{"id":4,"date":"2015-08-02T02:39:10","date_gmt":"2015-08-02T02:39:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/beta\/?p=4"},"modified":"2015-08-02T02:39:10","modified_gmt":"2015-08-02T02:39:10","slug":"01-the-new-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/beta\/01-the-new-world\/","title":{"rendered":"1. The New World"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Cahokia,<\/a>

Cahokia, by Michael Hampshire.\u00a0Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

*The American Yawp is currently in beta draft. Please\u00a0click here<\/a>\u00a0to help improve this chapter*<\/em><\/p>\n

1. \u00a0The First Americans<\/h1>\n

The last global ice age trapped much of the world\u2019s water in enormous continental glaciers. Twenty thousand years ago, ice sheets, some a mile thick, extended across North America as far south as modern-day Illinois and Ohio. With so much of the world\u2019s water captured in these massive ice sheets, global sea levels plummeted and the receding waters exposed a land bridge between Asia and North America across the Bering Strait. The first Americans most likely migrated from Asia sometime between twelve and twenty-thousand years ago, if not before. Nomadic hunter-gatherers, they traveled in small bands following megafauna–enormous mammals that included mastodons and giant horses and bison–into the frozen Beringian tundra at the edge of North America. Then, sometime between twelve- and fourteen-thousand years ago, the glaciers\u2019 long retreat freed them to enter the heart of North America. Behind them the land bridge closed and severed the two hemispheres, but in North America, as the ice retreated, humans filled the continents and by 11,000 years ago migrating peoples had reached the tip of South America. Hunters across the hemisphere preyed on plentiful game and natural foods and the population boomed.<\/p>\n

Whether because of overhunting, climate change, or a combination of the two, the megafauna population collapsed and mastodons, horses, and other large mammals disappeared. But native populations adapted: they fished, hunted small mammals, and gathered nuts and berries. Native peoples spread across North America. Woodland groups populated the Atlantic coast and later practiced agriculture to supplement rich hunting and fishing. On the plains, nomads followed bison herds. In the Northwest, natives exploited great salmon-filled rivers. And as paleo-Indians populated mountains, prairies, deserts, and forests, cultures and ways of life as arose as varied as the geography. Paleo-Indian groups spoke hundreds of languages and adopted distinct cultural practices. Woodland cultures burned underbrush to create vast park-like hunting grounds. Men typically hunted and women typically gathered and prepared wild foods. Rich and diverse diets fueled massive population growth across the continent.<\/p>\n

Between two and eighteen million people lived north of present-day Mexico before the arrival of Europeans. They were not isolated among themselves, but connected by complex relationships and long trading routes. By 3,500 years ago, for instance, copper from present-day Canada and flint from modern-day Indiana could be found in Poverty Point, Louisiana.<\/p>\n

Agriculture arose sometime between nine- and five-thousand years ago, almost simultaneously in the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. Mesoamericans in modern-day Mexico and Central America first domesticated maize and and developed perhaps the hemisphere\u2019s first settled population around 1,200 BCE. The Olmecs grew maize (corn), built monumental stone structures, and established long-distance trade routes that extended across the region and eventually the hemisphere. Corn was high in caloric content, could be easily dried and stored, and, in Mesoamerica\u2019s warm and fertile Gulf Coast, could sometimes be harvested twice in a year. Corn and other Mesoamerican crops spread across\u00a0the peoples of North America in the centuries before contact with European invaders. Agriculture\u00a0flourished especially in the fertile river valleys between the Mississippi River and Atlantic Ocean. There, three crops in particular–corn, beans, and squash, the so-called \u201cthree sisters\u201d–provided nutritional needs necessary to sustain cities and civilizations.<\/p>\n

The \u201cthree sisters”\u00a0allowed for dramatic social change. Several expansive civilizations in the Midwest and Southwest demonstrated the potential for large-scale Indian civilizations. The so-called Mississippians exploited the rich floodplains of the Mississippi River and built a network of settlements across the Midwest and the American South. Mississippian society was stratified. Elites maintained power through kinship, gift-giving, and by controlled access to the spiritual world. The Mississippian\u2019s signature mounds–enormous earthworks that could span acres and climb several stories tall–physically set priests and elites above the general population of craftsmen, agricultural workers, and slaves.<\/p>\n

\"Prehistoric<\/a>

Prehistoric Settlement in Warren County, Mississippi,\u00a0Vicksburg Riverfront Murals<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

The Mississippians developed the largest and most advanced native civilization north of modern-day Mexico. Roughly one-thousand years ago, the largest Mississippian settlement, Cahokia, located just east of modern-day St. Louis, peaked at a population of between 10,000-30,000. It rivaled contemporary European cities in size. (No American city, in fact, would match Cahokia\u2019s peak population levels until after the American Revolution). Located near the confluence of the Mississippi, Illinois, and Missouri Rivers, Cahokia became a key trading center with networks stretching from the Great Lakes to the American Southeast. The city itself spanned 2,000 acres. Religious ceremonies were performed atop vast \u201cmounds,\u201d enormous man-made earthen hills that still dot the Midwest and the American South. The largest mound at Cahokia, Monks Mound, rose ten-stories and was larger at its base than the great pyramids of Egypt. Scholars point to ecological collapse or mounting warfare as likely explanations for the Mississippians\u2019 eventual collapse.<\/p>\n

\"Cahokia,<\/a>

Cahokia, by Bill Iseminger.\u00a0Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Meanwhile, in the American Southwest sometime between the years 900 and 1300 ancient Puebloan peoples built a large civilization sustained by advanced irrigation and a vast trading network linking goods from as far as Central Mexico and the Mississippi River. As many as 15,000 people lived in the Chaco Canyon complex in present-day New Mexico. One single building, Pueblo Bonito, rose five stories and contained over 600 rooms. (Not until the late-nineteenth century would another American building surpass it in sheer size.) It and other ancient adobe cliff dwellings persist as ruins. Decline–likely brought on by sustained droughts, overpopulation, and soil exhaustion–shattered the large Pueblo cities although Puebloan peoples persisted in New Mexico and would later resist the highpoint of Spain\u2019s North American expansion.<\/p>\n

In the Pacific Northwest, Indian peoples including the Kwaikiutis, Tlingits, and Haidas took advantage of the lush forests and many rivers. The abundance of large forest mammals including deerk, elk, moose, and caribou, as well as waters filled with salmon, halibut, sturgeon and others created a tremendous surplus of food. Massive ocean-sailing canoes, some over 50 feet in length, enabled extensive fishing expeditions. The food surplus enabled a unique social organization, where individuals achieved social status by giving elaborate feasts, called potlaches. These days-long parties allowed the host to demonstrate his wealth by feeding and entertaining guests with food and artwork. Elaborately carved totem poles, masks, and other wooden items carved out of the great trees of the region produced some of the world\u2019s most unique art.<\/p>\n

\"Intricately<\/a>

Intricately carved masks, like the Crooked Beak of Heaven Mask, used natural elements–such as\u00a0animals–to represent supernatural forces during ceremonial dances and festivals. 19th century brooked beak of heaven mask from the Kwakwaka’wakw of the Pacific Northwest, via\u00a0Wikimedia<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Despite their many differences, North America\u2019s indigenous peoples shared some broad traits. Spiritual practices, beliefs on property, and kinship networks differed markedly from Europeans. Most Native Americans did not neatly distinguish between the natural and the supernatural. Spiritual power permeated their world and was both tangible and accessible. It could be appealed to and harnessed. Moreover, most native peoples\u2019 notions of property rights differed markedly from Europeans. Native Americans generally felt a personal ownership of tools, weapons, or other items that were actively used. The same rule applied to land and crops. While groups and individuals exploited particular pieces of land, for instance, and through violence or negotiation would exclude others, the right to the use of land did not imply the right to permanent possession. Meanwhile, kinship bound most native North American people together. Most North American native peoples lived in small communities tied by kinship networks. Native cultures understood ancestry as matrilineal: family and clan identity proceeded along the female line, through mothers and daughters, rather than fathers and sons. Fathers, for instance, would often join mothers’ extended families and sometimes even a mother\u2019s brothers would take a more direct role in child-raising than biological fathers.\u00a0Mothers could therefore\u00a0often\u00a0wield enormous influence at local levels and native mens\u2019 identities and influence were often forged in such\u00a0matrilineal contexts. Native American culture meanwhile generally afforded greater sexual and marital freedom. Women often chose their husbands, and divorce often was a relatively simple and straightforward process.<\/p>\n

Despite commonalities, native cultures varied greatly. From massive empires to scattered nomads, from agriculturalists to hunter-gatherers, the New World was marked by diversity and contrast. By the time Europeans were poised to cross the Atlantic, Native Americans spoke hundreds of languages and had adapted their lives to the hemisphere\u2019s many climates. Some lived in cities, others in small bands. Some migrated seasonally, others settled permanently. Native peoples had long histories and well-formed unique cultures that developed and evolved over millennia. But the arrival of Europeans changed everything.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

2. \u00a0European Expansion<\/h1>\n
\""The<\/a>

“The Landing of Columbus,” by John Vanderlyn, 1836.\u00a0Architect of the Capitol<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Scandinavian seafarers reached the New World centuries before Columbus. At their peak they sailed as far east as Constantinople and raided settlements as far south as North Africa. They established limited colonies in Iceland and Greenland and, around the year 1000, Leif Erikson reached New Foundland in present-day Canada. But the Norse colony failed. Culturally and geographically isolated, some combination of limited resources, inhospitable weather, food shortages, and native resistance drove the Norse back into the sea.<\/p>\n

Then, hundreds of years before Columbus, the Crusades linked Europe with the wealth, power, and knowledge of Asia. Europeans rediscovered or adopted Greek, Roman, and Muslim knowledge. The hemispheric dissemination of goods and knowledge not only sparked the Renaissance but fueled long-term European expansion. Asian goods flooded European markets, creating a demand for new commodities. This trade created vast new wealth, and Europeans battled one another for trade supremacy.<\/p>\n

European nation-states consolidated under the authority of powerful kings. A series of military conflicts between England and France–the Hundred Years War–accelerated nationalism and cultivated the financial and military administration necessary to maintain nation-states. In Spain, the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castille consolidated the two most powerful kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula. The Crusades had never ended in Iberia: the Spanish crown concluded centuries\u2019 of intermittent warfare–the\u00a0Reconquista–<\/i>by expelling Muslim Moors from the Iberian peninsula in 1492, just as Columbus sailed west. With new power, these new nations–and their newly empowered monarchs–yearned to access the wealth of Asia.<\/p>\n

Seafaring Italian traders commanded the Mediterranean and controlled trade with Asia. Spain and Portugal, at the edges of Europe, relied upon middlemen and paid higher prices for Asian goods. They sought a more direct route. And so they looked to the Atlantic. Portugal invested heavily in exploration. From his estate on the Sagres Peninsula of Portugal, a rich sailing port, Prince Henry the Navigator (Infante Henry, Duke of Viseu) invested in research and technology and underwrote many technological breakthroughs. His investments bore fruit. In the fifteenth century Portuguese sailors innovated the astrolabe, a tool to calculate latitude, and the caravel, a ship well-suited for ocean exploration. Both were technological breakthroughs. The astrolabe allowed for precise navigation and the caravel, unlike more common vessels designed for trading on the relatively placid Mediterranean, was a rugged, deep-drafting ship capable of making lengthy voyages on the open ocean and, equally important, carrying large amounts of cargo while doing so.<\/p>\n

Blending economic and religious motivations, the Portuguese established forts along the Atlantic coast of Africa during the fifteenth century, inaugurating centuries of European colonization there. Portuguese trading posts generated new profits that funded further trade and further colonization. Trading posts spread across the vast coastline of Africa and by the end of the fifteenth century Vasco de Gama leapfrogged his way around the coasts of Africa to reach India and lucrative Asian markets.<\/p>\n

The vagaries of ocean currents and the limits of contemporary technology forced Iberian sailors to sail west into the open sea before cutting back east to Africa. So doing, the Spanish and Portuguese stumbled upon several islands off the coast of Europe and Africa, including the Azores, the Canary Islands, and the Cape Verde Islands. They became training ground for the later colonization of the Americas.<\/p>\n

Sugar, a wildly profitable commodity originally grown in Asia, had become a popular luxury among the nobility and wealthy of Europe. The Portuguese began growing sugar cane along the Mediterranean, but sugar was a difficult crop. It required tropical temperatures, daily rainfall, unique soil conditions, and a fourteen-month growing season. But with the Atlantic Islands, the Portuguese had found new land to support sugar production and new patterns of human and ecological destruction followed. Isolated from the mainlands of Europe and Africa for millennia, island natives\u2014known as the Guanches\u2014were enslaved or perished soon after Europeans arrived. Portugal\u2019s would-be planters needed laborers to cultivate the difficult, labor-intensive crop. Portuguese merchants, who had recently established good relations with powerful African kingdoms such as Kongo, Ndongo, and Songhai, looked to African slaves. Slavery had long existed among African societies. African leaders traded war captives\u2014who by custom forfeited their freedom in battle\u2014for Portuguese guns, iron, and manufactured goods. From bases along the Atlantic coast, the largest in modern-day Nigeria, the Portuguese began purchasing slaves for export to the Atlantic islands. Slaves would work the sugar fields. Thus were born the first great Atlantic plantations.<\/p>\n

\"By<\/a>

By the fifteenth century, the Portuguese had established forts and colonies on islands and along the rim of the Atlantic Ocean; other major Europeans countries soon followed in step. An anonymous cartographer created this map known as the Cantino Map, the earliest known map of European exploration in the New World, to depict these holdings and argue for the greatness of his native Portugal. \u201cCantino planisphere\u201d (1502), Biblioteca Estense, Modena, Italy.\u00a0Wikimedia<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Spain, too, stood on the cutting edge of maritime technology. Spanish sailors had become masters of the caravels. And as Portugal consolidated control over its African trading networks along the circuitous eastbound sea route to Asia, Spain yearned for its own path to empire. Christopher Columbus, a skilled Italian-born sailor who studied under Portuguese navigators, came calling.<\/p>\n

Educated Asians and Europeans of the fifteenth century knew the world was round. They also knew that while it was therefore technically possible to reach Asia by sailing west from Europe–thereby avoiding Italian or Portuguese middlemen–the Earth\u2019s vast size would doom even the greatest caravels to starvation and thirst long before they ever reached their destination. But Columbus underestimated the size of the globe by a full two-thirds and therefore believed it was possible. After unsuccessfully shopping his proposed expedition in several European courts, he convinced Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain to provide him three small ships, which set sail in 1492. Columbus was both confoundingly wrong about the size of the Earth and spectacularly lucky that two large continents lurked in his path. On October 12, 149, after two months at sea, the\u00a0Nina<\/i>,\u00a0Pinta<\/i>, and\u00a0Santa Maria<\/i>\u00a0and their ninety men landed in the modern-day Bahamas.<\/p>\n

The indigenous Arawaks populated the Caribbean islands. They fished and grew corn, yams, and cassava. Columbus described them as innocents. \u201cThey are very gentle and without knowledge of what is evil; nor do they murder or steal,\u201d he reported to the Spanish crown. \u201cYour highness may believe that in all the world there can be no better people \u2026 They love their neighbours as themselves, and they have the sweetest talk in the world, and are gentle and always laughing.\u201d But Columbus had come for wealth and he could find little. The Arawaks, however, wore small gold ornaments. Columbus left thirty-nine Spaniards at a military fort to find and secure the source of the gold while he returned to Spain to great acclaim and to outfit a return voyage.<\/p>\n

Spain\u2019s New World motives were clear from the beginning. If outfitted for a return voyage, Columbus promised the Spanish crown \u201cas much gold as they need\u201d and \u201cas many slaves as they ask.\u201d \u201cThey would make fine servants,\u201d Columbus reported, referring to the indigenous Caribbeans. \u201cWith fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.\u201d It was God\u2019s will, he said.<\/p>\n

Columbus was outfitted with seventeen ships and over 1,000 men to return to the West Indies (Columbus made four total voyages to the New World). Still believing he had landed in the East Indies, he promised to reward Isabella and Ferdinand\u2019s investment. But when material wealth proved slow in coming the Spanish embarked upon a vicious campaign to extract every possible ounce of wealth from the Caribbean. The Spanish decimated the Arawaks. Bartolome de Las Casas traveled to the New World ten years after Columbus. He would later write that \u201cMy eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write.\u201d Las Casas said the Indians were peaceful, but \u201cour work was to exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle and destroy.\u201d He said, \u201cthey suffered and died in the mines and other labors in desperate silence, knowing not a soul in the world to whom they could turn for help.\u201d When the enslaved Indians exhausted the island\u2019s meager gold reserves, the Spaniards forced them to labor on on their huge new estates, the\u00a0encomiendas<\/i>. Las Casas described European barbarities in cruel detail. By presuming the natives had no humanity, the Spaniards utterly abandoned theirs. Casual violence and dehumanizing exploitation ravaged the Arawaks. \u201cThe admiral, it is true,\u201d Las Casas said, referring to Columbus, \u201cwas blind as those who came after him, and he was so anxious to please the King that he committed irreparable crimes against the Indians….\u201d The Indian population collapsed. Within a few generations a whole island had been depopulated and a whole people exterminated. Historians\u2019 estimates range from fewer than 1 million to as many as 8 million (Las Casas estimated the pre-contact population of the island at 3 million). In a few short years, they were gone. \u201cWho in future generations will believe this?\u201d Las Casas wondered. \u201cI myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite the diversity of native populations and the existence of several strong empires, native Americans were wholly unprepared for the arrival of Europeans and biology magnified European cruelties many times over. Cut off from the Old World and it\u2019s domesticated animals and its immunological history, Native Americans lived free from the terrible diseases that ravaged populations in Asia, Europe and Africa. But their blessing now became a curse. Native Americans lacked the immunities that Europeans and Africans had developed over centuries of deadly epidemics and so when Europeans arrived, carrying smallpox, typhus, influenza, diphtheria, measles, and hepatitis, plagues decimated native communities. Many died in war and slavery, but millions died in epidemics. All told, in fact, some scholars estimate that as much as 90 percent of the population of the Americas perished within the first century and a half of European contact.<\/p>\n

Though ravaged by disease and warfare, Native Americans forged middle grounds, resisted with violence, accommodated and adapted to the challenges of colonialism, and continued to shape the patterns of life throughout the New World for hundreds of years. But the Europeans kept coming.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

3. Spanish Exploration and Conquest<\/h1>\n

As news of the Spanish conquest spread, wealth-hungry Spaniards poured into the New World seeking land and gold and titles. A New World empire spread from Spain\u2019s Caribbean foothold. Motives were plain: said one soldier, \u201cwe came here to serve God and the king, and also to get rich.\u201d Mercenaries joined the conquest and raced to capture the human and material wealth of the New World.<\/p>\n

The Spanish managed labor relations through a legal system known as the\u00a0encomienda<\/i>, an exploitive feudal arrangement in which Spain tied Indian laborers to vast estates. In the\u00a0encomienda<\/i>, the Spanish crown granted a person not only land but a specified number of natives as well.\u00a0Encomenderos<\/i>\u00a0brutalized their laborers with punishing labor. After Bartolome de Las Casas published his incendiary account of Spanish abuses (The Destruction of the Indies<\/i>), Spanish authorities abolished the\u00a0encomienda<\/i>\u00a0in 1542 and replaced it with the\u00a0repartimiento<\/i>. Intended as a milder system, the repartimiento nevertheless replicated many of the abuses of the older system and the rapacious exploitation of the native population continued as Spain spread its empire over the Americas.<\/p>\n

\"El<\/a>

El Castillo (pyramid of Kukulc\u00e1n) in Chich\u00e9n Itz\u00e1, photograph by Daniel Schwen, via\u00a0Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

As Spain\u2019s New World empire expanded, Spanish conquerors met the massive empires of Central and South America, civilizations that dwarfed anything found in North America. In central America the Maya built massive temples, sustained large populations, and constructed a complex and long-lasting civilization with a written language, advanced mathematics, and stunningly accurate calendars. But Maya civilization, although it had not disappeared, nevertheless collapsed before European arrival, likely due to droughts and unsustainable agricultural practices. But the eclipse of the Maya only heralded the later rise of the most powerful native civilization ever seen in the Western Hemisphere: the Aztecs.<\/p>\n

Militaristic migrants from northern Mexico, the Aztecs moved south into the Valley of Mexico, conquered their way to dominance, and built the largest empire in the New World. When the Spaniards arrived in Mexico they found a sprawling civilization centered around Tenochtitlan, an awe-inspiring city built on a series of natural and man-made islands in the middle of Lake Texcoco, located today within modern-day Mexico City. Tenochtitlan, founded in 1325, rivaled the world\u2019s largest cities in size and grandeur. Much of the city was built on large artificial islands called\u00a0chinampas<\/i>\u00a0which the Aztecs constructed by dredging mud and rich sediment from the bottom of the lake and depositing it over time to form new landscapes. A massive pyramid temple, the Templo Mayor, was located at the city center (its ruins can still be found in the center of Mexico City). When the Spaniards arrived they could scarcely believe what they saw: 70,000 buildings, housing perhaps 200,000-250,000 people, all built on a lake and connected by causeways and canals. Bernal D\u00edaz del Castillo, one of Cortez\u2019s soldiers, later recalled, \u201cWhen we saw so many cities and villages built in the water and other great towns on dry land, we were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments \u2026 Some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream? … I do not know how to describe it, seeing things as we did that had never been heard of or seen before, not even dreamed about.\u201d<\/p>\n

From their island city the Aztecs dominated an enormous swath of central and southern Mesoamerica. They ruled their empire not through a decentralized network of subject peoples that paid regular tribute–including everything from the most basic items, such as corn, beans, and other foodstuffs, to luxury goods such as jade, cacao, and gold–and provided troops for the empire. But unrest festered beneath the Aztec\u2019s imperial power and European conquerors lusted after its vast wealth.<\/p>\n

\"This<\/a>

This sixteenth-century map of Tenochtitlan shows the aesthetic beauty and advanced infrastructure of this great Aztec city. Map, c. 1524,\u00a0Wikimedia<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Hernan Cortes, an ambitious, thirty-four year old Spaniard who had won riches in the conquest of Cuba, organized an invasion of Mexico in 1519. Sailing with 600 men, horses, and cannon, he landed on the coast of Mexico. Relying on a native translator, whom he called Do\u00f1a Marina, and whom Mexican folklore denounces as\u00a0La Malinche<\/i>, Cortes gathered information and allies in preparation for conquest. Through intrigue, brutality, and the exploitation of endemic political divisions, he enlisted the aid of thousands of native allies, defeated Spanish rivals, and marched on Tenochtitlan.<\/p>\n

Aztec dominance rested upon fragile foundations and many of the region\u2019s semi-independent city-states yearned to break from Aztec rule while nearby kingdoms, including Tarascans to the north, and the remains of Maya city-states on the Yucat\u00e1n peninsula, chafed at Aztec power.<\/p>\n

Through persuasion, and maybe because some Aztecs thought Cortes was the god Quetzalcoatl, the Spaniards entered Tenochtitl\u00e1n peacefully. Cortes then captured the emperor Montezuma and used him to gain control of the Aztecs\u2019 gold and silver reserves and its network of mines. Eventually, the Aztecs revolted. Montezuma was branded a traitor and uprising ignited the city. Montezuma was killed along with a third of Cortes\u2019s men in\u00a0la noche triste,\u00a0<\/i>the \u201cnight of sorrows.\u201d The Spanish fought through thousands of indigenous insurgents and across canals to flee the city, where they regrouped, enlisted more native allies, captured Spanish reinforcements, and, in 1521, besieged the island city. The Spaniard\u2019s eighty-five day siege cut off food and fresh water. Smallpox ravaged the city. One Spanish observer said it \u201cspread over the people as great destruction. Some it covered on all parts\u2014their faces, their heads, their breasts, and so on. There was great havoc. Very many died of it … They could not move; they could not stir.\u201d Cortes, the Spaniards, and their native allies then sacked the city. 15,000 died. The temples were unmade. After two years of conflict, a million-person strong empire was toppled by disease, dissension, and a thousand European conquerors.<\/p>\n

\"Emanuel<\/a>

Detail of Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, “Storming of the Teocalli by Cortez and His Troops,” 1848.\u00a0Wikimedia<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Further south, along the Andes Mountains in South America, the Quechuas, or Incas, managed a vast mountain empire. From their capital of Cuzco in the Andean highlands, through conquest and negotiation, the Inca built an empire that stretched around the western half of the South American continent from present day Ecuador to central Chile and Argentina. They built steppes to farm fertile mountain soil and by the 1400s they managed a thousand miles of Andean roads that tied together perhaps twelve million people. But like the Aztecs, unrest between the Incas and conquered groups created tensions and left the empire vulnerable to foreigners. Smallpox spread in advance of Spanish conquerors and hit the Incan empire in 1525. Epidemics ravaged the population, cutting the empire\u2019s population in half, killing the Incan emperor Huayna Capac and many members of his family and sparking a bloody war of succession. Inspired by Cortes\u2019s conquest of Mexico, Francisco Pizzaro moved South and arrived amid an empire torn by chaos. With 168 men, he deceived Incan rulers and took control of the empire and seized the capital city, Cuzco, in 1533. Disease, conquest, and slavery ravaged the remnants of the Incan empire.<\/p>\n

After the conquests of Mexico and Peru, Spain settled into empire. A vast administrative hierarchy governed its new holdings: royal appointees oversaw an enormous territory of landed estates and Indian laborers and administrators regulated the extraction of gold and silver and oversaw their transport across the Atlantic in Spanish galleons. Meanwhile Spanish migrants poured into the New World. 225,000 migrated during the sixteenth century alone, and 750,000 came during the entire three centuries of Spanish colonial rule. Spaniards, often single, young, and male, emigrated for the various promises of land, wealth, and social advancement. Laborers, craftsmen, soldiers, clerks, and priests all crossed the Atlantic in large numbers. Indians, however, always outnumbered the Spanish and the Spaniards, by both necessity and design, incorporated native Americans–unequally–into colonial life.<\/p>\n

An elaborate racial hierarchy marked Spanish life in the New World. Regularized in the mid-1600s but rooted in medieval practices, the\u00a0Sistema de Castas<\/i>\u00a0organized individuals into various racial groups based upon their supposed \u201cpurity of blood.\u201d Various classifications\u2014often elaborately arrived at\u2014became almost prerequisites for social and political advancement in Spanish colonial society.\u00a0Peninsulares<\/i>\u2014Iberian-born Spaniards, or\u00a0Espa\u00f1oles<\/i>–occupied the highest levels of administration and acquired the greatest estates. Their descendants, New World-born Spaniards, or\u00a0criollos<\/i>, occupied the next rung and rivaled the peninsulares for wealth and opportunity.\u00a0Mestizos<\/i>–a term used to describe those of mixed Spanish and Indian heritage–followed.<\/p>\n

Like the French later in North America, the Spanish tolerated and sometimes even\u00a0supported interracial marriage. There were simply too few Spanish women in the New World to support the natural growth of a purely Spanish population. The Catholic Church endorsed interracial marriage as a moral bulwark against bastardy and rape. As early as 1533, King Carlos I declared that any child with Spanish blood \u201cto the half\u201d was entitled to certain Spanish rights. By 1600, mestizos made up a large portion of the colonial population. By the early 1700s, more than one-third of all marriages bridged the Spanish-Indian divide. Largely separated by wealth and influence from the\u00a0peninsulares<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0criollos<\/i>, however, mestizos typically occupied a middling social position in Spanish New World society. They were not quite\u00a0Indios<\/i>, or Indians, but their lack of\u00a0limpieza de sangre<\/i>, or \u201cpure blood,\u201d removed them from the privileges of full-blooded Spaniards. Spanish fathers of sufficient wealth and influence might shield their mestizo children from racial prejudice, and a number of wealthy mestizos married\u00a0Espa\u00f1oles\u00a0<\/i>to \u201cwhiten\u201d their family lines, but more often\u00a0mestizos\u00a0<\/i>were confined to a middle-station in the Spanish New World.<\/p>\n

Slaves and Indians occupied the lowest rungs of the social ladder. After Bartolome de las Casas and other reformers shamed the Spanish for their harsh Indian policies in the 1530s, the Spanish outlawed Indian slavery. In the 1550s, the\u00a0encomienda\u00a0<\/i>system of land-based forced-labor gave way to the\u00a0repartimiento<\/i>, an exploitative but slightly softer form of forced wage-labor. Slaves labored especially on Spain\u2019s Caribbean plantation islands.<\/p>\n

Many manipulated the Casta System to gain advantages for themselves and their children. Mestizo mothers, for instance, might insist that their mestizo daughters were actually\u00a0castizas<\/i>, or quarter-Indians, who, if they married a Spaniard, could, in the eyes of the law, produce \u201cpure\u201d\u00a0criollo\u00a0<\/i>children entitled to the full rights and opportunities of Spanish citizens. But \u201cpassing\u201d was an option for the few. Instead, the massive native populations within Spain\u2019s New World Empire ensured a level of cultural and racial mixture–or\u00a0Mestizaje<\/i>–unparalleled in British North America. Spanish North America wrought a hybrid culture that was neither fully Spanish nor fully Indian. The Spanish not only built Mexico City atop Tenochtitl\u00e1n, but food, language, and families spilled across racial barriers. In 1531, a poor Indian named Juan Diego reported that he was visited by the Virgin Mary, who came as a dark-skinned\u00a0Nahuatl<\/i>-speaking Indian. Reports of miracles spread across Mexico and the\u00a0Virgen de Guadalupe\u00a0<\/i>became a national icon for a new mestizo society.<\/p>\n

\"Our<\/a>

Our Lady of Guadalupe is perhaps the most culturally important and extensively reproduced Mexican-Catholic image. In the iconic depiction, Mary stands atop the tilma (peasant cloak) of Juan Diego, on which according to his story appeared the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Throughout Mexican history, the story and image of Our Lady of Guadalupe has been a unifying national symbol. Mexican retablo of \u201cOur Lady of Guadalupe,\u201d 19th century, in El Paso Museum of Art.\u00a0Wikimedia<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

From Mexico, Spain expanded northward. Lured by the promises of gold and another Tenochtitl\u00e1n, Spanish expeditions scoured North America for another wealthy Indian empire. Huge expeditions, resembling vast moving communities, composed of hundreds of soldiers, settlers, priests, and slaves, with enormous numbers of livestock, moved across the continent. Juan Ponce de Leon, the conqueror of Puerto Rico, landed in Florida in 1513 in search of wealth and slaves. Cabeza de Vaca joined the Narvaez expedition to Florida a decade later, was shipwrecked, and embarked upon a remarkable multi-year odyssey across the Gulf of Mexico and Texas into Mexico. Pedro Men\u00e9ndez de Avil\u00e9s founded St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565, and it remains the oldest, continuously occupied European settlement in the present-day United States.<\/p>\n

But without the rich gold and silver mines of Mexico, the plantation-friendly climate of the Caribbean, or the exploitive potential of large Indian empires, North America offered little incentive for Spanish officials. Still, Spanish expeditions combed North America. Francisco Vazquez de Coronado pillaged his way across the Southwest. Hernando De Soto tortured and raped and enslaved his way across the Southeast. Soon Spain had footholds–however tenuous–across much of the continent.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

4. \u00a0Global Exchanges<\/h1>\n

The \u201cdiscovery\u201d of America unleashed horrors. Europeans embarked upon a debauching path of death and destructive exploitation that unleashed murder and greed and slavery. But disease was deadlier than any weapon in the European arsenal. It unleashed death on a scale never before seen in human history. Estimates of the population of pre-Columbian America range wildly. Some argue for as much as 100 million, some as low as 2 million. In 1983, Henry Dobyns put the number at 18 million. Whatever the precise estimates, nearly all scholars tell of the utter devastation wrought by European disease. Dobyns estimated that in the first 130 years following European contact, 95 percent of Native Americans perished. (At its worst, Europe\u2019s Black Death peaked at death rates of 25% to 33%. Nothing else in history rivals the American demographic disaster.) A 10,000 year history of disease crashed upon the New World in an instant. Smallpox, typhus, the bubonic plague, influenza, mumps, measles: pandemics ravaged populations up and down the continents. Wave after wave of disease crashed relentlessly. Disease flung whole communities into chaos. Others it destroyed completely.<\/p>\n

Disease was only the most terrible in a cross-hemispheric exchange of violence, culture, trade, and peoples–the so-called \u201cColumbian Exchange\u201d–that followed in Columbus\u2019s wake. Global diets, for instance, were transformed. The America\u2019s calorie-rich crops revolutionized Old World agriculture and spawned a worldwide population boom. Many modern associations between food and geography are but products of the Columbian Exchange: potatoes in Ireland, tomatoes in Italy, chocolate in Switzerland, peppers in Thailand, and citrus in Florida are all manifestations of the new global exchange. Europeans, for their part, introduced their domesticated animals to the New World. Pigs ran rampant through the Americas, transforming the landscape as the spread throughout both continents. Horses spread as well, transforming the Native American cultures who adapted to the newly introduced animal. Partly from trade, partly from the remnants of failed European expeditions, and partly from theft, Indians acquired horses and transformed native American life in the vast North American plains.<\/p>\n

The European\u2019s arrival bridged two worlds and ten-thousand years of history separated from each other since the closing of the Bering Strait. Both sides of the world had been transformed. And neither would ever again be the same.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This chapter was edited by Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, with content contributions by with content contributions by L.D. Burnett, Michelle Cassidy, D. Andrew Johnson, Joseph Locke, Ben Wright, and Garrett Wright.
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