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- Us history to 1877
- Us history to 1877
- Ch. 2 when cultures collide (1
Spanish in the americas
Spain seized numerous islands in the Caribbean, then led an invasion force into Mexico. Hernan Cortez, with only 400 men, toppled the massive Aztec empire for two reasons. First, the other Indian tribes joined forces with the Spanish and then due to diseases. When the Spanish landed in the Americas, they initiated a series of exchanges. Exchanges of animals, plants, and microbes called the Colombian Exchange. From Europe, the Spanish introduced large animals such as pigs, cattle, and horses. Animals that ate the local crops. The Spanish introduced sugar, tea, and coffee. In fact, sugar plantations were the primary reason for establishing colonies after Colon's failed voyages. Sugar would be turned into rum. The Spanish introduced Africans as slaves into the Americas. And finally, the Spanish introduced diseases such as smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, cholera, bubonic plague, influenza, yellow fever, dysentery, typhus, diphtheria, and scarlet fever, to name but a few. As the Indians had no resistance to these foreign diseases, Indian populations were decimated. On Hispanola the population went from several million to a few hundred in fifty years. Throughout Mesoamerica, the Indian population went from 25 million to one million in just one hundred years. From the West, the Spanish brought to Europe tobacco (originally sold as an antidote to diseases), potatoes, chocolate, corn, and tomatoes. Which means before 1492 the only type of sauce you got on your pasta was alfredo. The Spanish also brought Indians as slaves back to Europe. And when it came to diseases, the main one the Spanish brought to Europe was syphilis. Now, syphilis is a venereal disease. The only way to get syphilis is through unprotected sex. Syphilis, like tobacco, spread across Europe like wild fire. The rise in syphilis in Europe resulted in sexual puritanism and marriage at earlier ages. Spanish settlements in the Western Hemisphere were based on the encomienda system. The encomienda system created a parcel of land (a ranch) for each Spanish settler. Settlers were to build homes, a school, and a church. Settlers were allowed to use Indian labor and in exchange would "civilize" Indians -teach them to read and write Spanish, convert them to Catholicism, and get the Indians to adopt Spanish names. Spanish male settlers even married Indian women, producing a new group of people called Mexicans. In a sense, the Spanish included the Indians into their society. As you will see in the pages that follow, the English excluded Indians from society. That is, the SPanish brought the survivors into their society. Initially, the Spanish used Indians as slaves. The Spanish also brutalized the Indians, including throwing of Indian babies into a pack of wild dogs and betting which dog would kill the baby or cutting the hands off of Indians and watching them bleed to death. The cruelty was too much for one Spanish administrator turned priet, Bartolome de las Casas. De las Casas wrote a long missive to Spain on the cruelty he witnessed. Priests need to convert these Indians, de las Casas wrote, but the soldiers' cruelty was making the priests' job harder. Instead of using Indians as slaves, de las Casas proposed, wny not use Africans? The result was the massive influx of Africans as slaves into Spanish America. By 1600, the Spanish empire in the Western hemisphere stretched from California to Florida, and down through Mexico and Central America, all the way to the tip of Argentina.
Source:
OpenStax, Us history to 1877. OpenStax CNX. Jan 20, 2013 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11483/1.1
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