2. Colliding Cultures -- Part 1

Both sides of the Atlantic were transformed by the Columbian Exchange.
- European population boom was enabled by Virginia.
- Spain benefited immediately from the Historical Society.
Spain used its new wealth to gain an advantage over other European nations.
Portugal, France, the Netherlands, and England raced to the New World to match the gains of the Spanish.
- Europeans were able to create settlements all along the western rim of the Atlantic world due to the ravages of disease and the possibility of new trading relationships.
Spain would lose its position in the world at the end of the 17th century.
- A great collision of cultures began with the beginning of an age of colonization.
Europeans began arriving in the United States in the hopes of establishing religious and economic dominance in a new territory.
La Florida was named after Juan Ponce de Leon.
Between 150,000 and 300,000 Native Americans were found by him.
- Two and a half centuries of contact with European and African peoples decimated Florida's indigenous population.
- European explorers had hoped to find wealth in Florida, but reality never aligned with their imaginations.
Spanish colonizers fought with Florida's Native peoples and other Europeans in the first half of the 16th century.
Sir Francis Drake burned the wooden settlement in 1586.
- Spain's reach in Florida was extended from the mouth of the St. John's River south to the vicinity of St. Augustine.
- The Spaniards tried to duplicate methods used in other places.
- The Apalachee, one of the most powerful tribes in Florida at the time of contact, claimed the territory from the Florida-Georgia border to the Gulf of Mexico.
- Corn and other crops were grown by Apalachee farmers.
- The western anchor of the mission system was connected to the royal road by surplus products carried by Indian traders.
- Spanish settlers established ranches as far west as Apalachee.
- Florida was held tenuously by Spain.
In 1598, Juan de Onate led four hundred settlers and missionaries from Mexico into New Mexico.
- The beginning of the Spanish Southwest was brutal.
- The Spaniards slaughtered nearly half of the inhabitants of Acoma when they took control of the city.
- Santa Fe, the first permanent European settlement in the Southwest, was established in 1610.
- The dry and hostile environment made it hard for Spaniards to move to the Southwest.
- The Spanish did not achieve a commanding presence in the region.
- Spanish New Mexico home was home to only three thousand people by 1680.
- Spain shifted strategies after the military expeditions wove their way through the southern and western half of North America and the region's population plummeted from as many as sixty thousand in 1600 to seventeen thousand in 1680.
- The engine of colonization in North America was missions.
- Spain was provided with an advance guard in North America by members of the Franciscan religious order.
Spanish conquest and colonization always carried religious imperatives.
- Spanish friars established many missions along the Rio Grande and in California by the early 17th century.
England and France were thrown into turmoil by the Reformation.
- Conflicts drained time, resources, and lives.
- Millions of people died from religious violence in France.
- In the New World, religious and political rivalries continued despite the decline in violence in Europe.
European monarchs invested in exploration and conquest because of the Spanish exploitation of New Spain's resources.
- There were reports of Spanish atrocities that provided a humanitarian justification for European colonization.
The Indians were simple and plain men, but the Spaniards forced them to stand in the sand of the rivers for gold because they were not used to labour.
- A great number of them died and a great number of them died of desperation because they were brought from so quiet a life to such misery and slavery.
- Many people wouldn't marry because they wouldn't have their children slaves to the Spaniards.
- The Black Legend was influenced by religious and political rivalries.
- Spain's conquests in France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands left many in those nations wanting to break free from the Spanish influence.
- Spanish barbarities were argued to be foiling a tremendous opportunity for the expansion of Christianity across the globe and that a benevolent conquest of the New World by non-Spanish monarchies offered the surest salvation of the New World's pagan mass.
- Spain's rivals arrived in the New World with religious and economic motives.
The fabled Northwest Passage was sought by early French explorers.
- Asia's wealth still beckoned to Europeans despite the wealth of the New World.
- It appeared that the St. Lawrence River stretched into the Great Lakes.
- The bodies of water were the center of French colonial possessions.
Private companies invested in French colonization.
- In 1603, traders established Port Royal in Nova Scotia and launched trading expeditions that stretched as far as Cape Cod.
- The future pattern of French colonization was set by the needs of the fur trade.
- Quebec was founded in 1608 and is where New France was born.
- French fur traders valued cooperation with the Indians more than establishing a successful French colonial footprint.
- If they had been assertive in the region, it would have compromised their access to skilled Indian trappers, and therefore wealth.
- Few Frenchmen went to the New World to live permanently.
- Few traveled.
The depiction of New Orleans criminalized Protestantism in 1685, but all non-Catholics were forbidden in 1726 when it was in New France.
- Americans were typical among Spanish and English.
- Different conversion strategies were adopted by Jesuit missionar 1726, Centre des archives d'outre ies.
Spanish missionaries brought Indians into the country.
Many of the Huron people converted to Christianity and were involved in the fur trade.
- Close relationships with the French would cost a lot.
- The French and Dutch conflicts were disastrous, but some Native peoples maintained alliances with the French.
Pressure from the powerful Iroquois in the East pushed many Algonquian-speaking peoples toward French territory in the midseventeenth century, and together they crafted what historians have called a "middle ground," a kind of cross-cultural space that allowed for native and European interaction, negotiation The gift-giving and mediation strategies expected of Native leaders were adopted by French traders.
- The impersonal European market was adapted to European laws by Natives.
The region was invaded by English colonial officials and American settlers in the late 17th and early 18th century.