Period 1 Explained

This period is basically everything that happened prior to the first permanent English settlement in North America. The start of the period, 1491 (the year before Christopher Columbus “sailed the ocean blue”), is really shorthand for “before the Europeans showed up.” The end of the period is 1607, the year that the English landed in Jamestown, Virginia and founded the first permanent English settlement in the New World. In a nutshell, this period focuses on Native Americans and on early, non-English exploration of the New World, especially that of the Spanish.

The big concepts for this period are:

• Pre-Columbian America and Native American societies, especially the way they adapted to their environments

• Spanish exploration and the effect it had on native populations (e.g., disease, warfare, the encomienda system)

• The Columbian Exchange