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How have different cultures experienced European exploration and settlement?
Khan Academy the Columbian exchange overview
Khan Academy the Columbian exchange overview
Document A
Ecological and Demographic Impact of the Columbian Exchange Resources
The Changing Landscape
Excerpted from Touring Gotham’s Archaeological Past
by Diana diZerega Wall and Anne-Marie Cantwell.
Published by Yale University Press © 2004, All rights reserved
We don’t know how the bone of a cow, a European domesticated animal, wound up mingled with other more traditional Munsee household refuse here [Clason’s Point, the Bronx] and at other sites in the city. The meat could have been given, bought, or stolen, or the livestock could have been raised by the community. Written accounts suggest all of these possibilities.
No matter how the meat got here, this seemingly insignificant find underscores the profound and irrevocable economic and ecological changes taking place not only here but throughout seventeenth-century coastal New York. As the colonial settlements grew, Dutch and English farms began expanding more and more into Munsee territory. The colonists cut down forests for lumber, cleared fields, planted European crops, and grazed European animals. These practices radically altered local ecosystems and destroyed the habitats of many of the animals that the Munsees had traditionally hunted and the plants on which they had depended.
Compounding these changes was the tense political climate in the mid-seventeenth century. Not only did the wars take energies away from economic activities, but Munsee and Dutch also destroyed each others’ crops as part of conflicts. As a result, the Munsees had to find new strategies to get food and to deal with their rapidly changing natural world, which they were now sharing with the colonists. This piece of cow bone, then, is evidence of the dramatic changes in the economy and landscape that were taking place throughout the world.
Document B
Miantinomo
(Narragansett)
“Brothers we must be one as the English are, or we shall soon all be destroyed.” Miantinomo (c. 1600–1643) tried to organize an intertribal resistance to the English colonists, and in the following speech he exhorted the Montauks of Long Island, New York, to join him. For his efforts, unsuccessful though they were, he was executed by the colonial government’s Mohegan allies.
Great Speeches by Native Americans
Edited by Bob Blaisdell
Brothers, we must be one as the English are, or we shall soon all be destroyed. You know our fathers had plenty of deer and skins, and our plains were full of deer and turkeys, and our coves and rivers were full of fish. But, brothers, since these English have seized upon our country, they cut down the grass with scythes, and the trees with axes. Their cows and horses eat up the grass, and their hogs spoil our beds of clams; and finally we shall starve to death! Therefore, stand not in your own light, I beseech you, but resolve with us to act like men. All the sachems both to the east and west have joined with us, and we are all resolved to fall upon them, at a day appointed, and therefore I have come secretly to you, because you can persuade the Indians to do what you will. Brothers, I will send over fifty Indians to Manisses, and thirty to you from thence, and take a hundred of Southampton Indians, with a hundred of your own here. And, when you see the three fires that will be made at the end of forty days hence, in a clear night, then act as we act, and the next day fall on and kill men, women and children, but no cows; they must [not] be killed as we need them for provisions, till the deer come again.
[1] David B. Quinn, ed. The Roanoke Voyages, 1584–1590: Documents to Illustrate the English Voyages to North America
(London: Hakluyt Society, 1955), 378.
[2] Edward Winslow, Nathaniel Morton, William Bradford, and Thomas Prince, New England’s Memorial (Cambridge:
Allan and Farnham, 1855), 362.
[3] William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647, ed. Samuel E. Morison (New York: Knopf, 1952), 271.
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
The Columbian Exchange
Author: Alfred Crosby
Document C
Document C
Native American resistance to the Europeans was ineffective. Indigenous peoples suffered from white brutality, alcoholism, the killing and driving off of game, and the expropriation of farmland, but all these together are insufficient to explain the degree of their defeat. The crucial factor was not people, plants, or animals, but germs. The history of the United States begins with Virginia and Massachusetts, and their histories begin with epidemics of unidentified diseases. At the time of the abortive Virginia colony at Roanoke in the 1580s the nearby Amerindians “began to die quickly. The disease was so strange that they neither knew what it was, nor how to cure it.”[1] When the Pilgrims settled at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620, they did so in a village and on a coast nearly cleared of Amerindians by a recent epidemic. Thousands had “died in a great plague not long since; and pity it was and is to see so many goodly fields, and so well seated, without man to dress and manure the same.”[2]
Smallpox was the worst and the most spectacular of the infectious diseases mowing
down the Native Americans. The first recorded pandemic of that disease in British North
America detonated among the Algonquin of Massachusetts in the early 1630s: William
Bradford of Plymouth Plantation wrote that the victims “fell down so generally of this
disease as they were in the end not able to help one another, no not to make a fire nor
fetch a little water to drink, nor any to bury the dead.”[3]
The missionaries and the traders who ventured into the American interior told the same
appalling story about smallpox and the indigenes. In 1738 alone the epidemic destroyed
half the Cherokee; in 1759 nearly half the Catawbas; in the first years of the next century
two-thirds of the Omahas and perhaps half the entire population between the Missouri
River and New Mexico; in 1837–1838 nearly every last one of the Mandans and perhaps
half the people of the high plains.
European explorers encountered distinctively American illnesses such as Chagas
Disease, but these did not have much effect on Old World populations. Venereal syphilis
has also been called American, but that accusation is far from proven. Even if we add all
the Old World deaths blamed on American diseases together, including those ascribed to
syphilis, the total is insignificant compared to Native American losses to smallpox alone.
In your note books complete a after I read brain dump for the Columbian Exchange - 10 points
In your notebook draw a Historical Event Graphic Organizer with Columbian Exchange in the center. - 10 points
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