Sign Up Now
Get instant access to over 1 million+ study documents
OR
Already registered? click here to login
By creating your account, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and student honor code.
Because written accounts of the pre-contact Americas are limited or nonexistent, it is difficult to ascertain exactly what the continent would have been like had a traveler traversed every portion of its diverse terrain. The landscape, ecology, and climates were as diverse as its people. While there were some large nations of Native Americans with some small-scale urbanization in North America, the region was not densely populated. The more urbanized regions of Central and South America belie the fact that these were also mainly rural regions with disparate and scattered populations. Therefore, it is impossible to definitively answer the question of what the Americas were like before Columbus’s arrival.
It is possible, however, to consider what the Europeans did bring with them when they arrived. Diseases were of course the most devastating thing the Europeans brought, perhaps even more so than their advanced weapons. In some areas, almost the entire population was decimated; one of the primary effects of contact was “to wipe out between two-thirds and 90 percent of the people in the Americas (“In '1493,' Columbus Shaped A World To Be.”). The reason why the Native Americans succumbed so rapidly to diseases like small pox and influenza is rooted in biology and epidemiology; basically the populations...
The majority of Native Americans were hunter-gatherers who kept no livestock, too, and living in close quarters with animals is one of the main causes of disease (“In '1493,' Columbus Shaped A World To Be.”).
The view that Native Americans lived in total harmony with nature and barely left any ecological footprint is, however, false. One only need to consider the example of Easter Island to realize how a pre-contact civilization can easily destroy natural environment with hardly any advanced technologies. In North America, Native Americans who were not hunter-gatherers and who did practice agriculture would have left a tremendous ecological footprint. Agriculture can place strain on the land, and dramatically and irreversibly alter both ecology and climate (Mann 2002). Recent archaeological research from Bolivia reveals startling evidence that some pre-contact civilizations altered their landscapes in almost unimaginable ways: creating “forest islands” that allowed them to grow non-native trees, comprising “30,000 square miles of forest mounds surrounded by raised fields and linked by causeways,” (Mann, 2002). This research contradicts what many people believe about what the Americas…
References
“In '1493,' Columbus Shaped A World To Be.” NPR. https://www.npr.org/2011/08/08/138924127/in-1493-columbus-shaped-a-world-to-be
Mann, C.C. (2002). 1491. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/302445/
I know that the case you cite, of Dr. Drake, has been a common one. The religion-builders have so distorted and deformed the doctrines of Jesus, so muffled them in mysticisms, fancies and falsehoods, have caricatured them into forms so monstrous and inconceivable, as to shock reasonable thinkers, to revolt them against the whole, and drive them rashly to pronounce its Founder an impostor. Had there never been a
It is amazing to find out that the Christians who were conquered by the Muslims were not bitter against those who were once their enemies. Some of them were even Mosarabs, the so called "would be Arabs," who adopted the language and the culture of the Arabs. They lived in Toledo, along with the Christians who adopted the Muslim religion, the Berbers, Moslems, but not Arabs, the Arabs from Syria
Inquisitions have played a major role in the Catholic Church since early in the Church's history.[footnoteRef:1]. They are considered one of the most shameful part of the history of the Catholic Church and part of the darkest periods in Jewish history. One of the great Catholic theologians, St. Augustine, offered support for the Inquisition process by citing from the Book of Luke, 14:23. Then the master told his servant, "Go
Epidemics and Smallpox in Colonial America In 1992, the Smithsonian Museum held an exhibit on the process of exchanges between the Old World and the New World that resulted from the explorations of Christopher Columbus. The exhibit, entitled Seeds of Change, focused on five catalysts or "seeds" which had the most far-reaching consequences for both Europe and the new colonies in the Americas. These catalysts were the horse, sugar, the potato, corn
European history prior and during the age of discovery has had a strong influence on the colonization of the New World and on attitudes adopted on the American continent during the era. Christopher Columbus' arrival in the New World in 1492 marked the beginning of a period of cultural exchanges between the two continents. European cultural values slowly but surely pervaded American communities both because some were appealing and because
American politics took another turn with problems that would lead to the Civil War, as the North and the South each had their own interests. Tariffs to protect some Northern manufacturing interests greatly angered the South leading to attempts to nullify acts of the federal government, ultimately resulting in conflict between the powers of the states and the federal Union. The result of this conflict led to the Civil War and American political development became one