Sample Lesson Plan 2: AP AMERICAN HISTORY

BEGINNINGS (1491-1607)

1.2. Factors of Exploration and the Contours of Contact

(Lecture Base)

Objectives:

• Describe the characteristics of European society on the eve of contact
• Describe the characteristics of early West African empires and identify their religious and social structures
• Define the term “Columbian Exchange” and explain its impact on the emerging Atlantic World

NCHE Habits of Mind:

• Acquire a comprehension of diverse cultures and shared humanity
• Perceive past events and issues as they were experience by people at the time, to develop historical empathy as opposed to present-mindedness
• Understand the relationship between geography and history as a matrix of time and place, and as a context for events

NCHE Vital Themes and Narratives:

• Civilization, Cultural Diffusion, and Innovation
• Conflict and Cooperation
• Comparative History of Major Developments

Key Concepts:

1.2 The arrival of Europeans in the Western Hemisphere in the 15^th and 16^th Centuries triggered extensive demographic and social changes on both sides of the Atlantic.

1.3 Contacts among American Indians, Africans, and Europeans challenged the worldviews of each group.

Lecture Notes:

1. Seeds of Exploration

From the fifth to the fourteenth centuries, Europe was not a region of nation-states, as we now understand it. Rather, it was predominantly divided into small dominions such as kingdoms, duchies, and principalities.

• In other words, unlike modern countries, European states during this time were not especially well organized or efficient, because their source of power was not primarily centralized.
• For example, there was no such entity as “Ireland.” The island instead was the home of four provinces—Leinster, Munster, Connacht, and Ultster. Each was ruled by chieftains who controlled a large territory where inhabitants paid taxes in exchange for protection.
• The leaders of such petty fiefdoms and rulers of larger kingdoms tended to see their neighbors as rivals; just as Leinster feuded with Munster, England remained at odds with France, and France competed with Spanish kingdoms.
• Long-distance military expeditions against more distant foreign powers were relatively rare because they were so expensive.

Thus, throughout this time, the outlook of most Europeans was overwhelmingly provincial.

• Subsistence agriculture predominated, and commerce was limited; few merchants looked beyond the boundaries of their own regions.
• The Roman Catholic Church also exercised a measure of spiritual authority over most of the continent, and the Holy Roman Empire provided at least a nominal political center.

Even so, the real power was for the most part widely dispersed; only rarely could a single leader launch a great venture. Gradually, however, conditions in Europe would change so that by the fifteenth century interest in overseas exploration grew and flourished.

Several important and related changes provided the incentive for Europeans to look toward new lands. The first was the reawakening of commerce. This development can be partially attributed to significant growth in Europe’s population in the fifteenth century.

• The Black Death, a catastrophic epidemic of the bubonic plague that began in Constantinople in 1347, had decimated Europe killing more than a third of the people of the continent and debilitating its already limited economy.
• But a century and a half later, the population had rebounded. With population growth came a rise in land values, a general increase in prosperity, and, ultimately, the reawakening of commerce.

In particular, affluent landlords were becoming eager to purchase goods from distant regions, and a new merchant class was emerging to meet their demand.

Paralleling the rise of commerce in Europe, and in part responsible for it, was the rise of new governments that were more united, centralized, and, thus, more powerful than the feeble political entities of the feudal past.

• In the western areas of Europe, the authority of the distant pope and the even more distant Holy Roman Emperor was essentially weak. As a result, strong new monarchs were eventually able to emerge to create more centralized nation-states, with national courts, national armies, and national tax systems.
• As these ambitious kings and queens consolidated their power and increased their wealth, they became eager to enhance the commercial growth of their nations.

In addition to the explosion of commerce and the centralization of power, technological advances contributed to rise of overseas exploration.

• As voyagers traveled farther distances, they relied on a variety of both new and existing navigational tools to help them reach their destinations. The most popular of these tools and innovations included…
  • The Astrolabe–an instrument used to measure the position of the sun, moon, planets, and stars. Navigators used this tool to measure the angle of a celestial body above the horizon to determine their latitude positioning.
  • The Cross Staff—Mariners used the cross staff to measure the height of objects above the horizon. This information helped them to determine how far north or south of the Equator, they were.
  • Chip board—Mariners used this tool to measure the speed of the ship. The small board, tied to the end of several hundred feet of rope with knots at specific intervals, was thrown overboard. Sailors counted the number of knots to determine their speed.
  • Hourglass—This was one of the most commonly used navigational instruments. Depending on its size, the hourglass could be made to measure any amount of time. Sailors used it to track how far they had traveled or how long they had been on duty.
  • Caravela Redonda—-an improved version of the caravel, a popular vessel for open sea travel. Used by navigators from Spain, Portugal, and England, the caravel was a small but fast merchant ship that typically carried few weapons. The improved version was rigged with both square and lateen sails that increased its speed and maneuverability. Columbus’s Pinta and Nina were these types of caravels and Magellan had one in his fleet that circumnavigated the world.

An appetite for foreign goods also helped to create the drive for overseas exploration and expansion.

• To start, in Europe, territorial battles between Christians and Muslims had been dominating much of the period between the 11^th and 14^th
• Beginning in the fourteenth century many Europeans started to grow accustomed to a variety of exotic Asian goods including silk, drugs, dyes, perfumes, and spices.
• Muslim forces, however, controlled key passageways to the east and forced European tradespersons to pay huge sums for travel on their routes.

Ultimately, European consumers tired of the increasing prices and demanded faster, less expensive routes to Asia.

With the increase in trade, European cities also grew to handle the exchange of valued products from the East in return for silver, gold, woolen and linen cloths, furs, and leather.

• These flourishing centers of trade and banking included Venice, Genoa, Paris, Lyons, Amsterdam, London, Barcelona, Cadiz, and Lisbon.
• Moreover, the rise of these great cities accompanied the growth of unified political states.
• Therefore, in many ways, merchants provided the funding for rulers to consolidate small feudal states into nations.

In Portugal, Spain, France, and England, for example, commercial interests supported political unification and centralization to obtain social order, commercial monopolies, and standardized codes of law.

Finally, the invention of the printing press in 1450 also contributed to the rise of overseas exploration, as it made information sharing much easier.

• Journals described the experiences of many explorers, including the travels of Marco Polo to Asia almost three hundred years earlier.
• Europeans were captivated by his descriptions of incredible wealth and adventures.

In sum, ever since the early fourteenth century, when Marco Polo and other adventurers had returned from Asia bearing exotic goods and even more exotic tales, Europeans who hoped for commercial glory had dreamed above all of trade with the East.

• As discussed, for two centuries, that trade had been limited by the difficulties of the long, arduous overland journey to the Asian courts.
• But in the fourteenth century, as the maritime capabilities of several western European societies increased, there began to be serious talk of finding a faster, safer sea route to Asia.

Such dreams gradually found a receptive audience in the courts of the new monarchs. By the late fifteenth century, some of them were ready to finance daring voyages of exploration.

1. An Atlantic World Emerges

Europeans’ overseas expansion began in earnest even before Columbus reached the New World in 1492. The first to conduct overseas missions were the Portuguese. They were the preeminent maritime power in the fifteenth century.

• Encouraged by Prince Henry “the Navigator,” of Portugal in 1420 began a slow exploration of the West African coast, moving ever closer to a route to the Far East.
• Prince Henry had decided to challenge the Arab hold on the trade routes with the East. He also hoped to increase Portugal’s power by adding territorial possessions, to promote trade with Africa, and spread Christianity.

The explorations Prince Henry began did not fulfill his own hopes, but they ultimately led farther than he had originally dreamed. Some of Henry’s mariners went as far south as Cape Verde, on Africa’s west coast.

• In 1486 (six years after Henry’s death), Bartholomeu Dias rounded the Southern tip of Africa (the Cape of Good Hope) and in 1497-1498, Vasco da Gama proceeded all the way around the cape to India.
• In 1500, the next fleet bound for India, under the command of Pedro Cabral, was blown westward off its southerly course and happened upon the coast of Brazil.

Within a few years of their original expeditions, the Portuguese established a lucrative coastal trade in slaves, gold, and malaguetta pepper in the Senegal region and farther south and east to the Gold Coast and Benin.

• As a result, merchants began to invest in expeditions.
• And, between the 1440s and 1505, Portuguese traders transported forty thousand Africans to perform domestic labor in Portugal, Spain, and to work on the sugar plantations of the Azores, Madeira, and Canary Islands.

In short, the Portuguese African explorations soon involved the Portuguese in an Atlantic slave trade.

By the time of this development, West African cultures had grown to represent diverse societies, but they did share some common features.

• From before 200 AD to 1600, a succession of empires—Ghana, Mali, and Songhai—dominated western Africa.
• These empires had large armies, collected tribute over vast distances, and traded with Europeans and Arabs. Through such trade, many West Africans became converts to Islam.

Beyond these empires, along the West African coast laid smaller states with highly developed cultures.

• Although influenced by Islam, they retained much of their traditional religions. Divine kings governed many of the costal states.
• Like the Native Americans and Europeans, the people of Africa kept religion central to their lives and endowed their leaders with both political and religious authority.

Generally, in West African societies, the extended family held land in common and assigned plots to individual families.

• Women and men worked together in the fields to grow crops such as rice, cassava, wheat, millet, cotton, fruits, and vegetables.
• They also kept livestock such as cattle, sheep, goats, and chickens.
• Families produced food for their own use and for the market, where women were the primary traders.
• These societies also had artisans who were skilled in textile weaving, pottery, basketry, and woodwork. They also made tools and art objects of copper, bronze, iron, silver, and gold.

Altogether, as in the case of Native Americans, West Africans had experienced the rise and fall of empires and had developed diverse, complex cultures by the time Europeans arrived on their shores.

Although slavery was common among African cultures, the Atlantic Slave Trade that developed was different, in that it was economic rather than social.

• Over the course of four centuries, beginning in the 1440s, Africa lost more than 10 million people to the Atlantic Slave Trade.
• Slavery had existed in Africa and throughout the Mediterranean for centuries before the Portuguese arrived on the West African coast.
• But, most African slaves had been prisoners of war; others had committed some offense that caused their kinfolk to banish them.
• The primary function of localized slavery in West Africa was to provide a place in society for people who had been cut off from their families.

In this situation, most slaves remained in West Africa, where they became members of a household, married, and had children.

The plantation system that would become dominant in America began near Africa.

• Portugal began growing sugar as early as 1452 on the island of Madeira, off West Africa.
• Planting, tending, and harvesting sugarcane required large amounts of menial, strenuous labor in a hot climate. To supply Madeira, Portuguese merchants purchased black slaves from Muslim trans-Saharan traders and from Africans along the coast.
• When sugar proved an extraordinarily profitable commodity, the Portuguese colonized the small islands in the Gulf of Guinea to create new sugar plantations. The mortality rate was high and the demand for laborers great, spurring growth of the slave trade on the Gold Coast.
• By the end of the 15^th C, Portugal had developed both the plantation system and the commercial mechanism for purchasing humans from African traders.

Therefore, the growth of slavery and the slave trade in America after 1500 represented an expansion of these earlier developments.

Fearing that Portugal’s developing empire would become too strong, Spain began to seek another route to the Far East, but Columbus found the lands of the New World instead.

• Columbus, who was born and reared in Genoa Italy, obtained most of his early seafaring experiences in the service of the Portuguese. As a young man, he became intrigued with the possibility, already under discussion in many seafaring circles, of reaching Asia by going not east but west.
• Columbus failed to win the support for his plan in Portugal, so he turned to Spain.
• In the fifteenth century, the marriage of Spain’s two most powerful regional rulers, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, had produced the strongest monarchy in Europe.
• Like other young monarchies, it soon grew eager to demonstrate its strength by sponsoring new commercial ventures.

Columbus left Spain in August 1492 with three ships (the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria) and sailed west into the Atlantic on what he thought was a straight course for Japan.

• Ten weeks later, he sighted land and assumed he had reached his target. In fact, he had landed on an island in the Bahamas.
• When he pushed on and encountered Cuba, he assumed he had reached China. He returned to Spain in triumph, bringing with him several captured natives as evidence of his achievement. (He called the natives “Indians” because he believed they were from the East Indies in the Pacific).

But Columbus had not, of course, encountered the court of the great khan in China or the fabled wealth of the Indies.

• A year later therefore he tried again, this time with a much larger expedition. As before he headed into the Caribbean, discovering several other islands and leaving a small and short-lived colony on Hispaniola (present-day Haiti).
• On a third voyage, in 1498, he finally reached the mainland and cruised along the northern coast of South America.
• When he passed the mouth of the Orinoco River (in present-day Venezuela) he concluded for the first time that what he had discovered was not in fact an island off the coast of China, as he had assumed, but a separate continent; such a large freshwater stream he realized, could emerge only from a large body of land.
• Still, he remained convinced that Asia was only a short distance away. And although he failed in his efforts to sail around the northeastern coast of South America to the Indies, he returned to Spain believing that he had explored at least the fringes of the Far East. He continued to believe that until he died.

Excited by the gold Columbus had brought back from America, Ferdinand and Isabella sought formal confirmation of their ownership of the new lands. They feared the interference of Portugal.

• In 1493, at Spain’s urging, Pope Alexander VI issued a Papal Bull, the Doctrine of Discovery, which would go on to play a central role in the Spanish conquest of the New World. To start, the document supported Spain’s claim to exclusive rights to the lands discovered by Columbus.
• The Bull stated that any land not inhabited by Christians was available to be “discovered,” claimed, and exploited by Christian rulers and declared that the “Catholic faith and the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread…”

This “Doctrine of Discovery” would become the basis of all European claims in the Americas as well as the foundation for the United States’ western expansion.

The Bull also established a “Line of Demarcation” 100 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, dividing the Atlantic world into two equal parts—that east of the line for Portugal and that west of it for Spain.

• Because this line tended to be unduly favorable to Spain, and because the Portuguese had the stronger navy, the two countries went on to work out the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), by which the line was moved farther west.
• As a result, Brazil eventually became a Portuguese colony while Spain maintained claims to the rest of the Americas.

As other European nations joined the hunt for colonies, they tended to ignore the Treaty of Tordesillas.

Christopher Columbus’s initial voyage to America whetted the appetites of many European countries.

• As a result, power-hungry leaders would go on to sponsor many expeditions to the New World in the hopes of getting a share of the riches.
• As travel between Europe and America became more frequent, small settlements and trading posts were established along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, including present-day Florida through Central America.

As we will see next time, the explorers would discover great amounts of precious metals and natural resources, but it was not enough to quench their growing thirst for adventure and wealth.

III. The Columbian Exchange

As exploration and eventual colonization of the New World mounted, a cultural exchange developed that would change societies in not only America, but also Europe and Africa.

• Columbian ExchangeàThe transmission and exchange of European, Native American, and African knowledge, technology, and culture.
• To begin, the Europeans would not have continued exploring the Americas at all without their early contacts with the natives. From them, they first learned of the rich deposits of gold and silver.

After that, the history of the Americas became one of increasing levels of exchanges—some beneficial, some catastrophic—among different peoples and cultures.

The first result of this exchange was the importation of European diseases to the New World.

• This exchange exposed Native Americans to such illnesses as influenza, measles, chicken pox, mumps, typhus, and above all smallpox—diseases to which Europeans had over time developed at least a partial immunity but to which Native Americans were tragically vulnerable. Millions died.
• Native groups inhabiting some of the large Caribbean islands and some areas of Mexico were virtually extinct within fifty years of their first contact with Old World peoples.
• In Hispaniola, where Columbus landed and established a small, short-lived colony in the 1490s, the native population quickly declined from approximately 1 million to about 500.
• In the Mayan areas of Mexico, as much as 95 percent of the population perished within a few years of their first contact with the Spanish.

All of this had nothing to do with superiority or inferiority of bio-systems in any absolute sense. It had more to do with environmental contrasts.

• For instance, the peoples of the New World were accustomed to living in one particular kind of environment, Europeans and Africans in another.
• When the Old World peoples came to America they brought with them all their plants, animals, and germs creating a kind of environment, to which they were already adapted, and so they increased in number.
• The peoples of the New World had not adapted to European germs, and so initially, their numbers plunged.

Not all aspects of the exchange were disastrous to New World peoples.

• New crops, for instance, came to America from Europe and Africa such as cultivated rice, wheat, oats, sugarcane, bananas, onions, peaches, and watermelon.
• Europeans also introduced domestic livestock such as cattle, pigs, sheep and, perhaps, most significantly the horse.
• Some Indians, especially on the plains, adopted horses and became skilled riders.
• Problems, however, also resulted as Europeans often allowed their animals to roam. Cattle and pigs trampled native fields, helped spread disease, and the seeds of aggressive European plants that forced out native species.

New World contributions to the exchange were also significant.

• For instance, new agricultural techniques learned from Natives helped Old World peoples better assimilate to the character of the new land.
• In addition, Indians showed Europeans how to build canoes and catch fish using weirs.
• Indians also introduced Europeans and Africans to crops that soon circled the globe and had a major impact on the growth of world populations: Indian corn, tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, beans, chocolate, pumpkins, and tobacco.
• In all, as trade between the old and new worlds grew, the new crops became essential components of the diets of hundreds of millions of Europeans and Africans.
• Moreover, the influx of these crops lead to a population increase in parts of the Old World.

Agricultural discovers ultimately proved more important to the future of Europe than the gold and silver the early explorers valued so deeply.

All in all, for Native Americans, the arrival of Europeans resulted in a demographic catastrophe.

• Their great cities were destroyed, and within 150 years, the Indian population was reduced by 90%.
• On the other hand, for Europeans, Columbus’s unexpected “discovery” brought unimaginable new opportunities.
• And, for Africans, European colonization sparked the transatlantic slave trade, which over the next four centuries transported at least 10 million Africans to the Americas.

But, the contact among Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans involved more than conquest, enslavement, and death.

• Together, the three groups created new traditions and societies. Moreover, the American colonies were shaped by the exchange of knowledge, culture, and work among all the participants.

In short, then, three major cultural traditions came together to create a developing world that would be new to everyone.

Assessment:

Making it Real…

• You are a native of San Salvador. Columbus and his company have recently arrived in your homeland. Describe these strange people. What do they look like? What kinds of unusual things do they do? How have you communicated with them so far? What problems have arisen because of their arrival? How do you feel about this event so far?

Key Questions…

• What were the positive and negative results of interactions among Native Americans, Africans, and Europeans?
• Why did the Portuguese and Spanish explore the globe? How did their goals change over time? (Looking Forward)
• In what ways were the cultures of Native Americans, Africans, and Europeans similar on the eve of contact? In what ways were their cultures different? What conclusions can we draw from these similarities and differences? (Looking Back)