Native America Before 1492
Widespread cultivation of this staple crop helped many Native societies support permanent villages and larger populations.
What is maize (corn)?
Spanish soldiers and explorers who conquered Indigenous empires in the Americas were known by this term.
Who were the conquistadores?
This term describes the transatlantic movement of plants, animals, diseases, people, and ideas after 1492.
What is the Columbian Exchange?
Large agricultural estates producing crops such as sugar and tobacco for distant markets formed this economic system.
What is the plantation economy?
This Mexica (Aztec) capital was a major trade center and one of the largest cities in the Americas before Spanish conquest.
What is Tenochtitlan?
This major Mississippian city near present-day St. Louis relied on surrounding agricultural communities and river trade.
What is Cahokia?
This conquistador led the Spanish campaign that defeated the Mexica (Aztec) Empire.
Who was Hernan Cortes?
Europeans introduced this animal to the Americas, transforming mobility and hunting among many Plains peoples.
What is the horse?
Sugar and tobacco are examples of these crops, grown primarily for sale in distant markets rather than local subsistence.
What are cash crops (or export crops)?
This Spanish priest condemned colonial brutality and argued that Indigenous peoples were capable of governing themselves.
Who was Bartolome de Las Casas?
Native villages that produced food mainly to support their own communities practiced this form of agriculture.
What is subsistence farming?
This Spanish colonial labor system granted colonists control over Indigenous labor and tribute.
What is the encomienda system?
The movement of smallpox into the Americas produced this major demographic outcome.
What is the massive decline of Native American populations (demographic collapse)?
European demand for plantation products most directly expanded this forced movement of Africans across the Atlantic.
What is the trans-Atlantic slave trade?
This Spanish theologian argued that the Crown did not have unlimited authority to force Native conversion or destroy Indigenous religious practices.
Who was Francisco de Vitoria?
The concentration of settlements near fertile land and useful resources illustrates this broad process: societies shaped their economies and communities to local conditions.
What is environmental adaptation?
More than Spanish weapons or horses, this factor caused catastrophic population losses and greatly aided conquest.
What were European diseases, especially smallpox?
The transfer of American crops such as maize to Europe contributed to this broad long-term effect.
What are improved diets and population growth in Europe?
This ocean-centered commercial system linked Europe, Africa, and the Americas through crops, capital, trade, and coerced labor.
What is the Atlantic economy?
In this 1680 uprising, Pueblo communities expelled Spaniards from much of New Mexico for more than a decade.
What is the Pueblo Revolt?
Both Tenochtitlan and major Mississippian centers benefited from access to these natural transportation routes that supported trade and communication.
What are waterways or river systems?
In Spanish America, ancestry increasingly determined social status within this ranked social structure.
What is a racial caste system (racial hierarchy)?
Native population losses combined with rising colonial labor demands encouraged expansion of this labor system using Africans.
What is African slavery?
A map showing millions of enslaved Africans transported to the Americas is best explained by this economic demand.
What is the demand for labor to produce plantation cash crops?
Native peoples' defense of traditional religious practices against missionary pressure is an example of this response to colonization.
What is cultural resistance (or cultural persistence)?