Indigenous America Before 1492
This massive Mississippian city near St. Louis featured "Monks Mound," a structure 100 feet high that took 150 years to build.
Cahokia
Columbus sailed west hoping to reach this continent, underestimating the distance and not realizing the Americas were in the way.
What is Asia?
This trade route across the Atlantic Ocean forcibly transported enslaved Africans to the Americas, resulting in the deaths of about 15% of captives during the journey.
Middle Passage (transatlantic slave trade)
This 1620 ship carried the Separatists, or "Pilgrims," from their exile in Leiden, Netherlands, to Plymouth in New England.
the Mayflower
This Pennsylvania lieutenant witnessed a slave auction in eastern North Carolina and wrote to a comrade, questioning whether the scene squared with the "Liberty" he had spent six years fighting for.
Enos Reeves
This site in Oklahoma yielded artifacts like the "Conquering Warrior" effigy pipe and a copper head effigy plate, ca. 1200–1450.
Spiro Mounds
This 1494 treaty divided the Americas between Spain and Portugal.
What is the Treaty of Tordesillas?
According to the lecture, most societies enslaved people on these characteristics other than race, before the colonial-era shift to racial slavery.
war captives, other religions, criminals
This core Puritan/Calvinist belief held that only "the Elect" could be saved, through God's free grace rather than good works.
predestination
Despite his outburst against slavery at the auction, Reeves ultimately settled in this state after the war, married a local woman, and was recorded in the 1790 census as what?
an enslaver
This ancient earthwork site in Louisiana, dating to 1700–1100 BCE, is considered the oldest city in North America — over 2,000 years older than Cahokia.
Poverty Point
Spain's 700-year war to expel Muslim rulers from the Iberian Peninsula, completed in 1492, is known by this name.
What is the Reconquista?
This year marks when the first African captives arrived via slave ship in English Jamestown, Virginia.
1619
John Winthrop's 1630 sermon aboard the Arbella described the new colony using this famous phrase, meaning it would be a model watched by the world.
'a city upon a hill'
Ruddiman states that while Enos Reeves and other Revolutionary soldiers echoed antislavery rhetoric, the northern Continentals were were not 'blank slates.' What did he mean by this?
This national park in New Mexico contains the oldest known human footprints in America, dated to over 20,000 years old.
White Sands National Park
Around 1000 CE, these Scandinavian seafarers established short-lived settlements in Greenland and Canada, centuries before Columbus's voyages.
Norse (Vikings)
This English colony, founded in 1607 in the Chesapeake region, marked the beginning of British colonization aimed at profits from plantations and slavery.
Jamestown, Virginia
This 1689 English document created a parliamentary monarchy after the Glorious Revolution, shaping colonists' ideas about the "rights of freeborn Englishmen."
(English) Bill of Rights
On his march through Virginia, Private Josiah Atkins was appalled by the 'strikingly inconsistent character' of which Revolutionary war general's plantation?
George Washington
Unlike Cahokia and the Mississippians, these two Indigenous civilizations further south — one in Mexico, one in the Andes — did not decline before 1492 and were still flourishing (and powerful) at the time of European contact. Name at least one
Aztecs and Incas
Occurring roughly 1100–1300 CE, this long series of religious wars between Catholics and Muslims in the Near East also had the effect of connecting Europe and Asia during the Middle Ages, exposing Europeans to new trade goods and ideas.
the Crusades
According to Peter H. Wood's essay, why did slavery in English colonial America become specifically tied to race?
more cost effective, self propagating, social hierarchy
This economic and social shift, driven by transatlantic trade, improved manufacturing, transportation, and credit, made colonists feel connected to British culture through purchased goods like tea and "china."
consumer revolution (empire of goods)
According to Ruddiman's essay, Continental soldiers' remarks about southern slavery were not a consistent or coherent expression of antislavery sentiment — their views shifted based on
class, personal relationships