Period 1 Terms Flashcards
Three Sisters
Three staple crops (corn, beans, and squash) favored by many native tribes in North America. Their collective name references their interdependence: the cornstalks provided a structure for the beans to grow up, and the squash held moisture in the soil for all three.
Christopher Columbus
Italian explorer and colonizer. While attempting to prove a westward sea route for East Asian trade existed, he stumbled across the Bahamas in October 1492. The first European to visit the islands of Hispaniola and Cuba.
Amerigo Vespucci
Italian explorer and cartographer. His 1499–1502 trip along the South American coast determined that the New World was a distinct continent from Asia.
Columbian Exchange
The transmission and interchange of plants, animals, diseases, cultures, human populations (including slaves), and technologies between the New World and the Old World. Greatly benefited Europe and Asia while simultaneously bringing catastrophe to American Indian populations and cultures.
Treaty of Tordesillas
Signed between Spain and Portugal in 1494, it decided how Christopher Columbus’s discoveries of the New World would be divided. It established the zone of Portuguese influence in what would become Brazil.
Hernán Cortés
A Spanish conquistador whose expedition conquered the Aztec Empire and brought large swaths of modern-day Mexico under Spanish authority. Famous for intentionally destroying his own ships in order to force his men not to abandon their campaign.
Encomienda
A legal system established by the Spanish crown. Conquistadores or other officials were given a set number of American Indians from whom they would extract tribute while instructing in the Roman Catholic faith. In practice, it was a form of slavery.
Roanoke
Nicknamed “the Lost Colony.” First attempted English colony in the New World. Founded in 1585 by Sir Walter Raleigh on an island off the modern-day North Carolina coast. By 1590, its inhabitants had vanished for reasons that still remain unknown.
Virginia Company
The collective name for two joint stock companies (one of London, the other of Plymouth) that had identical charters but different (if overlapping) territorial claims. Chartered in 1606 by King James I in order to settle the North American eastern coastline.
