Peopling the Americas
This land bridge connected Asia and North America, allowing the first migrations of peoples before rising seas submerged it.
What is Beringia (the Bering Land Bridge)?
This Portuguese-developed ship, along with the astrolabe and magnetic compass, made long transatlantic voyages possible.
What is the caravel?
This term describes the widespread transfer of plants, animals, diseases, and people between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres after 1492.
What is the Columbian Exchange?
This system granted Spanish colonists the right to demand labor or tribute from Native peoples in exchange for supposed protection and Christianization.
What is the encomienda system?
This 1680 uprising saw Pueblo peoples in present-day New Mexico successfully drive out Spanish colonizers for over a decade.
What is the Pueblo Revolt?
This 1607 settlement, funded by a joint-stock company, became the first permanent English colony in North America.
What is Jamestown?
This Mississippian city, near modern St. Louis, built massive earthen mounds and may have housed a population rivaling contemporary London.
What is Cahokia?
Spain sponsored this Genoese navigator's 1492 voyage in hopes of finding a western route to Asia.
Who is Christopher Columbus?
European diseases like smallpox devastated Native populations largely because they lacked this biological protection, never having been exposed before.
What is immunity (acquired immunity/antibodies)?
This Dominican friar famously condemned Spanish treatment of Native peoples in works like "A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies."
Who is Bartolomé de las Casas?
This term describes the blending of European, African, and Native religious, culinary, and cultural traditions in the colonial Americas.
What is syncretism (cultural blending)?
Cultivated successfully by John Rolfe, this cash crop rescued the struggling Virginia colony economically.
What is tobacco?
Native societies in the arid Southwest, such as the Ancestral Puebloans, management practice to grow maize in a dry climate.
What is irrigation (canal-based irrigation) farming?
This 1494 treaty, brokered by the Pope, divided New World territorial claims between Spain and Portugal.
What is the Treaty of Tordesillas?
This American crop, once introduced to Europe, dramatically improved nutrition and helped fuel European population growth.
What is the potato (also acceptable: maize/corn)?
As Native populations collapsed from disease, Spain turned increasingly to this forced-labor source, importing people across the Atlantic.
What is African slavery (the Atlantic slave trade)?
Groups like the Tlaxcalans did this when they joined Cortés against the Aztec Empire, a common Native strategy during conquest.
What is allying with Europeans against a rival Native power?
These religious Separatists founded Plymouth Colony in 1620 after seeking freedom to practice their faith outside the Church of England.
Who are the Pilgrims (Separatists)?
This term describes how Native societies developed very different economies — nomadic bison hunting on the Plains, salmon fishing in the Pacific Northwest, farming in the Southeast
What is environmental adaptation (diverse subsistence patterns)?
European monarchies pursued exploration and colonization for three interconnected motives often summarized with this alliterative phrase.
What is "God, Gold, and Glory"?
Reintroduced to the Americas by Spanish colonizers, this animal transformed the economies and cultures of Plains peoples like the Comanche and Lakota.
What is the horse?
This hierarchical social system in Spanish colonies ranked people by ancestry, from Spanish-born peninsulares down through mixed-race and enslaved populations.
What is the casta (caste) system?
This AP historical reasoning skill involves identifying and weighing which factors were most important in producing an outcome, rather than simply listing events.
What is causation?
Signed aboard ship in 1620, this document established a basic form of self-government based on majority rule among Plymouth's colonists.
What is the Mayflower Compact?
Rather than centralized empires, this general form of political organization characterized most North American Native societies before contact.
What is decentralized, kinship-based political organization?
This economic theory, holding that colonies existed to enrich the mother country through a favorable balance of trade, justified European colonial policy.
What is mercantilism?
Historians estimate Native population loss from disease in the century after contact reached roughly this proportion.
What is up to 90 percent?
This labor draft system, used for mines like Potosí, largely replaced the encomienda while still compelling Indigenous communities to provide rotational labor.
What is the repartimiento (or mita) system?
This term captures how contact reshaped identities on both sides — as when Native groups adopted European goods or Christianity while still resisting colonial control.
What is cultural adaptation/negotiation?
The New England, Middle, and Southern colonies developed distinct economies, labor systems, and societies largely because of differences in this factor.
What is geography/climate (and resulting economic specialization)?