America’s History Concise Edition Combined Volume Ninth Edition Test Bank by Rebecca Edwards , Eric , Robert, James A. Henretta A+

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Similarities:

– Social and Political Organization: Both formed complex, large-scale societies with large permanent populations based in fortified cities. They practiced advanced farming techniques based on plant domestication and produced agricultural surpluses that led to population increase, class specialization, and city-state formation.

– Economies: Both developed extensive trade networks with neighboring societies. Peasants and farmers paid tribute and taxes (in the form of goods) to support an elite class of nobles and priests who waged wars against neighboring chiefdoms and patronized skilled artisans.

– Religion: Mesoamerican rituals may have influenced the development of Mississippian culture. Examples are Mayan refugees from war-torn Yucatán influencing Mississippi River Valley and Natchez customs of ceremonial burial in mounds. In both areas, farmers built pyramids and large temple mounds at the direction of an elite class of rulers and priests. Both cultures buried remains of their dead in ceremonial mounds.

– Environment: Large populations overburdened the environment, depleting local food supplies and leading to disease. Maya experienced a two-century drought, which produced economic crisis for overburdened peasants and led to migration.

Differences:

– Geography and Demography: The civilizations inhabited different regions: Central (Meso) America versus North America. Mesoamerica possessed more people: 40 million in Mesoamerica and South America combined, versus 7 million in North America.

– Chronology: Mesoamerica declined earlier (A.D. 800 for Maya and Teotihuacan versus A.D. 1350 for Mississippians) due to the later arrival of farming technology (A.D. 800) and later population increase for Mississippians.

– Migration: Climate changes during the last Ice Age enabled Native people to walk across a land bridge over the Bering Strait to North America around 10,000 B.C. The warming of the climate then isolated North American Indians from European migration and diseases until the arrival of Columbus in 1492. Native people succumbed rapidly to European diseases because of their lack of immunity. Climate changes, including drought, shaped the migratory patterns of North American Indians over time.

– Food Production: Climate shaped the development of farming technology in the Americas. Corn, bean, and squash cultivation was concentrated in the warm and moist soil of Mesoamerica; these crops later spread as far north as Canada.

– Economic Organization: The societies were comprised of diverse cultures, ranging from larger, more agricultural-based societies to smaller Algonquian and Iroquoian societies that combined hunting and gathering with farming. Eastern woodland societies did not encourage accumulation of material goods and land ownership; resources were shared, which encouraged reciprocity rather than accumulation among people.

– Politics: They were self-governing tribes composed of clans. Clan elders conducted ceremonies and policed societies but did not form a distinct ruling class. Because household and lineage, not hereditary and divinely ordained leadership, was the basis of society, leaders lacked power compared to Mesoamerica and could not compel all people to follow them into war or follow their lead in making other major decisions.

– Social Organization: They inhabited semipermanent settlements surrounded by fields. Lineage and household formed the basis of society. Farming was controlled by women after large-scale societies declined and dispersed into smaller settlements following disease exposure from the 1540s de Soto expedition. A matrilineal inheritance system developed due to control of farming by women; women passed use-rights of fields to daughters. Fathers stood outside the main lines of kinship; primary responsibility of child rearing fell to the mother and brothers, who often lived with sisters rather than wives.

– Culture: Religious rituals centered on an annual agricultural cycle, for example, the green corn and strawberry festivals of the Iroquois.

– Food Production: Farming technology (corn, beans, and squash) developed earlier in Mesoamerica; settled agriculture arrived later (A.D. 800) in North America. This factor produced a larger population and large cities earlier and in greater numbers in Mesoamerica than in North America. Greater use of mixed hunting/gathering and farming in North America stemming from the later development of farming technology produced smaller-scale and more self-governing societies.

– Population: Smaller populations in North American societies produced less diversity of occupations and social classes, lower levels of state formation and territorial competition, and fewer large-scale cities than in Mesoamerica. Greater development of dispersed and small settlements compared to Mesoamerica gave women more economic power within North American societies. The larger Mesoamerica population produced greater state control, urbanization, and more social classes compared to North American societies.

– European Economy: The Renaissance brought wealth to Italian city-states and later other European countries through trade with Arabia and the Far East. Banking, manufacturing, and technological innovation were spurred by the enormous profits made through international trade.

– Ideology and Politics: The ideology of civic humanism, which praised public virtue and service to the state, was adopted in Italian city-states and later influenced European and American notions of government.

– Culture: The Renaissance led to a flowering of art and culture that is still widely appreciated.

– Approaches to Salvation: Luther rejected the doctrine that Christians could win salvation through good deeds. He argued that people could be saved only by grace, a free gift from God. John Calvin preached the doctrine of predestination, the idea that God had chosen certain people for salvation even before they were born, condemning the rest to eternal damnation.

– Religious Authority: Catholics believed that priests were the ultimate authority, necessary to convey religious doctrine and mediate between God and people. Luther downplayed the role of the clergy and the pope as mediators between God and the people. He argued that believers must look to the Bible and not church doctrine as the ultimate authority in matters of faith.

– Church Government: Protestants wanted to purify the Catholic Church of ostentatious display, the sale of indulgences, and other forms of corruption.

– Why: Portugal and Spain pursued overseas commerce and conquest to acquire new lands for the monarchy and nation-state, to find a western route to Asian resources, to serve a Christian god, to enrich private investors, and to fulfill the process of mercantilism.

– How: The Portuguese and Spanish accomplished this by state-sponsored exploration led by determined monarchs and private individuals, utilization of Arab sailing technology, use of private investors and mercantilism to finance voyages, and extermination and enslavement of the Native population of the Americas.

– Lack of Political Unity: For example, the Aztecs had many enemies from within their own tribes as a result of territorial competition, wealth acquisition, and the sacrifice of captives taken in war. Cortés exploited Indian political rivalries to his advantage, forming alliances with enemy tribes of the Aztecs. In contrast, the Spanish possessed a highly unified society.

– Technology: Native Americans possessed copper but did not smelt iron. Spanish metal armor, swords, and lances inflicted devastating wounds on Aztec warriors armed with cotton armor and obsidian-tipped spears and arrows. Besides the penetrating power and devastating wounds, the use of guns and crossbows, though limited, inflicted psychological shock on Native American people. Aztecs fought on foot and had no wheeled carts or cavalry, unlike the Spanish, who also possessed attack dogs.

– Lack of Immunity to European Diseases: Although tuberculosis was known among Native Americans before the arrival of Europeans, isolation from Eurasia for thousands of years prevented the buildup of immunity to common European diseases. For example, in 1500, the Mesoamerican population equaled 30 million, but it was reduced to only 3 million by 1650; in Hispaniola, 300,000 Indians were wiped out in a few decades; and a smallpox epidemic lasted twenty days in Aztec Tenotchtitlán in 1521, facilitating Cortés’s victory. Before Pizarro landed in Peru in 1524, smallpox had reduced the Inca population by half (18 million to 9 million), which ignited an internal native fight over succession to rule and weakened the Inca militarily. Influenza and measles also has a severe impact on Native populations, producing both a population loss and a psychological shock that facilitated power decline.

– Limited Local Economies: Most of the ministates were small, and the tropical ecosystem prevented them from raising livestock. They cultivated yams and gathered food resources from the region’s rivers and coasts. There was little market for their products in the West African and North African empires. Their location south of the Sahara made trade with other regions difficult.

– Attractiveness of European Goods: European traders provided a new source for goods that had previously been unavailable.

– European Factors: Crusades in Europe during the Middle Ages brought Europe closer to North Africa and increased the desire of European monarchs to take advantage of Arab Muslim slave trade with sub-Saharan Africa. Renaissance economic expansion influenced European monarchs to increase commerce with Africa and Asia in an attempt to remove Arab Muslim control from world trade. Profits from increasing trade created powerful merchant and banking interests that promoted further world exploration. Africa, geographically close to southern Europe, was within easy reach due in part to advances in ship design (the caravel) and the compass. When European monarchs’ sponsorship of exploration led to Africa, Portuguese monarchs and traders militarily overwhelmed Arab middlemen and took control of trade (e.g., the building of the first slave-trading post at Elmina in 1482). Consequently, they created a sugar plantation system in the Cape Verde islands, the Azores, and Madeira based on West African slave labor. By 1550, the Atlantic slave trade expanded enormously to supply new sugar plantations in Brazil and the West Indies.

– African Factors: West Africans had previous experience with domestic slavery in African societies. People became slaves as prisoners of war and as security for debts, and some were sold by relatives in times of famine. The large population of Africans and a high degree of African warfare with little political unity in the continent made a great number of people available for the slave trade. West African societies engaged in the African slave trade with Arab Muslim traders of North Africa before the Portuguese arrived in the mid-1400s. West African slaves were sold as agricultural workers from one kingdom to another or carried overland in caravans by Arab traders to North Africa. This history indicates that African leaders’ participation in the Atlantic slave trade with Europeans was chosen and not involuntary.

– European Society: Similarities: Europe had an agriculturally based, pagan culture combined with monotheism. The peasant classes lived in relative poverty, and peasants lived in small villages with extended families. It was a male-ruled society, with a multiplicity of languages. The majority of people lived in hierarchical societies ruled by princes.

– West African Society: Differences: There was a more unified religion in Europe based on Christianity; Europeans made more widespread use of iron; Europeans were sailing societies; Europeans were more politically united; Africans practiced slavery; many Africans lived in tribal societies.

– Similarities Between Native Americans and West Africans/Europeans: Agriculturally based, small communities as well as large kingdoms; society based on kinship, with extended families living in one large household; multiplicity of languages.

– Differences Between Native Americans and West Africans/Europeans: Native American societies gave more power to women, succumbed to European diseases more readily due to lack of immunity, produced relatively smaller population levels, practiced paganism universally, and did not possess sailing technology.

– Thumbnail of Europe in 1300: Western Europeans in the 1300s lived in a patchwork of kingdoms, duchies, and republics reliant on subsistence agriculture, isolated from the rest of the “civilized” world. Hierarchy and patriarchy were organizing features. Most of the population labored in the service of others as peasants and faced disease, famine, poverty, and uncertainty. The Roman Catholic Church served as both a key state institution and a unifying cultural force. Europeans used technological innovations derived by Arab inventors in navigation, weaponry, map making, and communication.

– Crusades: Crusades developed Europeans’ militaries and paved the way for military supremacy over Muslims in Spain, Africa, and ultimately the Americas. They intensified Europe’s Christian identity and introduced Western European merchants to trade routes into Asia and the Mediterranean. The introduction of Eastern products provided incentive for the expansion of European trade and enterprises. The Crusades also introduced a cultural ethos of competition that further fed the region’s economic expansion, which would ultimately spread to the Americas.

– Renaissance: Italian merchants pushed their way into the Arab-dominated trade routes of the Mediterranean during the Crusades and came to dominate European markets. Profits from commerce created wealthy merchants, bankers, and textile manufacturers, and also spurred innovations in technology, communication, and navigation. This economic revolution spread slowly into northern and western Europe and modernized politics, culture, and social organization.

Exploration of the Atlantic and the search for new routes to Asia created opportunities for participation in the slave trade, and spurred greater European interest in gold, sugar, and plantation agriculture.

– Americas: Native Americans in North America were animists who believed the natural world was suffused with spiritual power. They sought to understand the world by interpreting dreams and visions; the rituals were intended to ensure successful hunts and general good fortune. There were many local variations of this core form. Native American conceptions of female power linked women’s reproductive functions with the fertility of the earth. Men’s spiritual power was closely related to hunting and war, and success in these areas was interpreted as a sign of sacred protection and power. Native North Americans’ religious practices were about understanding and protection and, in that sense, were comforting. In South American and Mesoamerican societies such as Aztec Mexico, priests and warriors used ritual murders and other forms of sacrifice to ensure fertile fields and the daily return of the sun. Kings claimed divine status and ruled empires by demanding tribute. Both of these practices, motivated by religion, provided benefits in the form of social and political organization, and suffering through exploitation and ritual murder.

– Europe: By the 1400s, Western Europeans were Roman Catholics. That religion provided a common understanding of God and human history. The Church was fully integrated with the state, and provided both the benefits and disadvantages that came with a strong state. Every locality had churches and shrines that served as points of contact with the sacred world. Church dogma about sin and Satan served as instruments of social control, but piety and devotion to God also provided order and comfort. The Church was founded on hierarchy, authority, and patriarchy and offered ordinary people a measure of security in a dangerous and unpredictable world. Events like the Crusades were harmful for Muslims in Spain and North Africa. The emphasis on doctrine and heresy also became dangerous for anyone who questioned the Church’s authority.

– Africa: Some Africans in the 1400s were Muslims, and Islamic commercial centers became important locations for learning and instruction. Most African communities practiced animist religions, however. They had wise men and women in charge of manipulating animistic forces. Ancestor worship was important, as were rituals that celebrated male virility and female fertility.

– America: Rulers in Andean and Aztec empires ruled over millions of people, and their politically complex societies were hierarchical. These empires were ruled by priests and warriors who led aggressive bureaucratic states. Subject peoples, who engaged in agriculture and produced various goods, paid tribute to their leaders, which supported their extravagant lifestyles, monumental architecture, and bureaucracy. Tribute, then, was the product of subjected peoples’ labor that flowed from local centers of power to the imperial core. Mississippian societies, like Cahokia, were similar in that they had powerful rulers who benefited from the work of their people. American societies in the eastern woodlands, Great Lakes, Great Plains, Southwest, and Pacific Coast, however, were more egalitarian and had more cooperative work arrangements.

– Africa: Slavery was widespread in Africa. Some Africans were held in bondage as security for debts, while others were sold into servitude by their families in exchange for food. Slaves were a key commodity of exchange, sold as agricultural laborers, concubines, or military recruits. The trans-Saharan trade depended on slaves as well. Female slaves were used for domestic service or concubinage in North Africa, Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire. Sometimes slave status applied only to individuals, but in other situations slavery was a hereditary condition. Between A.D. 700 and 1900, about 9 million Africans were sold in the trans-Saharan slave trade.

– Europe Under Feudalism: Coerced labor in hierarchal Europe consisted of serfdom. Many Europeans were peasants who lived on manorial lands where they received farming rights in exchange for labor on the lord’s estate. Kings and princes who owned vast tracts of land also forcibly conscripted men for military service.

– Europe’s Changing Relationship with Slavery: Before their encounters with Africa, European elites relied on coerced labor from serfs. After European exploration in Africa, however, Portugal took on a leading role in the African slave trade. The Portuguese traded in slaves and used Africans to work on their sugar plantations in Cape Verde, the Azores, and Madeira. Slaves were never used in Europe, but they became very important on European sugar plantations in Brazil and the West Indies after 1550. Eventually both the slave trade and slavery became central in the American colonies as well.

– Europe: Europe’s involvements in Africa and North America benefited Europe greatly. In Africa, it gained access to new commodities and markets that brought not only greater commercial development and cultural flowering, but great wealth and power for some. Europeans did not make inroads into Africa, but they carried out gold, slaves, and various profitable products. In the Americas, they eventually gained the riches of the Aztec and Inca empires, massive quantities of land that would soon produce profitable staple crops, and a new market for slaves. European incursions into Africa and the Americas helped to transform Europe from a political and cultural backwater to a dominant world power.

– Africa: Europe’s advancement into Africa in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries probably altered Europe more than it did Africa in that period. Africans welcomed European traders because they brought a variety of goods that had not been available previously. To obtain such goods, African slave traders participated willingly and enthusiastically in human trafficking with Europeans. Africa helped to build Europe’s wealth and power. African slaves who were forcibly removed to European colonies were victimized by the process.

– North America: Europe’s incursions into North America benefited Europe and caused a great deal of harm to the region’s native people and empires. Europe gained tremendously, while native people suffered terribly from death, disease, religious conversion efforts, enslavement, and property loss. Aztec, Inca, and North American societies that had existed before Europeans’ arrival would never b