1. Worlds Collide (1491-1607)
What was Christopher Columbus looking to find on his first transatlantic voyage?
A new sea route to the Spice Islands of what is today Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Malaysia
Hernán Cortés was a Spanish explorer and military leader, also known as a:
Conquistador
Which group of foods originated in the New World?
Corn, chocolate, tomatoes, and potatoes
When Cortés first entered the city of Tenochtitlán in 1519, what happened to Moctezuma II, the ruler?
Cortes seized the palace and held Moctezuma hostage there
The Ghana Empire was an inland Islamic empire located in western:
Africa
Ancestral Pueblo people had a thriving agricultural society, as opposed to more nomadic societies. What's the big trade-off for prioritizing agriculture over hunting?
Agriculture-based societies have a more reliable source of calories, but are more vulnerable to drought
What was traded between Europe, West Africa, and the Americas in the Columbian Exchange?
Cash crops, finished goods, diseases, and human beings
What were the plantations of the early colonial period designed to do?
Create large quantities of raw commodity crops at low cost, like indigo, sugar, tobacco, or coffee
What was an effect of Hernando de Soto's expeditions into what is today the Southeastern United States?
De Soto's expedition spread Eurasian diseases into the interior of the country, inadvertently killing thousands of Native people
Elmina Castle is a fortified trading post built by the Portuguese in the late 15th century along the Gold Coast of Africa; what was exported from its docks?
Enslaved people from further inland
Despite having a basis in religious and ethnic intolerance, in what way did the Crusades increase cultural interaction between Europe and the Middle East?
European Crusaders developed a taste for trade goods from India, China, and Central Asia, which spurred trade with the East along the Silk Road
During the period known as the Reconquista, Spanish forces:
Expelled North African and Arab Muslims—known as Moors— from the Iberian Peninsula of Europe
Monk's Mound in Cahokia is an enormous earthwork very near to the Mississippi River. What do archaeologists believe it was used for?
It's believed to have been a temple or chief's residence
What was responsible for the deaths of so many Huron and Iroquois people in the 17th century?
The smallpox virus
Why is it important that the Three Sisters agricultural system combined beans, corn, and squash?
Those three crops together provided complete nutrition; no single plant can provide all the nutrients a human body needs to survive
Non-Spanish European powers used the Black Legend to highlight the unspeakable cruelty the Spanish inflicted on Native Americans. Why would they want to do that?
To justify their own attempts to colonize the Americas and portray themselves favorably
Christopher Columbus was an Italian navigator employed by the Spanish crown to seek
a route to the East Indies.
An example of "syncretism" is
elements of Pueblo religion and Catholicism fusing together
When the Spanish colonized the Americas, they utilized the encomienda system, in which colonial settlers
set themselves up as wards for Native American laborers, extracting labor in exchange for feudal 'protection'
Crops such as sugar and tobacco were New World discoveries for the European colonizers. What was the main reason they were valued?
As cash crops that could be produced for sale
Dona Marina, also known as La Malinche, performed which of the following in the service of Hernan Cortes?
She used her knowledge of the Nahuatl and Mayan languages, as well as her burgeoning command of Spanish, to act as a diplomat between the Conquistadores and the Maya and Aztec peoples
European powers wanted to find new trade routes to the East as alternatives to the
Silk Road, which was slow and expensive.
What was the one disease that came from the New World to the Old World?
Syphilis, a sexually-transmitted infection
The Incan Empire was a civilization with a powerful federal government, located in
The Andean Mountains of South America
In the 11th century, Pope Urban II directed Christian Europe to conquer the Islamic lands of the Mediterranean, in a religious military campaign known as
The First Crusade
Francisco Vasquez de Coronado found neither gold nor silver on his expeditions into what is today Mexico and the American Southwest. What wonders did he find, however?
The Grand Canyon and the Colorado River; members of his expedition were the first Europeans to see either of them
The Oneida, Mohawk, Seneca, Tuscarora, Cayuga, and Onondaga peoples of the Northeast formed a political group known as
The Iroquois Confederacy
The Black Death killed an estimated 30 to 60% of Europe's population, but what was the Black Death?
An extremely deadly strain of the Bubonic Plague
"Three Sisters" farming was an agricultural system of companion planting innovated by the Iroquois-speaking speaking peoples of the Northeast; farmers planted corn, beans, and squash together. The beans used the cornstalks as a trellis to grow on, but how did beans benefit the other two plants in the system?
Bacteria on the roots of beans 'fix' nitrogen from the atmosphere into the soil, fertilizing the earth for the benefit of the corn and squash
Iroquois-speaking peoples lived in structures called longhouses. What did they tend to be made out of?
Bent saplings for supports, leaves for thatching, and bark for shingles
Served cold and frothy by the Mesoamerican elite, which New World beverage began a craze in Europe that coincided with the growing European desire for sugar?
Chocolate
In what way did religious intolerance contribute to global unrest during the Age of Discovery?
Christian colonists in the New World had a great desire to convert Native Americans to their faith
What was the economic philosophy of mercantilism?
Colonies exist to enrich the home country and therefore shouldn't be allowed to trade with anyone except the home country
How was the relatively small Conquistador army of Hernan Cortés able to conquer the great Aztec imperial city of Tenochtitlàn?
Cortés leveraged the discontentment felt by the tributary city-states of the Aztec Empire, like the Tlaxcaltecas and the Texcocans, and allied his army with theirs
What's a Clovis point, and what does it tell us about the way the North American continent was settled by human beings?
It's a sharpened stone tool, and it tells us that humans have been on the North American continent for at least 13,500 years
The Ghana Empire created extensive trade networks across the Sahara Desert, sending out caravans bearing
Gold and Salt
Bartolomé de las Casas was a Spanish planter and slaveholder on the island of Hispaniola, in what is today the Dominican Republic. How did de las Casas come to feel about the encomienda system?
He came to oppose and protest the encomienda system as immoral, writing A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies; he would later become a Dominican friar and urge Carlos V to abolish encomiendas
What is Francisco Pizarro best known for accomplishing in Incan Peru?
He conquered the Incan empire, ransomed the emperor Atahualpa, and then had him executed
Who was Henry the Navigator, and what does he have to do with the Age of Discovery?
He was a Portuguese prince who sponsored the development of the caravel ship and directed expeditions along the Atlantic coast of Africa
Let's say you're an Englishman of the planter class in 17th-century Virginia. How would you grow tobacco if you were cultivating it as a cash crop?
I'd grow nothing but tobacco and prepare it for export
What did 1494's Treaty of Tordesillas accomplish for the Portuguese?
It created a vertical line through South America, giving Portugal the claim to the east coast of what is today Brazil
What distinguished the Roanoke colony from other colonies along the Eastern seaboard?
It was the first English colony in the New World; the colony dissolved under mysterious circumstances
Where's the Bering Strait, and what does it have to do with the history of the North American continent?
It's a waterway that separates present-day Siberia from present-day Alaska; historians theorize that humans made their way across a now-vanished land bridge from Asia to North America
The Aztec civilization's capital city of Tenochtitlán is today better known as
Mexico City, Mexico
Mississippian cultures were vast and complex, but which of these is the most accurate brief description of their societies?
Mississippian peoples cultivated corn on Mississippi Valley floodplains and created pottery and immense earthworks
The Protestant Reformation led to:
Mistrust, turmoil, and warfare between Protestants and Catholics in Europe
Cahokia, the largest of the settlements of the Mississippian culture, is renowned for
Monks Mound, an enormous structure similar in size to the Great Pyramid of Giza
What was the purpose of the Pueblo uprising?
The Pueblo people aimed to reclaim their land and cultural practices from the Spanish
In the 1500s, what did the Portuguese do to capitalize on the lucrative sugar business?
They started trading West African slaves across the Atlantic to work on the sugar plantations
The Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole peoples were called the "Five Civilized Tribes" by Anglo-European colonists. Why did they deem these five groups of people 'civilized', and not others?
They adopted elements of European colonial culture like Christianity, literacy, and slavery
What was the relationship between Isabella and Ferdinand, the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, and Italian explorer Christopher Columbus?
They funded his expeditions to the New World, in the hopes of finding another sea route to the East Indies
Chaco Canyon, in modern-day New Mexico, is almost 600 miles from the Gulf of California and the Pacific Ocean. What does the presence of California seashells in archaeological digs tell us about the people who lived in Chaco Canyon 1000 years ago?
They had elaborate trade routes with societies that lived on the coast
"Mestizo" refers to people who are
are a combination of Native American and European in origin
