The Americas I

0 or 3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

The modern Americas began when Europeans intruded around 1500, imagining rights to rule a hemisphere populated by diverse peoples. They provoked radical changes that transformed the hemisphere and the world, in ways they rarely planned or imagined. Before 1500, most native Americans lived in communities sustaining families and state powers; others remained independent, dispersed across vast regions. Europeans arrived carrying deadly diseases that nearly emptied the continent, while global trade links created unforeseen opportunities for profit. Chinese demand for silver led to Spanish American societies grounded in rebuilt indigenous communities. European demand for sugar brought forced removals of bound Africans to work plantations from Brazil through the Caribbean. In New England, British settlers pursued religious liberties and profits, sustaining themselves and Caribbean plantations; to the south, others bought Africans to raise rice and tobacco. And across vast interiors, Europeans met staunchly independent peoples who traded skins, furs, and more for tools, mounts, and arms to reinforce independence. Everywhere, European assertions, indigenous adaptations, and enslaved peoples’ resistance generated cultural innovations. From the 1770s, conflicts broke European empires: the U.S. began promising liberty and defending slavery; Haitian revolutionaries destroyed slavery and the plantation economy; plantation slavery expanded in Brazil and Cuba; while In New Spain, popular insurgents broke silver capitalism to rebuild lives on the land before Mexico began in 1821. Across continental interiors native peoples solidified independence.