and Asia, where it apparently had not been seen before; over the centuries, this acquired a sort of mystique as an unintended form of "revenge" unwittingly exacted by the Indians for what Columbus and the arrival of Europeans had done to them; according to William H. McNeill, many modern researchers reject this; there is evidence of pre-Columbian syphilis in the Old World; pre-Columbian skeletons recently unearthed in England show distinctive signs of syphilis; while a definitive answer to the origin of the scourge of Venus remains a mystery, this seems far less likely than it once did

Pueblos

traditional architecture of the Pueblo Indians of the southwestern United States; these multi-story, permanent, attached homes typical of tradition are modeled after the cliff dwellings built by the Ancestral Pueblo, Anasazi, culture beginning in approximately A.D. 1150; these continued to be used by many Pueblo peoples in the early twenty-first century; traditional construction of these used limestone blocks or large adobe bricks; the latter of these were made from clay and water and generally measured approximately eight by sixteen inches, twenty by forty centimeters, with a thickness of four to six inches, ten to fifteen centimeters; in the early twenty-first century, modern construction materials were sometimes used in tandem with adobe, creating stronger and more durable these; in a typical building of this, adobe blocks form the walls of each room as well as a central courtyard; these can be up to five stories tall; usually each floor is set back from the floor below, so this resembles a step pyramid; this enables the roof of each level to serve as a terrace for the level above; movement between levels of these was traditionally accomplished by means of wooden ladders, although staircases are now used as well; ground floor rooms of these had no ground-level doors; used almost exclusively for storage, primarily of grain, they were traditionally entered through rooftop openings in these; most rooms above the ground floor of these can be entered by doorways from adjoining rooms; most of these residential groups comprise nuclear or extended families; numerous families may live in one of these; families typically have several connecting rooms, which are often arranged in a line radiating out from the central plaza of this; additions to a family's section of this are generally added above or behind the original rooms; traditionally each of these also had two or more kivas, or ceremonial rooms

Hernando de Soto

veteran of the war against the Inca in Peru; in 1539 he explored Florida; he was authorized to conquer and colonize the region that is now the southeastern United States; in 1541 he discovered the Mississippi River; on May 21, 1542, he died from a fever by the banks of the Mississippi River; the remains of his army, led by Luis de Moscoso, reached New Spain, now Mexico, the next year; he reached the Arkansas River

Coureurs de Bois

young French trappers and traders; led by these, Frenchmen were expanding their reach into the North American heartland; one of these, Medard Chouart, mapped the Lake Superior-Hudson Bay region and then sold the information to the English, who formed the Hudson Bay Company to exploit the knowledge