Norton People and a Nation Chapter 1 Terms

Paleo-indians: These were the first Americans, nomadic hunters and gatherers, they dispersed throughout N and S America after crossing Beringia. By 11,500 years ago, they were making stone tools. By 900 years ago, they began to cultivate crops. Some began to establish permanent settlements. They reached their peaks of success after they mastered agriculture.
Mayans: The Maya established an empire about 2000 years ago in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. Their city, Teotihuacan housed 100,000 people by the 5th century. They built urban centers, studied astronomy, and created an elaborate writing system. Constant warfare with neighboring tribes and an inadequate food supply lead to their demise in the 9th century.
Cahokia: Mississippian culture refers to the combined tribes of the Mississippi valley of the south-eastern US. They relied heavily on maize, squash, pumpkins and nuts. They established a hierarchal society with their largest city, Cahokia, covering 5 square miles near modern St. Louis. By its peak in the 11th and 12th centuries Cahokia housed 20,000, more than London at the same time. They developed an accurate calendar but by 1250 Cahokia was deserted, possibly due to climate change and overpopulation.
Aztecs: The Aztecs migrated from further south to the central valley of Mexico during the 12th century. The Aztecs were fearsome, conquering their neighbors and forcing them to pay tributes in textiles, food, and human sacrifices. Spanish conquered this, and this was crucial, because it gave Spain the largest land empire since Rome and the Aztec’s vast gold reserves.
Huitzilopochtli: This was the primary war god of the Aztec religion. Legend says that he directed the Aztecs to establish their capital on an island where they saw an eagle eating a serpent. This island became Tenochtitlan.
Sexual division of labor: Pre-Columbian societies assigned different tasks to women and men. Men were traditionally tasked with hunting, allotting gathering, food preparation, and clothing production to women. This is notable because it was true of all such hunting societies. Women cared for young children, while older children learned skills from the same-sex parent.
Upper Guinea: The northern region of West Africa, or Upper Guinea, where fishing, hunting and agriculture sustained its inhabitants for 10,000 years before the Europeans arrived in the 15th century. Muslim culture influenced the area heavily when Mediterranean traders first contacted the Africans. The northernmost portion cultivates rice, and the southern portion, which was much less populated and developed, produced wheat. In African societies, the sexes generally shared agricultural responsibilities. Men hunted, raised livestock, and fished. Women managed commercial networks, however, and were tasked with trading with other societies.
Dual-sex principle: Lower Guinea had a unique system referred to by historians as the dual-sex principle. In this system, male political and religious leaders governed men, and females governed women. Most of these societies practiced polygamy, so very few men and women lived as couples in marital households, but they were instead accountable to their own sex.
Ferdinand and Isabella: Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, jealous of Portugal’s success in Africa, agreed to Finance Columbus’s risky expedition west across the Atlantic, with the knowledge that a direct rout to the Far East would be hugely profitable for Spain.
Printing press: The 1400s brought technological change to Europe through the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg, by making information more accessible.
Travels by Marco Polo: One of the first books to be distributed widely by means of the printing press, Travels was published in 1477 and recounted Polo’s adventures as a merchant who spent lots of time travelling through China and described the China as being bordered on the east by an ocean. This led the Europeans to believe that they could possibly reach China by sailing west and that this would be very helpful, because then they could circumvent the Muslim merchants.
The Mediterranean Atlantic: The Mediterranean seas were the training ground for European sailors. The complex winds were good practice for explorers. Here, mariners developed a new technique of sailing around the wind. This was key to making trans Atlantic travel possible.
Azores, Madeiras, and the Canaries: These are the major islands of the Mediterranean Atlantic. These are the islands that were first influenced by European expansion in late 1400s pre Columbus. Portuguese settled the Azores and Madeiras as trading posts. The Canaries had indigenous residents- the Guanche people, who traded animal skins and dies with Europeans. The French, Portuguese, and Spanish , and the seven islands fell to the Spanish.
Northeast trades and Westerlies winds: These winds in the Mediterranean Atlantic permitted sailors to travel efficiently. Returning from the Mediterranean to Spain, they would lead themselves against the wind northwest into the open ocean until they could catch the Westerly winds to carry them home.
Sao Tome: Portugal began exploring Africa in the late 15th century. The Portuguese established trading posts along the coast, the most successful being Sao Tome. Sao Tome proved an ideal location with great sugar producing capacity. The Portuguese developed the key colonization principles: 1) how to transplant crops and livestock 2) the natives could be conquered and exploited 3) the model of slavery on plantation like farms was productive.
Amerigo Vespucci: Vespucci was a Florentine explorer who led an expedition to South America following Columbus’s success. He was the first to publish on the discovery of a new continent in 1499, leading a German cartographer, Martin Waldseemuller, to label the continent “America” in 1507.
Leif Ericsson: About the year 1001, a Viking expedition led by Leif Ericsson reached North America after sailing only 200 miles from a Nordic base in Greenland. Attacks by natives as well as the barren land in Canada they landed on forced them out a few years later.
John Cabot: John Cabot is credited with discovering North America. Cabot, calculating that England would be eager to sponsor explorations of the new world, gained financial backing from Henry VII. He reached America in June 1497 and explored the coast of Newfoundland, claiming it for England.
Malinche: Malinche was a young, Mayan slave given to conquistador Hernan Cortez as a gift. She became his personal translator, bore him a child, Martin, one of the first mestizos, and eventually married one of his officers.
Spanish model of colonization: Spain began colonization immediately. On his second voyage, Columbus brought 1200 people to Hispaniola to a place named Isabella, which became the staging area for the Spanish invasion of the Americas. Spain established the model of colonization based on 3 major elements other countries would later adopt: 1) the Crown sought tight control over the colonies through a hierarchal colonial bureaucracy 2) European men constituted most of the colonies initially. They took native women as wives or concubines, which explains the racial makeup of Latin America today 3) The colonies wealth was based on the exploitation of the natives and African slaves.
The encomienda system: Cortez established the encomienda system, which granted plantations and even entire native villages to conquistadors in return for services provided. After criticism from colonial priest Bartholomew de Las Casas the crown restricted the enslavement of the nartives, leading the encomenderos to import African slaves for labor.
Spanish Missionaries: The missionaries followed the conquistadors with the intent of spreading Christianity throughout the Native populations. Indians were exposed to European customs and religious rituals designed to assimilate Catholic and pagan values.
The Columbian exchange: This is the term for the mutual exchange of diseases, plants, animals and other organisms resulting from the 16th century explorations and Spanish colonization of the New World. For example, many large animals, like horses and cattle, were native to the old world, while the New World had vegetable crops, like corn, beans, squash, and potatoes that were more nutritious and produced higher yields than Old World crops. However, diseases carried from Europe and Africa decimated the Native American population, killing as many as 95% in the years following Columbus.
Smallpox: Of all the imported diseases in N.A., Smallpox was the greatest killed of the natives. Smallpox, a virus, was highly infectious and deadly.
Syphilis: The Americans probably gave the Europeans syphilis. Although less likely to be fatal than smallpox, syphilis was debilitating. It was carried by soldiers, sailors, and hookers. It spread throughout the Old World and reached China by 1505.
Sir Walter Raleigh: The first English colonial planners desired to send to America English men who would be able to exploit the local resources for profit. Among these men was Sir Walter Raleigh. Queen Elizabeth I authorized Raleigh to colonize N. America.
Roanoke Island: After two preliminary expeditions, Raleigh sent 117 colonists to a territory he named Virginia. They established a colony on Roanoke Island, in what is now North Carolina. In 1590, a resupply ship found that all the colonists had vanished. Recent studies suggest an extreme drought forced the colonists to abandon Roanoke.
Harriot’s Briefe and True Report: Thomas Harriot was a noted scientist travelling on the second voyage to Roanoke. He revealed that, while the colonists relied on local Indians for food, they antagonized them by unjustly killing several on different occasions. Harriot advised future colonists to be more humane to the colonists, but then noted that his advice would most likely not be followed, because 1) the Americas offered more of the products Europeans already used, such as grapes, iron, and copper 2) exotic American products like tobacco and corn were very profitable 3) the Natives were easy to manipulate.