UNIT 1

AP American History

America: A Narrative History 8th Ed

Historical Ironies

• Luck and accident often shape human affairs.

• Christopher Columbus accidently discovered the New World in his effort to find a passage to Asia.

• He named the indigenous people “Indians” because he believed he had found the East Indies.

Naming a “New People”

•“Why do you call us Indians?” a Massachusetts native complained to Puritan missionary John Eliot in 1646.

•Christopher Columbus, who mistook the Taino people of the Caribbean for the people of the East Indies, called then Indios.

•Within a short time this Spanish word had passed into English as “Indians,” and was commonly used to refer to all the native peoples of the Americas.

Being Politically Correct

• Today anthropologists often use the term “Amerindians,” and many people prefer “Native Americans.”

•But in the United States most of the descendents of the original inhabitants of North American refer to themselves as “Indian people.”

The First Peoples

• were nomadic hunters and gathers.

• migrated from northeastern Asia during the last Ice Age, nearly 20,000 years ago.

• were diverse and often highly sophisticated societies (farmers—traders—conquerors).

Negative Impact of Exploration

• Indians were: - exploited. - infected. - enslaved. - displaced. - exterminated.

Further Impact of Exploration

• However, Indians were not passive victims. They fully participated in the creation of the new society as: - enemies. - allies. - neighbors. - advisors. - converts. - spouses .

Europeans

• risked their lives to explore and settle the New World.

• They were also diverse: - young and old - men and women - came from Spain, Portugal, France, the British Isles, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Italy, and the various German states

Motivations

• adventurers and fortune seekers

• fervent Christians

• convicts, debtors, indentured servants, or political and religious exile

• people seeking land, higher wages, and greater economic opportunity

Lack of Workers

• The rapidly expanding colonial economies could not entice enough workers, so the Europeans began forcing Indians to work for them.

•Captive Indians often escaped or were so rebellious that their use as slaves was banned in several colonies.

Primary Excerpt

• The Massachusetts legislature outlawed forced labor because Indians were of such “a malicious, surly and revengeful spirit: rude and insolent in their behavior, and very ungovernable.”

African Slave Trade

• In 1619 white traders began transporting captured Africans to the English colonies.

• Few Europeans saw the contradiction between the New World’s promise of individual freedom and the expanding institution of race-based slavery.

• Nor did they predict the problems associated with introducing into the new society people they considered alien and unassimilable.

New Culture

• The intermingling of peoples, cultures, and ecosystems from the continents of Africa, Europe, and North America gave colonial American society its distinctive vitality and variety.

Human-Environmental Interaction

• The diversity of the environment and the climate spawned quite different economies and patterns of living in the various regions of North America.

• As the original settlements grew into prosperous and populous colonies, the transplanted Europeans had to fashion social institutions and political systems to manage growth and control tensions.

European Wars

• Imperial rivalries among the Spanish, French, English, and Dutch triggered costly wars.

• The monarchs of Europe struggled to manage often unruly colonies, which, they discovered, played crucial roles in their European wars.

Colonial Independence

• Many of the colonist had come with a feisty independence, which led them to resent government interference in their affairs.

• A British official in North Carolina reported that the residents of the Piedmont region were “without any Law or Order. Impudence is so very high, as to be past bearing.”

Road of Revolution

• As long as the reins of imperial control were loosely held, the two parties maintained an uneasy partnership.

• But as the British authorities tightened their control during the mid-18th century, they met resistance, which became revolt and culminated in revolution.