Interactions North America (1491–1607): every key term you need (+ practice quiz)
132 flashcard terms for AP U.S. History Unit 1, written to match the course framework. Read them here, drill them as flashcards, or take the 54-question quiz. Free, no account needed.
Diverse peoples adapted to their environments — from the Pueblo's irrigation in the Southwest to Great Plains hunters, Eastern Woodlands farmers, and Pacific Northwest fishing societies. There was no single 'Indian' way of life.
Maize Cultivation
The spread of corn from Mexico northward supported economic development, permanent villages, and social diversification among Native societies in the Southwest and beyond.
Pueblo Peoples
Southwestern peoples who built adobe towns, farmed with irrigation, and developed complex religious traditions centered on kachinas and kivas.
Great Basin & Plains Peoples
Arid-land peoples developed mobile lifestyles organized around hunting and gathering; the horse (after European contact) later transformed Plains life.
Eastern Woodlands Peoples
Societies along the Atlantic and in the Mississippi Valley mixed agriculture (the 'three sisters': corn, beans, squash) with hunting and gathering, often in permanent villages.
Iroquois Confederacy
A powerful alliance of five (later six) nations in the Northeast — a sophisticated political league with matrilineal clans and councils.
Cahokia
The great Mississippian mound city near modern St. Louis — home to perhaps 20,000 people at its peak around 1100 CE.
Mississippian Culture
Mound-building societies of the Mississippi Valley with maize agriculture, trade networks, and hierarchical chiefdoms.
Kinship Networks
Native political and social life was organized largely through extended family and clan ties rather than European-style states.
Native Views of Land
Most Native societies saw land as a resource held and used communally, not as private property to be bought and sold — a fundamental clash with European views.
European Motives for Exploration
'God, gold, and glory': spreading Christianity, seeking wealth (especially direct access to Asian trade), and national/personal ambition.
Causes of European Expansion
Population recovery after the Black Death, the rise of centralized monarchies, Renaissance curiosity, and demand for Asian luxury goods spurred exploration.
Portuguese Trading-Post Empire
Portugal pioneered the African coast route and built a maritime trading empire — a model of commerce backed by naval power.
New Maritime Technology
The caravel, astrolabe, magnetic compass, improved maps (portolani), and lateen sails — many borrowed from Islamic and Asian sources — made ocean voyages possible.
Joint-Stock Companies
Investors pooled capital and shared risk to finance exploration and colonization — the corporate engine of English expansion.
Christopher Columbus (1492)
Sailing for Spain, Columbus reached the Caribbean seeking Asia. His voyages began sustained contact between the hemispheres — and the conquest of the Americas.
The Columbian Exchange
The transfer of plants, animals, people, microbes, and ideas between hemispheres: horses, cattle, wheat, and smallpox went west; maize, potatoes, tomatoes, and tobacco went east.
Demographic Catastrophe
European diseases — smallpox, measles, influenza — killed as much as 90% of the Native population, the greatest demographic disaster in history.
Escaped Spanish horses transformed Plains societies, enabling mounted buffalo hunting and new forms of warfare and wealth.
Silver and the Global Economy
Spanish American silver (Potosí, Zacatecas) financed Spain's empire and fueled the first truly global trade, linking the Americas, Europe, and Asia.
Treaty of Tordesillas (1494)
The Pope divided the non-European world between Spain and Portugal — giving Spain most of the Americas and Portugal Brazil and the African route.
Spanish Conquistadores
Cortés toppled the Aztecs (1521) and Pizarro the Inca (1533), aided by steel, horses, disease, and Native allies resentful of imperial rule.
Hernán Cortés & Tenochtitlán
With Native allies like the Tlaxcalans, Cortés conquered the Aztec capital; smallpox devastated the defenders.
Encomienda System
Spanish crown grants giving colonists the right to extract labor and tribute from Native people — slavery in practice, justified as 'protection' and Christianization.
Repartimiento
A reformed labor draft that replaced encomienda in name, still compelling Native labor for Spanish employers.
Hacienda System
Large Spanish landed estates producing crops and livestock with dependent Native labor — the rural backbone of New Spain.
African Slavery Begins
As Native populations collapsed, the Spanish and Portuguese imported enslaved Africans — beginning the Atlantic slave trade to the Americas.
The Casta System
New Spain's racial hierarchy ranking people by ancestry: peninsulares, criollos, mestizos, mulattos, Natives, and Africans — race as social structure.
Mestizo Society
Widespread intermixture of Spanish men and Native women created large mixed populations — unlike the later English pattern of exclusion.
Spanish Mission System
Missions sought to convert Natives to Catholicism and reorganize their labor and settlement — spiritual conquest alongside military conquest.
Bartolomé de las Casas
A Dominican friar who denounced Spanish cruelty toward Natives and debated Sepúlveda; his advocacy led to the New Laws (1542) but also, initially, to African slavery.
Valladolid Debate (1550–51)
Las Casas argued Natives were fully human and rational; Sepúlveda claimed they were natural slaves — Europe's formal debate over the morality of conquest.
The Black Legend
The (partly propagandistic) English/Protestant portrayal of Spanish colonization as uniquely cruel — used to justify their own colonial ambitions.
Juan Ponce de León
Spanish explorer who claimed Florida (1513) while seeking wealth and, by legend, the fountain of youth.
Hernando de Soto & Coronado
Spanish expeditions that penetrated the American Southeast and Southwest (1539–1542), spreading disease and finding no golden cities.
St. Augustine (1565)
The Spanish settlement in Florida that became the oldest continuously occupied European city in the future United States.
Spain's thin northern frontier — Florida, New Mexico, later Texas and California — held by missions, presidios (forts), and small settlements.
Juan de Oñate & New Mexico (1598)
Oñate brutally subdued the Pueblos (the Acoma massacre) and founded New Mexico — Spain's northernmost inland colony.
European Religious Motives
The Reformation turned colonization into religious competition: Catholic Spain and France versus Protestant England and the Dutch.
Protestant Reformation's Impact
Luther's revolt (1517) split Christendom; England's break from Rome under Henry VIII created a Protestant rival eager to challenge Catholic Spain overseas.
Spanish Armada (1588)
England's defeat of Spain's invasion fleet signaled Spain's slow decline and opened the Atlantic to English colonization.
English Motives for Colonization
Woolen-trade depression, enclosure displacing farmers, primogeniture pushing younger sons abroad, religious dissent, and national rivalry with Spain.
Roanoke — The 'Lost Colony' (1587)
Raleigh's failed Carolina colony vanished, leaving only the word 'CROATOAN' — a warning of colonization's perils before Jamestown.
First Contacts & Mutual Misunderstanding
Europeans and Natives interpreted each other through their own worldviews — trade, alliance, and religious exchange mixed with violence and mistrust from the start.
Trade Alliances & Native Agency
Native peoples were not passive victims: they used European goods and alliances for their own purposes, playing rival empires against each other.
European Ideas of Superiority
Europeans justified conquest with claims of religious truth, civilizational superiority, and legal doctrines like 'discovery' — while some voices (Las Casas, Montaigne) dissented.
Ecological Transformation
European livestock, weeds, and farming remade American landscapes; American crops (potato, maize) later fueled population booms in Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Sugar and Slavery
Sugar plantations in the Caribbean and Brazil created the model of gang slavery and plantation agriculture later carried to North America.
The Atlantic World
By 1600, Europe, Africa, and the Americas were bound into one Atlantic system of trade, migration (free and forced), biology, and ideas.
Period 1 Big Picture
Contact created 'new worlds' for everyone: Native societies devastated and transformed, Africa drawn into the slave trade, Europe enriched and empowered — the collision that made modern America possible.
Ancestral Puebloans (Anasazi)
Southwestern predecessors of the Pueblos who built cliff dwellings like Mesa Verde and road networks from Chaco Canyon before drought dispersed them.
Chaco Canyon
A great ceremonial and trade center of the Ancestral Puebloans (c. 900–1150), with massive 'great houses' and roads radiating across the desert.
Hohokam Irrigation
Desert farmers of present-day Arizona who dug hundreds of miles of canals to grow maize — engineering adapted to an arid world.
Chinook & Pacific Northwest
Salmon-rich coastal societies with plank houses, ocean canoes, social hierarchy, and potlatch ceremonies of competitive gift-giving — wealth without farming.
Small mobile bands in the arid Great Basin survived on seeds, roots, and small game — the environment demanding mobility and low density.
Algonquian Peoples
Widespread language family of the Eastern Woodlands and Great Lakes — many of the coastal peoples Europeans first met were Algonquian speakers.
Three Sisters Farming
Corn, beans, and squash interplanted so each helped the others — the agricultural base of Eastern Woodlands village life.
Matrilineal Societies
In many Eastern nations (like the Iroquois), descent and property passed through mothers, and clan mothers helped choose leaders — startling to patriarchal Europeans.
Native Trade Networks
Long-distance exchange moved copper, shells, obsidian, and turquoise across the continent centuries before Columbus — the Americas were already connected.
Animism
The widespread Native belief that spiritual power inhabits the natural world — animals, plants, places — shaping reciprocal relations with nature.
Reconquista (1492)
Spain's centuries-long reconquest of Iberia from Muslim rule ended at Granada in 1492 — releasing crusading zeal and soldiers for the New World.
Ferdinand and Isabella
The monarchs whose marriage united Spain; they completed the Reconquista, expelled Spain's Jews, and financed Columbus — all in 1492.
Prince Henry the Navigator
Portuguese prince who sponsored systematic exploration of the African coast, building the knowledge base of Atlantic navigation.
Vasco da Gama (1498)
Reached India by sea around Africa, giving Portugal the direct spice route that Spain had sought westward.
Amerigo Vespucci
The Italian navigator whose accounts convinced Europeans a 'New World' had been found — mapmakers put 'America' on the continents.
Ferdinand Magellan
His expedition (1519–1522) first circumnavigated the globe, proving the earth's scale, though Magellan died in the Philippines.
Moctezuma II
The Aztec emperor who received Cortés amid uncertainty; taken hostage, he died as Tenochtitlán rose against the Spanish.
La Noche Triste & the Siege of Tenochtitlán
The Aztecs expelled the Spanish with heavy losses (1520), but Cortés returned with allies and smallpox to besiege and destroy the city (1521).
Francisco Pizarro
Conquered the Inca Empire (1532–33), capturing Emperor Atahualpa amid a civil war and seizing a mountain of silver and gold.
Atahualpa's Ransom
The captured Inca filled a room with gold and two with silver for his freedom — Pizarro took the treasure and executed him anyway.
Cabeza de Vaca
A shipwrecked Spaniard who wandered eight years from Texas to Mexico, living among Native peoples — his account fed rumors of golden cities.
Seven Cities of Cíbola
The mythical golden cities that lured Coronado's expedition through the Southwest (1540–42) — finding pueblos, not gold.
His 1539–42 expedition brutalized the Southeast from Florida to the Mississippi; the diseases it spread helped collapse Mississippian chiefdoms.
New Spain's Government
The Crown ruled through viceroys in Mexico City and Lima and the Council of the Indies — a centralized, bureaucratic empire.
Peninsulares vs. Criollos
Spanish-born officials (peninsulares) outranked American-born Spaniards (criollos) — a resentment that would eventually fuel independence.
The Requerimiento
A legal proclamation read (in Spanish) to Natives demanding submission to crown and church — resistance then 'justified' war and enslavement.
New Laws of 1542
Reforms inspired by Las Casas limiting encomienda and Native enslavement — resisted so fiercely by colonists they were partly repealed.
Sepúlveda's Argument
The scholar who argued at Valladolid that Natives were 'natural slaves' whose conquest was just — the intellectual defense of empire.
Mission, Presidio, Pueblo
Spain's three frontier institutions: the mission (conversion), the presidio (garrison), and the civilian town — colonization on a budget.
Syncretism — Virgin of Guadalupe
Native and Catholic beliefs blended; the dark-skinned Virgin who appeared to Juan Diego (1531) became a symbol of Mexican Christianity.
Sugar Mill (Engenho)
The Portuguese sugar plantation-factory of Brazil — the deadly, capital-intensive model that married slavery to industrial-scale agriculture.
African Kingdoms & the Trade
Powerful states like Kongo, Benin, and Songhai traded with Europeans on their own terms initially — the slave trade's growth warped these relationships.
Sextant, Astrolabe & Dead Reckoning
Navigational tools and techniques — many transmitted from Islamic and Asian seafaring — that made open-ocean sailing survivable.
Printing Press & Exploration
Gutenberg's press (c. 1450) spread travel accounts, maps, and propaganda — turning discoveries into European ambitions.
Martin Luther & the Reformation (1517)
The Protestant break shattered Christian unity and turned overseas expansion into a race between Catholic and Protestant powers.
John Cabot (1497)
Sailing for England, Cabot reached North America's coast — the thin legal basis for England's later claims.
Jacques Cartier & Early France
French voyages up the St. Lawrence (1530s–40s) staked France's claim to Canada, though permanent settlement waited until 1608.
French-Native Fur Trade Model
France's later empire would rest on trade partnership and alliance with Native nations rather than mass settlement — a contrast worth previewing.
Sir Francis Drake
Elizabeth's favorite 'sea dog' who plundered Spanish treasure ships and circumnavigated the globe — piracy as national policy.
Sir Walter Raleigh
Organizer of the Roanoke ventures (1585, 1587) — England's failed first attempts at American colonization.
England's chief colonization propagandist, arguing colonies would enrich the nation, employ the poor, and spread Protestantism.
Enclosure Movement
English landlords fencing common lands displaced rural families — creating the 'surplus population' that would people the colonies.
Primogeniture
English law giving estates to eldest sons — pushing ambitious younger sons of gentry toward American ventures.
Population Recovery in Europe
Post-plague population growth strained resources and raised prices — energy and hunger that expansion promised to channel.
Horses Return to the Americas
Extinct in the Americas for millennia, horses returned with the Spanish — escaping northward to transform Plains cultures by the 1700s.
Smallpox
The deadliest import: repeated epidemics with mortality rates Europeans had never seen — depopulating whole regions ahead of any settler.
Silver Fleets & Piracy
Annual treasure convoys from the Americas to Seville drew pirates and privateers — and made the Caribbean a war zone.
Inflation & the Price Revolution
American silver flooding Europe helped drive a century of inflation — enriching merchants, squeezing landlords and workers.
Contact Zones
Historians' term for regions where peoples met, traded, fought, and mixed — the Americas as negotiation as well as conquest.
Historiography — 1491 Debates
Scholars now emphasize large pre-contact populations and sophisticated societies (Mann's '1491') — against older myths of an 'empty wilderness.'
Encomienda System
Spanish crown grants giving colonists the right to extract labor and tribute from specific Native communities in exchange for 'Christianizing' them; in practice a coercive labor regime that collapsed Native populations.
Casta System
Hierarchical racial classification in Spanish America (peninsulares, criollos, mestizos, mulattoes, Africans, Natives) that tied legal status and opportunity to ancestry and birthplace.
Bartolome de las Casas
Dominican friar whose 'Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies' (1552) condemned encomienda abuses and helped prompt the New Laws of 1542; he initially suggested African labor as an alternative.
Juan Gines de Sepulveda
Spanish scholar who argued in the Valladolid debate (1550-51) that Natives were 'natural slaves' under Aristotelian theory, justifying conquest and forced conversion.
Valladolid Debate
The 1550-51 formal dispute between Las Casas and Sepulveda over the humanity and treatment of Native peoples — the first major European moral debate about colonization.
Columbian Exchange (Old World to New)
Horses, cattle, pigs, wheat, sugarcane, and diseases (smallpox, measles) moved west; disease killed an estimated 80-90% of some Native populations within a century.
Columbian Exchange (New World to Old)
Maize, potatoes, tomatoes, cacao, tobacco, and silver moved east, fueling European population growth, price inflation, and the rise of Atlantic capitalism.
Sugar and Slavery Link
Portuguese sugar plantations on Atlantic islands (Madeira, Sao Tome) created the plantation-labor model later exported to Brazil and the Caribbean using enslaved Africans.
Slavery in West Africa was often not hereditary or race-based; the Atlantic system created permanent, inheritable, racially defined bondage.
Mission System
Spanish Franciscan and Jesuit outposts (later in Florida, New Mexico, California) that combined conversion, agricultural labor, and cultural suppression of Native peoples.
Treaty of Tordesillas (1494)
Papal-brokered line dividing new lands between Spain (west) and Portugal (east); explains why Brazil is Portuguese-speaking and why other nations ignored it.
Silver Mining (Potosi)
Vast Andean silver mines worked through the mita draft labor system; New World silver flowed to Spain and on to China, linking global trade.
Price Revolution
The sixteenth-century inflation across Europe driven partly by American silver imports and population growth, destabilizing feudal economies.
Sepulveda's 'Just War' Doctrine
The claim that war against peoples who rejected Christianity or practiced 'unnatural' customs was legally justified — used to legitimize the Requerimiento.
Requerimiento (1513)
Document read aloud (in Spanish) to Natives demanding submission to the crown and Church; refusal was treated as legal grounds for war and enslavement.
Great Basin Adaptation
Peoples like the Ute and Shoshone lived in small, mobile bands foraging pinon nuts and hunting small game — an example of environment shaping social organization.
Mita Labor Draft
The Inca rotational labor obligation that Spain repurposed to staff the Potosi silver mines, conscripting Andean villages by quota and producing lethal working conditions.
Council of the Indies
The Madrid body that drafted colonial law, reviewed viceroys, and heard appeals from the Americas, embodying a bureaucratic empire governed from across an ocean.
Asiento
A crown license granting the holder the right to sell a fixed number of enslaved Africans in Spanish America; it made the slave trade a matter of state contracts and later a prize in European wars.
Bullionism
The mercantilist assumption that national power equaled accumulated gold and silver, which drove Spain to prize extraction over colonial manufacturing and left it dependent on imports.
Peninsulares vs. Criollos Tension
Spanish-born officials monopolized the highest offices while American-born Spaniards held wealth without power, seeding a resentment that would later fuel Latin American independence movements.
Potlatch
A Pacific Northwest ceremony in which chiefs gained status by giving away or destroying accumulated goods, demonstrating that surplus and hierarchy could arise from fishing rather than farming.
Chinampas
Aztec raised-bed floating gardens in the lake basin around Tenochtitlan that produced multiple harvests a year and supported one of the world's largest cities.
Quipu
Knotted-cord record-keeping used by the Inca to track tribute, population, and storehouse contents, showing sophisticated administration without alphabetic writing.
Virgin Soil Epidemic
An outbreak in a population with no prior exposure and thus no acquired immunity; the concept explains why Old World pathogens killed across all age groups rather than mainly children.
Syncretism
The blending of Native and Catholic religious practice, as when the Virgin of Guadalupe absorbed features of an existing shrine, allowing conversion without total cultural erasure.
A shallow-draft ship combining square sails for speed with triangular lateen sails for tacking into the wind, which made return voyages against prevailing winds practical.
Volta do Mar
The Portuguese sailing technique of swinging far out into the Atlantic to catch favorable winds home from Africa; mastery of wind systems, not just courage, enabled oceanic voyaging.
Little Ice Age
A centuries-long cooling that shortened growing seasons, contributed to Ancestral Puebloan dispersal, and worsened European famine and unrest before expansion.
Feitoria
A Portuguese fortified trading factory on a foreign coast, staffed to buy gold, pepper, and captives without conquering the surrounding territory.
Sea Dogs
English privateers such as Francis Drake who raided Spanish treasure fleets with unofficial royal backing, blurring the line between trade, war, and piracy in the Atlantic.
Richard Hakluyt's Promotional Writing
Published accounts urging English colonization as a cure for unemployment, a market for wool, and a Protestant counterweight to Spain, shaping investor expectations before Jamestown.