Hist 151 terms

Question 1

Mesoamerica

Answer 1

Also known as Middle America, it is the area from Central into South America where the Mayas, Aztecs and Incas developed sophisticated societies and shared cultural beliefs.

Question 2

Mexica

Answer 2

Is

Question 3

Aztec empire

Answer 3

Located in Mesoamerica, an alliance of three city-states which emerged at about the time of the Toltec and Mayan disappearance. Their capitol city was Tinochtitlan.

Question 4

Maize.

Answer 4

The most widely-grown crop in the Americas, it was one of the three staples of the modern diet that were unknown in Europe before Columbus’ voyage. Modern corn is a variant.

Question 5

Adena–Hopewell Culture

Answer 5

a Pre-Columbian Native American culture that existed from 1000 to 200 BCE. Centered in the Ohio River Valley, they built enormous earthworks and burial mounds and developed an elaborate trade network that spanned the continent.

Question 6

Burial mounds –

Answer 6

Huge mounds of earth, in many different shapes, build mostly in the Ohio Valley by the Adena-Hopewell nations as a place to bury their dead. A person’s importance in life determined his or her burial site within the mound.

Question 7

Mississippian Culture –

Answer 7

Centered in the Mississippian River Valley, these were also mound-builders who lived in what is now the Midwestern and Southeastern United States from approximately 800 CE to 1500 CE. They developed a specialized labor force, effective government, and extensive trading networks.

Question 8

Eastern Woodlands People –

Answer 8

Native Americans, particularly Algonquian, Iroquoian, and Muskogean peoples who once dominated the Eastern seaboard from Maine to Louisiana.

Question 9

Cahokia -

Answer 9

the center and city for the Mississippian nation. Located in present day Illinois, it was home to 15,000 inhabitants from 1050 t0 1250 and was a sophisticated farming settlement.

Question 10

Anasazi Culture –

Answer 10

an ancient Native American culture centered on the present-day Four Corners area of the United States who lived in baked-mud adobe structures built four or five stories high. They lacked a rigid class structure, and only fought as a means of self-defense.

Question 11

Pueblos-

Answer 11

“Pueblo” is the Spanish word for village. Spanish explorers used the word to describe both the permanent residential structures, some of which are cliff dwellings, and the people living in these communities. Many pueblos, located in Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah, still exist and are the home of the Hopis, Zunis and other heirs of the Anasazi.

Question 12

Roman Catholicism –

Answer 12

A powerful religion which held a thousand-year supremacy in Europe. When the first conquerors arrived in the western hemisphere, they wanted to become rich, and to convert the natives to the religion. They used whatever methods, including death, to do so.

Question 13

Christopher Columbus –

Answer 13

a navigator and explorer whose voyages across the Atlantic Ocean led to general European awareness of the American continents in the Western Hemisphere. With his four voyages of exploration and several attempts at establishing a settlement on the island of Hispaniola, all funded by Isabella I of Castile, he initiated the process of Spanish colonization which foreshadowed general European colonization of the “New World.”

Question 14

Treaty of Tordesillas –

Answer 14

a treaty signed in 1494 between Spain and Portugal. It drew an imaginary line 370 leagues west of Cape Verde Islands and stipulated that the area west of it would be a Spanish place of expedition and settlement.

Question 15

Amerigo Vespucci –

Answer 15

Italian explorer who participated as an observer on several voyages to the New World between 1499 and 1502. The expeditions became widely known in Europe after two accounts attributed to Vespucci were published. European mapmakers thereafter began to label the New World using a variant of Vespucci’s first name: America.

Question 16

Hernando Cortes

Answer 16

a Spanish conquistador who led the first European expedition that caused the fall of the Aztec empire and brought large portions of mainland Mexico under the King of Castile, in 1519. Cortés was part of the generation of Spanish colonizers that began the first phase of the Spanish colonization of the Americas.

Question 17

Conquistadores-

Answer 17

The Spanish word for “conquerors.” The name was given to the European soldiers who fought for and claimed much of the Western hemisphere for their king and the Roman Catholic Church.

Question 18

Tinochtitlan -

Answer 18

Founded by the Aztecs in 1395 on Lake Texcoco, the city of Tenochtitlan is now known as Mexico City.

Question 19

Encomienda –

Answer 19

transferred to America by the conquistadors, it is a system by which favored officers became privileged landowners who controlled Indian villages or groups of villages.

Question 20

Columbian Exchange –

Answer 20

is the transfer of biological and social elements among Europe, the Americas, and Africa after Columbus’s voyages to the “new world.”

Question 21

Infectious diseases –

Answer 21

illnesses that pass from one person to another by way of invasive biological organisms. Europeans, at first unwittingly, brought many such diseases to the Americas, devastating the people who lived here already. Some diseases travelled east, too.

Question 22

Bartolomeo de Las Casas –

Answer 22

a priest in Hispaniola and later a bishop in Mexico who witnessed, and was driven to oppose, the torture and genocide of the Native Americans by the Spanish colonists. He was the author of A Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies (1552).

Question 23

New Mexico –

Answer 23

the first center of Roman Catholic missionary activity in what would become the U. S. southwest.

Question 24

Hernando de Soto –

Answer 24

an explorer and conquistador who landed on Florida’s west coast in 1539, discovered and explored the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers, and looted or destroyed many native villages before dying in 1542 near Natchez.

Question 25

Protestant Reformation –

Answer 25

the 16th century religious movement in Europe that challenged the Roman Catholic Church and resulted in the beginnings of Protestant Christianity.

Question 26

Martin Luther –

Answer 26

A German theologian and monk who began the Protestant Reformation in 1517 when he posted his Ninety-five theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg in protest against abuses in the Catholic Church. The theses were written to protest against the Catholic Church’s abuse of power.

Question 27

Queen Elizabeth I of England-

Answer 27

The protestant daughter of Henry VIII, she was the queen from 1558-1603, and played a major role in the Protestant Reformation. During her reign, the Spanish Armada was defeated.

Question 28

Spanish Armada –

Answer 28

a massive Spanish fleet of 130 warships that was defeated at Plymouth, England, in 1588 by the English navy and a huge storm during the reign of Elizabeth I.

Question 29

Jacques Cartier –

Answer 29

The leader of the first French effort at colonization who gave Canada its name and, in 1534, explored the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the St. Lawrence River as far as Montreal and Quebec.

Question 30

Sir Walter Raleigh’s Roanoke Colony –

Answer 30

an English aristocrat, writer, poet, soldier, courtier, and explorer who persuaded Queen Elizabeth I to renew Humphrey Gilbert’s colonizing mission in his own name. Two expeditions landed at Roanoke Island on the Outer Banks in what is now North Carolina, the first in 1584, the second in 1587. Led by Governor John White, this second group had completely disappeared by 1590.