Para 1 - Cengage



CHAPTER 1

Out of Old Worlds, New Worlds

Chapter Outline

I. Introduction: The Cherokee Creation Myth

“Earth,” according to the Cherokee myth of creation, “is a great island floating in a sea of water, and suspended at each of the four [main compass] points by a cord hanging down from the sky vault, which is of solid rock.” Earth’s creation began when little Water Beetle, tired of being crowded in the sky with all the other animals, dove below the water to find a new place to live. Water Beetle “came up with some soft mind mud, which began to grow on every side until it became the island we call earth.” As the mud was drying, Great Buzzard flew about, and “wherever his wings struck the earth there was a valley, and where they turned up again there was a mountain.” As so the Cherokee country was full of mountains and valleys.

Eventually other animals arrived, carried by the streams that flowed out of the mountains, and they commanded a sun to cross the sky each day. The animals were divided according to their needs and abilities, and “plants and people were made, we do not know by whom.” “At first there were only a brother and sister until he struck her with a fish and told her to multiply, and so it was. In seven days a child was born to her, and thereafter every seven days another, and they increased very fast until there was a danger that the world could not keep them. Then it was made that a woman should have only one child in a year, and it has been so ever since.” But all Cherokee know, and fear, that “when the world grows old and worn out, the people will die and the cords will break and let the earth sink down into the ocean, and all will be water again.” The Cherokee were afraid of this.

The stories people tell to explain their origins can seem fantastical or heretical. Often, as in the Cherokee myth of creation, certain themes sound familiar to listeners or readers because different cultures share certain views of the world. For example, accounts of migrations, the lives of kings, or daily affairs may seem similar across geographies and cultures. But the stories are more than mere fictions intended to entertain people. Over the centuries the Cherokee retold and reshaped the details of their creation myth, putting together in order the component parts of the world as they knew it, and giving names to physical and psychological phenomena as they understood them. Their myth helped explain the causes of what they experienced daily and gave collective expression of core values, even their reason for existence.

For centuries before roughly 1400 CE, the Western Hemisphere was populated by hundreds of different Native American cultures. Their environments, family lives, religions, and political structures varied from one region to another, and each of them changed over time. Meanwhile, great transformations—political, social, economic, and cultural—also took place in Europe and Africa for centuries before these two “old worlds” came to north America.

African slaves who were forcibly introduced into North America brought new ways of farming and cooking, as well as new family and religious traditions, which set them apart from Indians and Europeans. Europeans, who frequently dismissed Indian myths as fireside stories or, worse, the false legends of “uncivilized savages,” tended to believe that the rise of printing and books made them superior, even though very few Europeans were themselves literate at the time they came to the Americas, and strong oral traditions still prevailed on every continent. In addition, the early Spanish, French, English, and Dutch colonizers sometimes marveled at the contrasts among African, Indian, and European values and customs, but often they found differences objectionable. Most Indians did not share the biblical narration of creation, and they also cared little for European Christian values. Furthermore, Europeans frequently noted that Indians and Africans had “peculiar” ways of working, structuring families, defining the meaning of property, telling time, creating political authority, and using the resources of their environments. Africans brought to North America were also placed (usually at the bottom) in this cultural and political hierarchy that Europeans developed in their minds, laws, and social behavior. Differences in appearance and behavior quickly turned into social and legal distinctions governing use of the land and its resources. The encounters of Native Americans, Africans, and Europeans became nothing other than transformative for all three cultures as they made a New World together.

II. The First Americans, to 1500

A. Earliest North Americans

1. The Paleo-Indians

2. Climatic Change and Adaptation

3. The Agricultural Revolution

B. North American Cultures

1. Eastern Woodland Cultures

2. Adena and Hopewell Cultures

3. Mound-Builders of the Mississippi River Valley

4. Southwestern Cultures

a) The Hohokam

b) The Anasazi

c) The Pueblo

5. Algonquian

a) The Chesapeake Tribes

b) The Eastern Coastal Tribes

6. The Iroquoian

a) The Five Nations of the Iroquois

b) Hiawatha and the Great League of Peace

C. Mesoamerican and South American Cultures

1. The Olmec

2. The Toltec

3. The Maya

4. The Mexica (Aztec)

5. Early Andean Cultures

a) The Chavin Mountain Culture

b) The Mochicans

c) The Tiwanaku

6. The Incas

III. Old World Peoples in Africa and Europe, to 1500

A. West African Cultures and Kingdoms

1. West African Social and Community Structures

2. Ghana

3. The Songhai Empire

B. Traditional European Societies

1. European Social and Community Structures

a) Peasant Families

b) Peasant Relationships to the Land

c) Laws and Social Customs

2. The Economic Expansion of Europe

3. The Black Death

4. Commercial Expansion and Early Voyages of Exploration

IV. Europe’s Internal Transformation, 1400–1600

A. Agriculture and Commerce

1. Impact of Recurring Plagues on European Agriculture

2. Urban Development and an Expanding Middle Class

3. New Technology and Transoceanic Travel

4. Markets and Fairs

5. Changing Relationships to the Land

6. New Social and Legal Arrangements

7. Urban Expansion

8. Changing Commercial Relationships

B. The Nation-State and the Renaissance, 1400–1600

1. The Formation of the Nation State

a) Portugal and Spain

b) France

c) England

2. The Renaissance

a) Greco-Roman Influences

b) The Renaissance Impact on the Arts and Sciences

(1) Galileo Galilei

(2) William Shakespeare

(3) Machiavelli and The Prince

C. The Reformation, 1517–1563

1. Martin Luther and the Ninety-five Theses

2. The Impact of the Reformation

a) Germany

b) France

c) England

3. The English Puritans

V. From Across the Seas, 1420–1600

A. Portuguese Exploration and African Slavery

1. Old World Slavery

2. The Portuguese Slave Trade

3. Sugar and Slaves

B. Christopher Columbus

1. Columbus’s First Voyage and Early Native American Encounters

a) The Arawak

b) The Taino

2. The Treaty of Tordesillas

3. Columbus’s Later Voyages

C. The Spanish Century

1. The Conquistadores

2. Hernan Cortes and the Aztec

3. Pizarro and the Incas

4. Juan Ponce de Leon and Florida

5. Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca and Texas

6. Hernando de Soto and the Mississippi Valley

7. Francisco Vasquez de Coronado and the Search for Cibola

D. The Effects of Contact

1. The Columbian Exchange

2. New World Slavery and the Middle Passage

3. European Cultural Adaptations

4. Native American Cultural Adaptations

VI. Conclusion

Native American, African, and European peoples all lived in dynamic cultures when they encountered each other. Long before peoples of different continents mixed, thousands of different North American cultures rose, flourished, and profoundly changed—sometimes repeatedly—in energetic interaction with each other. Cultures in Africa and Europe, too, underwent significant changes that laid the foundations for both cultural sharing and cultural conflicts when they did finally meet. By the time Africans and Europeans came to the Western Hemisphere, most peoples of the Caribbean and the coastal mainland lived in sedentary villages or semi-permanent encampments. They had organized themselves into clusters of families and hierarchical communities that were recognizable to Europeans, and they identified among themselves leaders, servants, and specialists of many kinds. From Aztec and Inca, to Pueblo and Seminole, certain Native Americans’ contact with the first arriving Europeans were in some ways closer culturally to these strangers from across the Atlantic Ocean than they were to nomads or hunter-gatherers who lived in remote places and rough climates of the American interior.

But there were also deep differences. Portuguese and Spanish explorers pushed aside Islamic commercial supremacy with a burst of energy in the 1400s, and went on to conquer islands and empires stretching over thousands of miles in the New World. By 1450 medieval technological, agricultural, and commercial innovations had changed living conditions dramatically within Europe. Religious and political turmoil had uprooted huge numbers of Europeans, many of whom became migrants to the West. The changes in the city-states of the Americas and Africa were just as far-reaching as those in Europe; their cultures were just as rich. But Africans and Native Americans did not choose to enter this imperial race; they were brought into it forcibly.

The first crude toeholds of Europeans in the Americas contrasted sharply with the great Native American city-states of Mound Builders, Aztec, Inca, and southwestern peoples. And yet, within only a short period, the demographic tables reversed. While life was no doubt difficult for European colonizers, who experienced starvation, death, and disease in the first years of each settlement, millions of Indians and Africans throughout the Americas perished by the diseases, steel weapons, harsh work regimens, and oppressive political authority of migrating European strangers. As Spain extracted shiploads of hides and precious metals from new lands, deadly diseases took a greater toll on Native Americans than Europeans had ever experienced in the bloodiest of wars. At the same time, Spanish and Portuguese explorers and settlers required greater replenishment of African slaves to perform an array of tasks as forced labor. This pattern, as we shall see, repeated itself when other European countries entered the race for colonization. It didn’t take long for the initial European dreams of glory and gold to give way to the reality of difference, disappointment, and sharpening tensions among strangers.

The Cherokee myth of creation does not disclose what happened when the encroachments of Europeans and Indians became unbearable. However, it does reveal much about the Cherokee respect for—and awe of—nature and the place of humans in a spectrum of living things. It is intriguing to wonder whether the myth provided a familiar explanation of creation that eased introductions between the Cherokees and Europeans, or whether its starkly different view of Cherokee homelands and social order contributed to alienation between the two cultures.

Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, students should be able to respond to all of the following questions:

1. What differences marked the cultural and historical experiences of the many peoples who lived in the Americas? In what ways were their cultures similar?

2. What kinds of interactions developed among peoples who came from fundamentally different cultures? In what ways did they cooperate, and in what ways did they clash?

3. How did Indians, Europeans, and Africans share different aspects of their cultures and blend their respective backgrounds into new cultures?

Chapter Summary

The First Americans, to 1500

American history began as a multiethnic, multicultural folk movement. Toward the middle of the fifteenth century, several vastly different human groups—Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans—came into contact with each other. As these cultures collided, conflicts resulted—often with devastating consequences to the peoples involved. But, as the process of exploration and settlement continued, new societies emerged based on a wide-ranging series of cultural blending events appropriately characterized as the “American experiment.” Migrations of Asian peoples across the “land bridge” known as Beringia began an estimated 30,000 years ago. Over the course of the next 17,000 years, these first Americans (or Paleo-Indians) spread overland from the plains of modern-day Montana to the southern tip of South America, Tierra del Fuego. These earliest Americans arrived as members of nomadic bands following large mammals that roamed across the vast tundra searching for food. Mammals such as the mastodon, woolly rhinoceros, and bison provided all of the essential needs required by the small communal bands of hunter-gatherers. As the climate began to change over the next 10,000 years, the last of the great ice ages drew to a close. The early Americans started to decline in number, leaving behind a dispersed population that began adapting their societies and cultures to the available resources that could be extracted from the regions they now inhabited. For the first time, settled communities began to dot the American landscape.

The earliest North Americans can be grouped into three broad categories, called the Woodland cultures, which occupied the eastern interior regions around the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys. The Woodland tribes are often referred to as the “mound builders” because of the great burial mounds they constructed. Many of these structures still exist as an enduring testament to the sophisticated organization of labor and hierarchical structure of these tribes. The Adena represented the first significant group of the Woodland cultures. They dominated the banks of the upper Ohio River from about 3,000 years ago until the first century CE As the Adena declined, the Hopewell culture emerged in the same area. The culmination of the Woodland culture is found in the area around modern-day St. Louis that was then known as Cahokia. This North American urban center thrived over a period of 450 years from 950–1400, had a population of 40,000 residents, and was built around a massive burial mound that stood over one hundred feet tall. Some time after 1400, Cahokia collapsed and no longer represented a major cultural center.

The Hohokam, the Anasazi, and the Pueblo occupied the semiarid southwestern reaches of North America at this time. The tribes of the arid Southwest, such as the Hohokam, built hundreds of miles of irrigation canals so they could grow grain crops and cotton in the typically dry climate. The Anasazi and the Pueblo were later cultures noted for their elaborate cities that they carved out of the canyons and cliffs of New Mexico. The Algonquians, descendents of the Adena and Hopewell peoples, settled the Chesapeake region and the northeastern reaches of North America. They tended to establish small villages, develop innovative ways to fertilize their lands, and grow a variety of crops including corn (maize), beans, and tobacco.

Other native cultures thrived in Central and South America, including the Olmec, Maya, Toltec, Mexica (or Aztec), and Inca peoples. Unlike the North American cultures, the bands that settled in Mexico and South America tended to establish chiefdoms with imperial leaders who created elaborate societies and ruled mighty empires. The Toltec, a culture that thrived between 1000 BCE and 650 CE, was among the first to develop a highly stratified society in the highlands near modern-day Mexico City. While the Toltec dominated the central plains of Mexico around 300 CE, the remarkably sophisticated Mayans emerged and soon ruled the Yucatan Peninsula. Around 900 CE, the Toltec swept down on the Mayan centers, overwhelmed them, and added their population to the massive Toltec empire. Suddenly, around 1200, the Toltec mysteriously vanished. The Aztec people, from the drier region of northern Mexico, soon asserted their control over the central highlands. By 1325, the Aztecs founded Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City). Further south, several Andean cultures occupied the mountainous regions of modern-day Peru. Like the Toltec, Mayan, and Mexica peoples to the north, the Andeans developed sophisticated societies that fashioned fine pottery and built great pyramids. Between 1200 and 1400, as the Mexica emerged as the dominant power in Mexico, the Inca seized control of the southern Andean highlands and eventually established an empire that stretched over two thousand miles north and south of the Incan capitol, Cuzco.

Old World Peoples in Africa and Europe, to 1500

As the various cultures emerged in the Americas, similar events transpired in Africa and Europe. Before 3000 BCE, West African people living on the savanna—the open grassland located between the equator and the Sahara Desert—settled and soon developed productive agricultural communities. The West Africans utilized many of the same slash-and-burn techniques that the North American coastal Indians practiced. Both groups would move on to new lands after depleting the soil of its nutrients. Between the sixth and fifteenth centuries, powerful empires began to emerge and dominate West Africa. The first prominent kingdom was Ghana, whose rulers controlled a network of towns and retained their wealth and power by controlling the caravan trade between Muslim traders from North Africa and the various sub-Saharan cultures. By the end of the eleventh century, invading North Africans weakened Ghana through a long series of protracted struggles. A new West African kingdom, called the Songhai Empire, emerged from the wreckage of the Ghanaian kingdom and prospered until the fifteenth century. Timbuktu was its commercial and religious center. The Songhai Empire reached its peak in the late fifteenth century at the same time that the Aztecs and Incas were dominating Central America and the Andean region and as the Italian explorer, Christopher Columbus, was setting sail toward the Caribbean.

Beyond the northern banks of the Mediterranean Sea, while the Ghanaian kingdom dominated West Africa between 500 and 1100, most people in Europe lived in impoverished communities farming the land and raising livestock. These people were dominated by the nobility, or landed gentry, who owned most of the European lands. The vast majority of the European population suffered regularly from crop failures and resulting famines, as well as devastating plagues—most notably the Black Death that wiped out one-third of Europe’s population between 1347 and 1353. In the decades following the Black Death, Europe experienced a series of internal changes that would mark the beginning of Europe’s “hiving out” in search of new opportunities.

Europe’s Internal Transformation, 1400–1600

Beginning in the fifteenth century, the population in Europe began to increase steadily, and the older farming strategies and techniques proved insufficient to meet the growing demand for food. Changing economies only served to exacerbate these problems. Consequently, in the period between 1380 and 1485, a series of new nation-states began to emerge, and political authority consolidated in the hands of hereditary kings. As powerful new rulers in western Europe appeared in Portugal, Spain, England, and France, they began to look for ways to address their internal problems by securing access to new markets—particularly those found in Asia. Portugal and Spain initiated the process: the former sponsored a series of explorations down the West African coast looking for an easterly all-water route to Asia; the latter sponsored the voyages of Christopher Columbus in an effort to mimic Portugal’s success with a westerly all-water route to Asia.

Two other major cultural transformations fueled the European age of exploration—the Renaissance and the Reformation. The Renaissance spurred dramatic changes in art, literature, law, politics, and science. New technology, developed during the Renaissance, made it easier to travel the world’s oceans without land references. The religious revolt known as the Reformation, which began in 1517, quickly divided Europe into Catholic and Protestant camps. Eventually, this religious schism set the stage for a dramatic confrontation between Catholic Spain and Protestant England in the Americas and the subsequent establishment of a series of English colonies in North America along the Atlantic seaboard.

From Across the Seas, 1420–1600

The transformations that occurred in Europe over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries provided the essential backdrop for the contrasting human groups in the Americas, Africa, and Europe to collide—and, as a result, all of them would be forever changed. As Spanish conquistadores vanquished the Aztec and Inca empires (and the subsequent combination of the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal), Spain emerged as one of the wealthiest and most powerful nations in the world. Spanish efforts to extract as much wealth as possible led to the enslavement of the Native American populations—who were already decimated by disease. Portugal sought to fill the void by trafficking in slaves from Africa. The growing European demand for African slaves destabilized the West African region to such a degree that the Songhai Empire soon toppled, following a similar pattern exhibited by the once grand Aztec and Inca empires. As other European nation-states sought to challenge Spanish supremacy, new kingdoms—notably England under the Tudor dynasty (1485–1603)—began to make inroads against Spain’s New World dominions.

Amid all of this devastation, something new emerged as a result of a series of cultural transferences known as the “Columbian Exchange.” The Spanish introduced a wide variety of domesticated livestock to the Americas, including grazing cattle, goats, swine, and horses; they also brought many new food items, including grains such as barley, wheat, oats, rice, and rye. Other crops included melons, olives, and coffee. The Native Americans, in turn, introduced the Europeans to a variety of beans and squashes, as well as the potato and tobacco. These positive aspects were muted, however, when biological exchanges introduced the Americans to a host of diseases previously unknown to them. European diseases decimated the native populations as epidemics of smallpox, influenza, typhus, malaria, measles, and pneumonia swept through their communities. As West Africans were brought to the Americas as slaves to replace the dwindling native population, they also introduced new crops and farming techniques that would contribute to the dramatic transferences that were taking place. The combined results of this dramatic convergence in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries established the foundations for both cultural sharing and cultural conflicts that would define the “American experiment.”

Lecture Strategies

1. Compare and contrast the major historical and cultural developments among North American, European, and African cultures before their contact with other cultures began. (Refer to the following comparative chronology.)

2. Trace the evolution of the modern European nation-state, and indicate specific ways that the Renaissance and Reformation shaped the political events occurring in the major European states.

3. Highlight the primary motivations that fueled the European age of exploration and colonization. Discuss the role geography played in Portugal’s early exploration efforts, and tell how that small Atlantic nation influenced later such efforts by Spain and England.

4. Discuss the roles that military technology, Native American reactions toward Europeans, and viral diseases played in setting the stage for the European conquest of the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. (Read James Axtell’s article, “Native Reactions to the Invasion of America,” which is readily found in a collection of his essays, Beyond 1492.)

5. Discuss how the “Columbian Exchange” undermined Native American societies after European contact, and the various ways in which the exchange represents a prevalent aspect of contemporary western culture.

Topics for Class Discussion

1. What were the major environmental factors that influenced pre-contact Native American, European, and African societies?

2. Upon initial contact between Europeans and Native Americans, the Europeans automatically assumed an air of superiority. Was this an accurate assessment on the part of the Europeans?

3. How did the European Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation affect the process of Europe’s westward expansion? Was one event more important than the other? If so, why?

4. Was the “Columbian Exchange” a failure for the original inhabitants of the Americas?

Map Exercises

Exercise A: North American Culture Areas Before European Contact

Physical Map of the United States ()

Label all of the following:

1. Bodies of Water: Atlantic Ocean; Chesapeake Bay; Columbus River; Great Lakes (all five—Erie, Huron, Michigan, Ontario, and Superior); Great Salt Lake; Gulf of Mexico; Mississippi River; Ohio River; Pacific Ocean; Rio Grande River; and St. Lawrence River.

2. Mountain Ranges and Geographic Regions: Allegheny Mountains; Appalachian Mountains; Atlantic Coastal Plain; Cascade Mountains; Eastern Woodlands (Northeast and Southeast); Great Basin; Great Plains; Mojave Desert; Rocky Mountains; Sierra Nevada Mountains; and the Southwest.

3. Native American Groups: Mark the locations of the following Native American groups: Arapaho; Catawba; Cherokee; Cheyenne; Creek; Delaware; the Five Nations of the Iroquois (Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, and Seneca); Fox; Mandan; Narragansett; Pequot; Powhatan; Pueblo; Sac; Shawnee; Shoshone; Sioux; Susquehannock; and Wampanoag.

Questions for Analysis:

1. How did the physical environment of North America determine where the different Native American cultures lived?

2. What natural obstacles did European settlers encounter after their arrival, and how did the physical features of North America affect settlement patterns, exploration, and transportation systems?

Exercise B: Africa and Europe in 1500

Physical Map of the World ()

Political and Physical Map of Africa ()

Map of European Countries ()

Label all of the following:

1. Features and Locations: Benin; Egypt; Ethiopia; Ghana; Gold Coast; Grain Coast; Indian Ocean; Ivory Coast; Mali; Mediterranean Sea; North Africa; North Atlantic; Red Sea; Rice Coast; Sahara Desert; Slave Coast; South Atlantic; and Timbuktu.

2. European Nations: England, France, Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland.

Questions for Analysis:

1. Why did the Portuguese dominate the early African slave trade?

2. Look at a contemporary map of Africa and match the different “coasts,” as identified by Europeans with the modern African nation.

3. What geographical features contributed to the emergence of Portugal and Spain as the first European maritime powers?

Competing Voices: Interpreting the Cultures of Strangers

What do the observations made by Christopher Columbus and Bartolome de Las Casas reveal about European attitudes and values?

Instructors: Note Columbus’s emphasis on the absence of great cities; the manner in which the Taino do not wear clothing; the absence of a single person identified as chief or king; the reference to personal property; and finally the connection between religion and profit.

For Las Casas, note his reference to how Spaniards came as Christians to convert Native Americans but their love of gold led to unspeakable atrocities.

Comparative Chronology

|Date |North America |Mesoamerica |South America |Europe |Africa |

|BCE |

|30,000–10,000 |Ancient peoples |Ancient |Ancient peoples cross | | |

| |cross Berengia |peoples cross Berengia |Berengia | | |

|10,000–2000 |Cultivation of crops|Cultivation of crops | |Stonehenge constructed in |Agricultural societies |

| |begins north of the |begins in the Mexican | |Britain (c. 10,000) |emerge on the West |

| |Rio Grande (c. 3000)|plains (c. 7000) | | |African savannas (c. |

| | | | | |3000) |

|1000–100 |Adena societies |Olmec culture emerges in|Early Andean |Height of Ancient Greek | |

| |flourish in the Ohio|the Mexican highlands |agricultural |culture (750–323); Romans | |

| |Valley (to 200 CE) |(1000) |communities |dominate Mediterranean | |

| | | |established (900) |world (450 BCE– 500 CE) | |

|CE |

|200–1000 |Hopewell culture dominates|Olmec culture wanes (c. | |Fall of Rome (c. 500); |Ghanaian kingdom |

| |Ohio and Mississippi |200) as Mayan culture | |Germanic feudal kingdoms |established in West |

| |Valleys (to 950) |begins to thrive on the | |emerge in Europe |Africa (c. 600) |

| | |Yucatan Peninsula | | | |

| | |(300–900) | | | |

|1000–1200 |Cahokia established as |Toltec culture sweeps | |Vikings reach North |Ghanaian kingdom |

| |primary urban center near |into the Yucatan from | |America (1000) |supplanted by the |

| |St. Louis, MO; Pueblo |the Mexican plains, | | |Songhai Empire (c. |

| |culture emerges in |weakening Mayan culture | | |1100) |

| |Southwest | | | | |

|1200–1400 |Cahokia declines as major |Aztecs emerge as |Inca civilization |Black Death sweeps through| |

| |urban center |dominant group in |dominates Andean |Europe (1347–1353); | |

| | |Mexican highlands and |region |Southern Renaissance | |

| | |build Tenochtitlan | |begins; nation-state of | |

| | |(1325) | |Portugal established | |

| | | | |(1382) | |

|1400–1500 |Iroquois form Great League| | |Portuguese explore coast |Songhai Empire reaches |

| |of Peace (1450) | | |of West Africa (1420s); |its peak |

| | | | |nation-states Spain and | |

| | | | |England (1469, 1485); | |

| | | | |Columbus’s first voyage | |

| | | | |(1492) | |

|1500–1600 |Spain explores Florida, |Cortes conquers the |Pizarro conquers the |Protestant Reformation |Portuguese interest in |

| |southeastern and |Aztecs (1519); epidemics|Incas; European |begins (1517); Northern |African slave trade |

| |southwestern regions |of European diseases |diseases ravage South |Renaissance begins; |intensifies as sugar |

| |(1515–1540); France |ravage Caribbean and |American Indians |Francis Drake |plantations appear on |

| |explores Canada and Great |Mesoamerican cultures |(1533) |circumnavigates world |the Atlantic and |

| |Lakes region; England | | |targeting Spanish gold |Caribbean islands and |

| |establishes colonies at | | |along the way (1577–1580);|in Brazil |

| |Roanoke (1584–1587) | | |England defeats the | |

| | | | |Spanish Armada (1588) | |

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