Role/impact of corn
Corn was one of the most important crops grown by Native American peoples in Mexico and South America. Early Native American people even worshipped a corn god. The growth of corn in the Americas helped shape the shift of people from nomadic hunting bands to settled agricultural villagers. Corn had a huge impact on Pueblo culture as well.
Pueblo peoples
Strongly molded by the growing of corn. The developed an irrigation system to water the corn. They lived in multistoried, terraced buildings. Pueblo=village.
Three-sister farming
Three-sister farming was an agricultural system employed by North American Indians as early as 1000 A.D. Maize, as well as high-yielding strains of beans and squash made possible the three-sister farming with beans growing on the trellis of the cornstalks and squash covering the planting mounds to retain moisture in the soil. This helped to create some of the highest population densities.
Iroquois Confederation
The Iroquois Confederation developed the political and organization skills to sustain a robust military alliance that menaced its neighbors, Native American and European alike, for well over a century. The Iroquois were one of the greatest empires in North America.
Caravel
Small regular vessel with a high deck and three triangular sails. Caravels could sail more closely into the wind, allowing European sailors to explore the Western shore of Africa, previously made inaccessible due to prevailing winds on the homeward journey. They were created by Portuguese mariners. They discovered that they could return to Europe by sailing northwesterly from the African coast toward the Azores, where the prevailing westward breezes would carry them home.
Plantation system
Portuguese adventurers in Africa were to be found the origins of the modern plantation system, based on large-scale commercial agriculture and the wholesale exploitation of slave labor. This plantation economy shaped much of the New World. Plantations were large-scale agricultural enterprise growing commercial crops and usually employing coerced or slave labor. European settlers established plantations in Africa, South America, the Caribbean, and the American South.
Bartholomew Dias
Portuguese man in search of the water route to Asia. Edging cautiously down the African coast, he rounded the southernmost tip of the "Dark Continent" in 1488.
Vasco da Gama
Portuguese man who finally reached India and returned home with a small but tantalizing cargo of jewels and spices ten years after Bartholomew Dias rounded the southernmost tip of the "Dark Continent".
Christopher Columbus
He was a skilled Italian seafare that persuaded the Spanish monarchs to outfit him with three tiny but seaworthy ships. He headed West in search of a water route to the Indies. After six weeks at sea, failure loomed until, on October 12, 1492, the crew sighted an island in the Bahamas. He never actually came to the Indies, but he thought that he had so he called the native people there Indians. Columbus's discovery would eventually convulse four continents- Europe, Africa, and the two Americas. Columbus brought seedlings of sugar cane, which thrived in the warm Caribbean climate.
Columbian Exchange
The transfer of goods, crops, and diseases between New and Old World societies after 1492. The Native World had gold, silver, corn, potatoes, tobacco, pineapples, tomatoes, beans, vanilla, chocolate and syphilis. The Old World/Europeans had wheat, rice, sugar, coffee, horses, cows, pigs, smallpox, measles, influenza, bubonic plague, typhus, diphtheria, and the scarlet fever. This whole exchange of things was initiated by Columbus.
Treat of Tordesillas
Signed by Spain and Portugal, dividing the territories of the New World. Spain received the bulk territory in the Americas, compensating Portugal with titles to lands in Africa and Asia.
Conquistador
Sixteenth-century Spaniards who fanned out across the Americas, from Colorado to Argentina, eventually conquering the Aztec and Incan empires. They did this in the service of God, as well as in search of gold and glory. *Vasco Nunez Balboa and Ferdinand Magellan.
Vasco Nunez Balboa
Hailed as the discoverer of the Pacific Ocean, he waded into the foaming waves off Panama in 1513 and boldly claimed for his kind all the lands washed by that sea.
Ferdinand Magellan
He started from Spain in 1519 with five tiny ships. After beating through the storm-lashed strait off the tip of South America that still has his name, he was killed by the inhabitants of the Philippines. His one remaining vessel returned home in 1522, completing the first circumnavigation of the globe.
Juan Ponce de Leon
In 1513 and 1521, Juan Ponce de Leon explored Florida, which he at first thought was an island. Seeking gold, most likely not the mythical fountain of youth, he instead met death by an Indian arrow.
Francisco Coronado
In 1540-1542 Francisco Coronado, in search of fabled golden cities that turned out to be adobe pueblos, wandered through Arizona and New Mexico, penetrating as far as Kansas. While on his expedition he discovered two natural wonders: the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River and enormous herds of buffalo.
Hernando de Soto
Hernando de Soto, with 600 armor plated men, undertook a gold-seeking expedition during 1539-1542. Floundering through marshes and pine barrens from Florida westward, he discovered and crossed the Mississippi River just north of its junction with the Arkansas River. He brutally mistreated Indians with iron collars and fierce dogs, and then later died of fever and wounds. His troops secretly disposed of his remains at night into the Mississippi River so that the Indians would not abuse the body.
Francisco Pizarro
In South America, Francisco Pizarro crushed the Incas of Peru in 1532 and added a huge hoard of booty to Spanish coffers. This added wealth to Spain and by 1600 Spain was swimming in New World silver, much of which was from rich mines at Potosi in present-day Bolivia, as well as in Mexico.
Encomienda
Spanish government's policy to "commend", or give, Indians to certain colonists in return for the promise to Christianize them. Part of a broader Spanish effort to subdue Indian tribes in the West Indies and on the North American mainland.
Bartolome d Las Casas
A Spanish missionary who was appalled by the encomienda system in Hispaniola and called it "a moral pestilence invented by Satan." He was a reformed Dominican friar who wrote The Destruction of the Indies in 1542 to chronicle the awful fate of the Native Americans and to protest Spanish policies in the New World.
quote: "Who of those in future centuries will believe this? I myself who am writing this and saw it and know the most about it can hardly believe that such was possible.
Hernan Cortes
In 1519 Hernan Cortes set sail for Cuba with sixteen fresh horses and several hundred men aboard eleven ships, bound for Mexico. On the Island of Cozumel off the Yucatan Peninsula, he rescued a Spanish castaway who had been enslaved for several years by the Mayan-speaking Indians. He picked an Indian slave named Malinche who knew both Mayan and Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec empire in central America. In addition to his superior firepower, Cortes now had the advantage, through these two interpreters. With his interpreters he learned that there were problems with the Aztec empire and the people they demanded tribute from. He also heard about gold in Tenochtitlan and he wished to get it. The leader of the Aztecs sent gifts welcoming the Spaniards. The Spaniards then approached the capital city unopposed. Eventually the Spaniards were driven out by the Aztecs in a frantic, bloody retreat. Cortes then laid siege to the city, and it capitulated on August 13, 1521. Spanish ruled for 3 centuries.
Moctezuma
He was the Aztec chieftain. He sent gifts to the Spaniards welcoming them. Moctezuma believed that Cortes was the god Quetzalcoatl and so he allowed the Spaniards to approach the capital city unopposed. June 30, 1520 he had the Aztecs attack the Spaniards, driving them down the causeways from Tenochtitlan in a frantic bloody retreat.
Mestizos
People of mixed Indian and European heritage, notably in Mexico. Cortes intermarried with the surviving Indians of the Aztec civilization.
Giovanni Cobato (John Cabot)
The upstart English sent Giovanni Cobato to explore the northeastern coast of North America in 1497 and 1498.
Giovanni da Verrazano
The French king dispatched another Italian mariner, Giovanni da Verrazano, to probe the eastern seaboard in 1524.
Jacques Cartier
The Frenchman Jacques Cartier journeyed hundreds of miles up the St. Lawrence River ten years after Giovanni da Verrazano.
Don Juan de Onate
Don Juan de Onate led a dust-begrimed expeditionary column, with eighty-three rumbling wagons and hundreds of men. They traversed the bare Sonora Desert from Mexico into the Rio Grande valley in 1598. The Spaniards cruelly abused the pueblo peoples the encountered.
Battle of Acoma
In the Battle of Acoma in 1599, the Spanish severed one foot of each survivor. They proclaimed the area to be the province of New Mexico in 1609 and founded its capital at Santa Fe the following year.
Pope's rebellion
Catholic mission became the became the central institution in colonial New Mexico until the missionaries' efforts to suppress native religious customs provoked and Indian uprising called Pope's Rebellion in 1680. The Pueblo rebels destroyed every Catholic church in the province and killed a score of priests and hundreds of Spanish settlers. In a reversal of Cortes's treatment of Aztec temples, more than a century earlier, the Indians rebuilt a kiva, or ceremonial religious chamber, on the ruins of the Spanish plaza at Santa Fe.
Robert de La Salle
Frenchman sent to run an expedition down the Mississippi River in the 1680s.
Juan Rodriquez Cabrillo
Juan Rodriquez Cabrillo had explored the California coast in 1542, but failed to find San Francisco Bay or anything else of much interest. For some two centuries thereafter, California slumbered undisturbed by European intruders.
Junipero Serra
In 1769 Spanish missionaries led by Father Junipero Serra founded at San Diego the first of a chain of twenty-one missions that wound up the coast as far as Sonoma, north of San Francisco Bay. Father Serra's brown-robed Franciscan friars toiled with zealous devotion to Christianize the three hundred thousand native Californians.
Black Legend
False notion that Spanish conquerors did little but butcher the Indians and steal their gold in the name of Christ. The Spanish invaders did indeed kill, enslave, and infect countless natives, but they also erected a colossal empire, sprawling from California and Florida to Tierra del Feugo. They grafted their culture, laws, religion, and language onto a wide array of native societies, laying the foundations for a score of Spanish-speaking nations.