Topics
- 1.1 Contextualizing Period 1
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AP US History Topic 1.1, Contextualizing Period 1, covers the Americas from 1491 to 1607, before and after European contact. Before Columbus, tens of millions of people lived in the Americas, from the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán and the Inca empire to hundreds of separate nations north of Mexico, each adapted to its own environment. Columbus's voyage of 1492 began lasting contact between Europe and the Americas. Over the next century, Spain conquered the Aztec and Inca empires, epidemics killed millions of Native people, enslaved Africans arrived in the Americas, and England and France began to challenge Spain.
- 1.2 Native American Societies Before European Contact
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AP US History Topic 1.2, Native American Societies Before European Contact, explains how the peoples of North America adapted to their environments before 1492. Maize farming and irrigation fed Pueblo and Hohokam towns in the Southwest, bison herds and scattered plants kept western Plains and Great Basin peoples on the move, and the Haudenosaunee of the Northeast farmed corn, beans, and squash in matrilineal longhouse towns. Salmon and acorns supported settled villages in the Northwest and California without farming. Where food could be stored, societies grew more complex, with trade, specialized work, and chiefs.
- 1.3 European Exploration in the Americas
The Wrong Size of the World
AP US History Topic 1.3, European Exploration in the Americas, explains why Europeans crossed the Atlantic in the 1400s and 1500s and what Spain and Portugal claimed. Portugal sent ships down Africa's coast under Prince Henry, seeking a sea route to Asia's spices, allies against Muslim rulers, and converts, helped by the caravel, the compass, and the astrolabe. After conquering Granada in 1492, Spain's rulers backed Columbus, who reached the Bahamas on October 12 and insisted he had found Asia. The Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 divided Spanish and Portuguese claims, and in 1498 Vasco da Gama reached India by sea.
- 1.4 Columbian Exchange, Spanish Exploration, and Conquest
The Wrong Size of the World
AP US History Topic 1.4, Columbian Exchange, Spanish Exploration, and Conquest, covers how Spain built an empire after 1492 and how plants, animals, and germs crossing the Atlantic changed the world. Hernán Cortés took Tenochtitlán in 1521 with Native allies and the help of smallpox, which reached Mexico in 1520, and Francisco Pizarro conquered the Inca Empire by 1533. Historians estimate that central Mexico lost most of its Native people by the 1590s. Maize and potatoes fed Europe, Africa, and Asia, horses reshaped the Plains, and American silver flowed to Europe and across the Pacific to China.
- 1.5 Labor, Slavery, and Caste in the Spanish Colonial System
Other People's Hands
AP US History Topic 1.5, Labor, Slavery, and Caste in the Spanish Colonial System, explains how Spain organized work and rank in its American empire. Encomienda, begun on Hispaniola in 1503, gave settlers the labor and tribute of Native communities, and later drafts such as the repartimiento in Mexico and the mita in Peru forced Native people into fields and mines. As disease and overwork killed millions, Spain brought in more enslaved Africans under licenses and contracts called asientos. A caste system ranked people by ancestry, with Spaniards at the top, people of mixed ancestry in between, and Native and African people at the bottom.
- 1.6 Cultural Interactions Between Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans
What They Made of Each Other
AP US History Topic 1.6, Cultural Interactions Between Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans, covers how the three groups viewed, borrowed from, and fought one another in the first century of contact. Most Europeans saw Native peoples as inferiors to convert, rule, and put to work, a view the friar Bartolomé de las Casas challenged at the Valladolid debate of 1550 and 1551 against Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. Native peoples answered in different ways, by trade, alliance, petition, or war, and some enslaved Africans, such as Estevanico, guided Spanish expeditions. Contact also produced new families, and by 1600 Spanish America had many people of mixed ancestry.
- 1.7 Causation in Period 1
What the Ships Started
AP US History Topic 1.7, Causation in Period 1, reviews the causes and effects of European contact from 1491 to 1607. Compasses, better maps, sturdier ships, and rivalry among kingdoms sent Spain across the Atlantic for silver, gold, and converts. The results included the Columbian Exchange, smallpox from 1520, Cortés's conquest of Tenochtitlán in 1521, encomienda, and a slave trade that grew with the sugar plantations. Native nations still limited Europeans: in 1571 men from Chesapeake Bay killed Spanish Jesuit missionaries, and the English who arrived in 1607 depended on the bay's people for corn.
Key terms
- Land bridge (Beringia)
- Topic 1.1
Land that joined Siberia and Alaska during the last Ice Age, when the sea was lower. Many scholars think the first Americans crossed it or followed its coast.
- Largely mobile lifestyles
- Topic 1.2
Moving camp with the seasons to reach food. Bison hunters on the western Great Plains and foragers in the dry Great Basin both lived this way.
- Pueblo communities
- Topic 1.2
Farming towns of the Southwest, built of stone or adobe and often several stories high. Pueblo is Spanish for town; Cicuye, later called Pecos, was one of many.
- Surplus
- Topic 1.2
Food beyond what people need right away. Stored, traded or shared, it carried people through bad years and freed some of them for other work.
- Maize (corn)
- Topic 1.2
A grain first bred from a wild grass in southern Mexico. It spread north over thousands of years and became the main crop of many North American farming peoples.
- Irrigation
- Topic 1.2
Bringing water to dry fields through canals or ditches, as Hohokam farmers did along the Salt River in today's Arizona.
- Social diversification
- Topic 1.2
A society dividing into more kinds of work and more levels of rank. In the Southwest, maize surpluses and canal work made room for builders, traders, leaders and religious specialists.
- Trade networks before contact
- Topic 1.2
Native peoples traded over long distances before Europeans arrived. Pueblo towns swapped corn, cloth and pottery for the bison meat, fat and hides of Plains bands.
- Matrilineal
- Topic 1.2
Tracing family and clan through the mother's line. Among the Haudenosaunee, related women and their families shared a longhouse, and clan mothers chose the chiefs.
- Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy)
- Topic 1.2
A league of five nations in what is now New York: the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida and Mohawk, later joined by the Tuscarora. Its council met at Onondaga.
- Three Sisters
- Topic 1.2
Maize, beans and squash planted together. Cornstalks hold up the beans, beans enrich the soil, and squash leaves shade out weeds.
- Mixed agricultural and hunter-gatherer economy
- Topic 1.2
Farming plus hunting, fishing and gathering. In the Northeast, the Mississippi Valley and along the Atlantic coast, this mix supported villages that lasted for years.
- Cahokia (Mississippian culture)
- Topic 1.2
The largest Mississippian town, near present-day St. Louis, at its height around 1100. Its farmers grew maize, and its people built huge earthen mounds. Most had left by about 1400.
- Plank houses
- Topic 1.2
Large houses of split cedar planks, each home to several related families. On the Northwest coast and the lower Columbia, rich fisheries let people live in such towns all year without farming.
- Motives for exploration
- Topic 1.3
Europeans explored and conquered for new sources of wealth, to compete with rival kingdoms, and to spread Christianity. One voyage usually served all three.
- Caravel, compass and astrolabe
- Topic 1.3
The caravel was a small, fast ship whose triangular lateen sail let it sail closer to the wind. The compass showed direction; the astrolabe measured the sun or a star to find latitude.
- Nation-states
- Topic 1.3
Kingdoms united under strong central rulers, like Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella. Their monarchs needed trade income and the Church's support, so they paid for voyages and claimed new lands.
- Treaty of Tordesillas (1494)
- Topic 1.3
Spain and Portugal's agreement to divide newly claimed lands along a line west of the Cape Verde Islands: Spain to the west, Portugal to the east, which later included Brazil. No Native nation agreed to it.
- Columbian Exchange
- Topic 1.3
The movement of plants, animals, people and diseases between the Americas and Europe, Africa and Asia after 1492. It ran both ways and changed life on both sides of the ocean.
- Smallpox and measles
- Topic 1.4
Diseases from Europe, Africa and Asia that had never reached the Americas. With no one immune, epidemics killed far more Native people than war did.
- Encomienda
- Topic 1.4
A grant from the Spanish crown that let a colonist collect tribute and labor from a Native town, in return for protecting the people and converting them to Christianity. In practice it was forced labor.
- Maize and potatoes
- Topic 1.4
Food crops first grown by Native Americans. They fed more people per acre than Europe's grains, and over the next centuries they supported population growth in Europe, Africa and Asia.
- Horses
- Topic 1.4
Brought by the Spanish in 1493. Spreading through Native trade, they reached the Great Plains by the 1600s and changed how Plains peoples hunted, traveled and fought.
- Feudalism and capitalism
- Topic 1.4
Under feudalism, wealth and power came from land and the service owed by the people on it. Under capitalism, money invested in trade and business, called capital, mattered more. Europe's shift was slow and uneven.
- Joint-stock company
- Topic 1.4
A business owned by many investors who each buy shares. They split the profits, and if a venture fails, each loses only what he put in. English joint-stock companies later paid for colonies such as Jamestown.
- Protestant Reformation
- Topic 1.4
The break with the Catholic Church that began in Germany in 1517. Protestant churches spread across northern Europe, and Catholic and Protestant kingdoms competed for converts and colonies.
- Asiento
- Topic 1.5
Spain's system for licensing the slave trade to its colonies. Traders bought the right to import enslaved Africans, and the Crown collected a tax on each person brought in.
- Transatlantic slave trade
- Topic 1.5
The forced shipment of enslaved Africans to the Americas. European traders bought captives from some West African rulers and merchants and sold them to colonists for plantations and mines.
- Middle Passage
- Topic 1.5
The forced voyage of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas. Over the trade's whole history, roughly 10 to 15 percent of the captives died on the way.
- Plantation agriculture
- Topic 1.5
Large farms that grew one crop, such as sugar, to sell abroad. In Spain's Caribbean colonies, plantations used enslaved African workers alongside Native labor.
- Conquistadores
- Topic 1.5
Spanish conquerors in the Americas. Hernán Cortés defeated the Mexica (Aztec) Empire in Mexico in 1521, and Francisco Pizarro defeated the Inca Empire in Peru by 1533.
- Repartimiento
- Topic 1.5
A rotating labor draft in New Spain. Native towns had to send a share of their men, in turns, to work for Spanish colonists for low, fixed pay.
- Mita
- Topic 1.5
A rotating labor draft in the Andes. The Inca had used one; from the 1570s, Spain forced highland towns to send a share of their men to the Potosí silver mines each year.
- Caste system (castas)
- Topic 1.5
Spain's colonial ranking of people by ancestry. Spaniards stood at the top, people of mixed ancestry in the middle, and Native and African people at the bottom. Rank shaped tribute, rights and punishments, but labels could shift.
- Mestizo and mulato
- Topic 1.5
Colonial labels for people of mixed ancestry. A mestizo usually had Spanish and Native parents; a mulato usually had Spanish and African parents. Officials used the labels unevenly.
- Slavery
- Topic 1.5
Being legally owned as another person's property and forced to work. An enslaved person could earn wages and still be owned.
- Manumission
- Topic 1.5
Legal release from slavery. In Spain's empire, some enslaved people won it by buying their freedom from their owners, as Margarita did.
- Bartolomé de las Casas
- Topic 1.6
A Spanish colonist and priest who gave up his own Native workers in 1514. For the rest of his life he urged Spain's kings to protect Native peoples, and his books recorded Spanish cruelty in detail.
- Cultural superiority
- Topic 1.6
Treating your own customs as proof that your people are better and fit to rule others. Cabeza de Vaca called the islanders who fed him brutes.
- Cultural adoption
- Topic 1.6
Europeans and Native Americans each took up useful practices, goods and knowledge from the other while keeping their own beliefs. The castaways healed the Native way and prayed as Christians.
- Sovereignty
- Topic 1.6
A people's right to govern itself and decide who may enter its land. Hawikuh's leaders acted on it when they turned the strangers away.
- Land use: two worldviews
- Topic 1.6
Europeans claimed land with royal markers and written deeds. Many Native peoples held rights to fish, hunt or farm a place by custom, and their leaders decided who could use it.
- New Laws of 1542
- Topic 1.6
Royal laws that banned enslaving Native people and ordered encomiendas to end when their holders died. Colonists resisted, and in 1545 the Crown let encomiendas be inherited again.
- Valladolid Debate (1550–1551)
- Topic 1.6
A hearing before royal judges in Spain on whether Spain could conquer Native peoples before converting them. Las Casas and Sepúlveda argued opposite sides, and the judges never issued a joint ruling.
- Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda
- Topic 1.6
A Spanish scholar who argued that Native peoples were inferior by nature, so Spain could justly conquer and rule them.
- Diplomacy and military resistance
- Topic 1.6
The two ways Native peoples defended their land and self-rule: negotiating, petitioning and making alliances, or fighting. Tenamaztle did both.
- Gender roles
- Topic 1.6
Each society's ideas about the work and authority of men and women. In Algonquian towns, women did the farming; in England, farming was mostly men's work.
- Mixed ancestry
- Topic 1.6
People with Native, European and African parents or grandparents. Their numbers grew through the 1500s, and Spanish colonial law ranked them by ancestry.
- Smallpox
- Topic 1.7
A deadly, contagious disease that Europeans carried to the Americas. Native peoples had never been exposed to it, so epidemics killed huge numbers and left too few healthy people to farm, nurse the sick or fight.
- Caste system (casta)
- Topic 1.7
Spain's colonial ranking of people by their mix of Spanish, Native and African ancestry. A person's rank shaped their status and chances, and the categories changed over time and from place to place.
- Mestizo
- Topic 1.7
A person of mixed Spanish and Native American ancestry.
- Catholic missions
- Topic 1.7
Settlements where priests worked to convert Native peoples to Christianity. For Spain, winning converts was both a religious duty and a way to extend its empire.
- Capitalism
- Topic 1.7
An economy in which private owners invest money in trade and production to earn a profit. American silver helped speed Europe's shift from feudalism to capitalism.
- Native sovereignty
- Topic 1.7
The right of Native nations to govern themselves and their lands. European charters ignored it, but in 1607 Native nations still controlled almost all of North America.