September 25, 2023
American Yawp Ch. 1 Sections III-V Notes
● There were Scandinavian seafarers that reached the New World before Christopher
Columbus did.
○ They sailed as far east as Constantinople
○ Raided settlements as far south as North Africa
○ Limited colonies in Iceland and Greenland
○ Around 1000, Leif Erikson reached Newfoundland
○ The Nose were driven back to the sea by some combination of limited resources,
inhospitable weather, food shortages, and Native resistance
● A series of military conflicts between England and France- the hundred years war:
○ Accelerated nationalism and cultivated the financial and military administration
necessary to maintain nation-states
● Marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile consolidated two most power
kingdoms in Iberia.
● Portuguese established first along the Atlantic coast of Africa during the fifteenth century.
● The Spanish and Portuguese stumbled on islands such as Azores, Canary, and the
Cape Verde Islands.
● The Portuguese began growing sugarcane along the mediterranean coast
● The Portuguese began purchasing slaves for export to the Atlantic islands to work the
sugar fields.
● Christopher Columbus landed in the Bahamas on october 12, 1492
● Indigenous Arawaks, or Taíno, populated the Caribbean islands
● Columbus left thirty-nine Spaniards at a military fort on Hispaniola to find and secure the
source of gold
● He made four trips to the new world.
● Encomiendas: way to manage labor relations
● Got rid of encomienda and replaced it with repartimiento which replicated abuse
● Repartimiento: system by which the crown allowed certain colonists to recruit
indigenous peoples for forced labor.
● Tenochititlán was founded in 1325
● Much of the city was built on large artificial islands called chinampas
● The native populations were densely populated
● A lot of the population is taken out by disease