Unit 2 Super-Summary

What kinds of things were early explorers looking for when they left their home countries?  1) trade routes  3) markets to sell their goods  2) riches

Who were the first Europeans to come to North America?  Vikings  Where were the Vikings from?  Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland  Viking Bunny of Doom

 The Vikings came around 1,000AD & tried to settle in  modern-day Canada  Here’s a high school picture of a famous actor from Canada  Who is he?

So who came after the Vikings, and why?  A few centuries later, some Europeans wanted to find a sea route to Asia  At the time, Muslim traders traveled to Asia, and then brought silks & spices back to the Middle East  The Europeans then had to pay the Muslim traders a lot of money for the goods

How might the Europeans have made this process easier & cheaper?  So here was their thought:  Let’s find an easy way to get to Asia ourselves  That way we can buy the goods directly, and not pay the Muslim traders for the goods and for their labor bringing them back from Asia  ie: cut out the middleman

Who made it to Asia first?  The Portuguese, by sailing around the southern tip of Africa  Other countries continued trying to find their own ways to Asia

Enter: Christopher Columbus  An Italian man who thought he could get to Asia more quickly by sailing west across the Atlantic  He didn’t know that North & South America would be in the way

 3 months after he left Spain, Columbus reached an island in the Caribbean  He called the people he met there Indians b/c he thought he was in the East Indies (Asia)  Of course we now know they were actually Native Americans, and the island he reached was in the modern-day Bahamas

 The next island Columbus & his men reached was a little bigger. They built a fort there & called the island  Hispaniola  (modern-day Dominican Republic & Haiti)  39 men stayed there, and the rest returned to Spain with him (fort)

Columbus later made 3 more voyages to “the Indies” (the Caribbean)  Why?  Many people in Spain really believed Columbus had reached the Indies, (Asia) so in 1493,  Columbus was sent back to the new world to set up colonies

What are Colonies?  Colonies: Permanent settlements controlled by a larger country

 In 1496, the Spanish settlers founded the first permanent European colony in the Western Hemisphere  It was called Santo Domingo, on the island of Hispaniola

 When Christopher Columbus died in 1506, he was unaware that he had arrived at 2 new continents, and not Asia

Spain Builds an Empire in the Caribbean  Columbus and his brothers had a short stint at governing Santo Domingo, but they didn’t do a good job  Spanish rulers took control of the new settlements  Their main goals in creating the new colonies were: 1. To serve God 2. To serve the King 3. To get rich

In order to get rich,  The Spanish gov’t had to convince more Spanish people to travel to the new colonies & settle  The question was, how could they bribe/motivate people to do so?

Land Grants  The gov’t decided to offer people large pieces of land, called encomiendas, if they moved to the colonies  Can you think of any problems with this idea?  A lot of the land that the Spanish colonists would be receiving already had Native Americans living on it Native American Spain Spanish Colonist

Other Problems with the Encomienda System:  When the Spanish conquered Cuba & Puerto Rico, they planted sugarcane there on very large plantations  Large plantations/farms  Lots of work to be done  Many Native Americans were so overworked that they died Overworked donkey 

 Short on labor, the Spanish started enslaving and bringing people from Africa to the colonies  They first arrived in Hispaniola in 1505

Francisco Vasquez de Coronado  Around 1535, this 25- year-old left his home country of Spain and traveled to Mexico  He conquered and became the governor of a kingdom in Mexico called Nueva Galicia

 In 1539, Coronado sent a priest friend to explore the land to the north of them  While on his trip, the priest was told that there were“cities of gold” in what is now the southwestern U.S.

The following year,…  Coronado set out to find those cities of gold  He spent 2 years traveling through modern-day Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, & Kansas,  while some of his soldiers traveled down the valley of the Rio Grande, & others explored the Grand Canyon

Did they find gold?  Nope  Would Spain want to settle in places with no gold or silver?  Not at that point  So the Spanish didn’t create a permanent settlement in the present-day U.S. for quite a while

 The Spanish founded missions in the areas that are now  Florida,  Texas,  New Mexico,  Arizona,  & California  The missionaries from these missions tried to convert people to the Catholic religion Not for another 68 years, actually

 Many Spanish colonists married Native American or African American women  The mixture of these ethnic groups’ traditions (Spanish, Native American, & African American) led to the development of Latino culture