Objective: Explain the context for European encounters in the Americas from 1491 to 1607.
Objective: Explain how and why various native populations in the period before European contact interacted with the natural environment in North America.
Key Concepts:
The spread of maize cultivation from present day Mexico northward into the present-day American Southwest and beyond supported economic development, settlement, advanced irrigation, and social diversification among societies.
Societies responded to the aridity of the Great Basin and the grasslands of the western Great Plains by developing largely mobile lifestyles.
In the Northeast, the Mississippi River Valley, and along the Atlantic seaboard, some societies developed mixed agricultural and hunter-gatherer economies that favored the development of permanent villages.
Societies in the Northwest and present-day California supported themselves by hunting and gathering, and in some areas developed settled communities supported by the vast resources of the ocean.
Objective: Explain the causes of exploration and conquest of the New World by various European nations.
Key Concepts:
European nations’ efforts to explore and conquer the New World stemmed from a search for new sources of wealth, economic and military competition, and a desire to spread Christianity.
Objective: Explain causes of the Columbian Exchange and its effect on Europe and the Americas during the period after 1492.
Key Concepts:
The Columbian Exchange brought new crops to Europe from the Americas, stimulating European population growth, and new sources of mineral wealth, which facilitated the European shift from feudalism to capitalism.
Improvements in maritime technology and more organized methods for conducting international trade, such as joint-stock companies, helped drive changes to economies in Europe and the Americas.
Spanish exploration and conquest of the Americas were accompanied and furthered by widespread deadly epidemics that devastated native populations and by the introduction of crops and animals not found in the Americas
Objective: Explain how the growth of the Spanish Empire in North America shaped the development of social and economic structures over time.
Key Concepts:
In the encomienda system, Spanish colonial economies marshaled Native American labor to support plantation-based agriculture and extract precious metals and other resources.
European traders partnered with some West African groups who practiced slavery to forcibly extract enslaved laborers for the Americas. The Spanish imported enslaved Africans to labor in plantation agriculture and mining.
The Spanish developed a caste system that incorporated, and carefully defined the status of, the diverse population of Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans in their empire.