AP U.S. History · Summary

Unit 1 summary

1. Native societies before 1492 fit their environments: maize farming with careful water use in the Southwest, mounds and maize in the Mississippi valley, salmon villages on the Northwest Coast, seasonal foraging in the Great Basin.
2. Europeans sailed out for trade routes to Asia, gold, converts and glory, helped by new ships and navigation tools; Portugal went around Africa, and Spain went west with Columbus in 1492.
3. The Columbian Exchange ran both ways: American crops such as maize and potatoes fed the Eastern Hemisphere, while horses, cattle, wheat, sugarcane and deadly diseases came to the Americas.
4. Disease, not weapons alone, explains the speed of Native population collapse and of conquests like Tenochtitlan; Native allies mattered too.
5. Spain ran its empire on silver, forced Native labor through the encomienda, and growing numbers of enslaved Africans, and it ranked people with the casta system.
6. Spaniards themselves argued over the conquest: Las Casas condemned it, and the New Laws of 1542 and the Valladolid debate show the crown wrestling with how to treat Native peoples.