introduction to history and chapter one © 2009 pearson education, inc.1

Introduction to History and Chapter One

© 2009 Pearson Education, Inc. 1

HISTORY

What is history and why do we study it?

“It has to do with not only academic or theoretical questions concerning such matters as the nature of truth, but also with very practical questions of where as humans we are going; and in both respects historical study is deeply involved.”

• -Beveraly C. Southgate


TRUTH

This is not a philosophy class!!! However, at one point all people who study history must come to a solid definition with this term truth

Two ways to see this:

Absolute (inflexible reality)

Relative – We will be focusing on this


So you want to study the Civil War? Which is most helpful?President Lincoln or President Davis’s journal accounts and speeches

Political history

A Confederate or Union soldier’s account

Social history

The religious and social institutions and their records

Cultural history

The military battles and strategies

Military and diplomatic history

The economic and technological changes and actions

Material history


So you want to study the WWII? Which is most helpful?The records of Hitler, FDR, and Churchill

Political history

A Nazi or American soldier’s journal

Social history

The religious and social institutions and their records

Cultural history

The military battles and strategies

Military and diplomatic history

The economic and technological changes and actions

Material history


WHY DOES IT MATTER AT ALL?

I’ll give you three reasons:

"A people without history is like a man without memory, each generation would have to learn everything anew -- make the same discoveries, invent the same tools and techniques, wrestle with the same problems, commit the same errors.“

-Henry Steele Commager

If you look into history you will understand your world better in every situation

"All we have of freedom, all we use or know - This our fathers bought for us long and long ago.

-Rudyard Kipling


Chapter 1A Continent of Villages

to 1500

Chapter 1A Continent of Villages

to 1500

OUT OF MANY

A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

Part One:

Introduction

8© 2009 Pearson Education, Inc.

A Continent of Villages

What Happens when contact is made?


Columbus, describing his first encounter with Native Americans“They ... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned... . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane... . They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”


Life before contact


You can never plan the future by the past.

-Edmund Burke


American Communities: Cahokia: Thirteenth Century Life on the Mississippi

An urban complex along the Mississippi that flourished from the tenth to the fourteenth centuryPopulated by about 30,000 people by mid-1200

Center of long-distance trading system

City-state sponsored by tribute and taxation

Huge temple showcased city wealth and power


Who Are the Indian People?

Enormously diverse group of people

2,000 separate cultures15© 2009 Pearson Education, Inc.

A forensic artist reconstructed this bust from the skull of “Kennewick Man,” whose skeletal remains were discovered along the Columbia River in 1996. Scientific testing suggested that the remains were more than nine thousand years old.


When, in 1927, archaeologists at Folsom, New Mexico, uncovered this dramatic example of a projectile point embedded in the ribs of a long-extinct species of bison, it was the first proof that Indians had been in North America for many thousands of years.

SOURCE: Courtesy of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.


Migration from Asia

New genetic research links American Indians and northwest Asians.

Beringia land bridge between Siberia and Alaska


MAP 1.1 Migration Routes from Asia to America During the Ice Age, Asia and North America were joined where the Bering Straits are today, forming a migration route for hunting peoples. Either by boat along the coast, or through a narrow corridor between the huge northern glaciers, these migrants began making their way to the heartland of the continent as much as 30,000 years ago.


Map 1.2 Native North American Culture Areas and Trade Networks, ca. 1400 CE All peoples must adjust their diet, shelter, and other material aspects of their lives to the physical conditions of the world around them. By considering the ways in which Indian peoples developed distinct cultures and adapted to their environments, anthropologists developed the concept of “culture areas.” They divide the continent into nine fundamental regions that have greatly influenced the history of North America over the past 10,000 years. Just as regions shaped the lifeways and history of Indian peoples, after the coming of the Europeans they nurtured the development of regional American cultures. And by determining the origin of artifacts found at ancient sites, historians have devised a conjectural map of Indian trade networks. Among large regional centers and smaller local ones, trade connected Indian peoples of many different communities and regions.


MexicoPeople living in central Mexico developed farming of maize about 5,000 years ago.

Teotihuacán had 200,000 inhabitants.

Mesoamerican civilizations were characterized by an elite class of rulers and priests, monumental public works, and systems of mathematics and hieroglyphic writing.


Mesoamerican maize cultivation, as illustrated by an Aztec artist for the Florentine Codex, a book prepared a few years after the Spanish conquest. The peoples of Mesoamerica developed a greater variety of cultivated crops than those found in any other region in the world, and their agricultural productivity helped sustain one of the world’s great civilizations.

SOURCE: Image #1739-3, courtesy of the Library, American Museum of Natural History.


The creation of man and woman depicted on a pot (dated about 1000 CE) from the ancient villages of the Mimbres River of southwestern New Mexico, the area of Mogollon culture. Mimbres pottery is renowned for its spirited artistry. Such artifacts were usually intended as grave goods to honor the dead.

SOURCE: Mimbres black on white bowl, with painted representations of man and woman under a blanket. Grant County, New Mexico. Diam. 26.7 cm. Courtesy National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 24/3198.


The Anasazis

Anasazi farming culture arose on the plateau of Colorado River around Four Corners area where Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico meet.

Built densely populated, multistoried apartment complexes (pueblos) Grew high-yield maize in terraced fields irrigated by canals

• Supplemented vegetable diet by hunting with bow and arrow

Culture consisted of 25,000 communitiesDisappeared and is still discussed today


Cliff Palace, at Mesa Verde National Park in southwest Colorado


The Politics of Warfare and Violence

Warfare predated the colonial eraHunting communities organized small raids on farming communities.

Farming communities fought to gain land for cultivation.


The Great Serpent Mound in southern Ohio, the shape of an uncoiling snake more than 1,300 feet long.



Seeing History An Early European Image of Native Americans.

Map 1.3 Population Density of Indian Societies in the Fifteenth Century


Map 1.4 Indian Groups in the Areas of First Contact.


Different tribes by region

The Southwest – The Yuman, Pimas, Pueblos, and most recent arrivals, Athapascans who developed into Navajo and Apaches.

The South - The Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creeks, and Cherokees.

The Northeast - The Iroquois and the Algonquians

The Midwest - The Blackfeet, Sioux, and Chippewa

The Northwest - Chinook, Tillamook, Coast Salish


introduction to history and chapter one © 2009 pearson education, inc.1

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