Columbian Exchange
While you may be familiar with the stories of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean in October 1492, the emphasis in AP US History will be on the profound impacts on at least 4 different continents (Africa, Europe, North America, and South America) stemming from the frequent interactions of different societies, including lasting impacts on the natural environments of these continents.
Frequently referred to as the Columbian exchange, these interactions involved the introduction of new animal and plant species, as well as different human societies, into unfamiliar landscapes. Examples include the introduction of the potato from the Andes mountains in South America to Europe and the arrival of cattle and horses in the Americas from Europe. Tragically, the most immediately impactful element of the Columbian exchange was smallpox, a deadly pathogen that killed millions of indigenous people in the Americas throughout the 16th century. Ultimately, though, the greatest impacts may have resulted from the American introduction of corn, potatoes, tomatoes, and tobacco into Europe and the European introduction of cattle, pigs, horses, wheat and coffee into the Americas.
*** Image 007 / Columbian exchange ***
Spanish exploration
Spanish exploration in North America during the colonial period ranged from Florida to California in the contemporary United States and throughout the Caribbean and Mexico and Central America. For the purposes of AP US History, you will primarily need to know that Spanish exploration in North America resulted in the establishment of vast but sparsely settled colonial dominions; Spanish explorers such as Hernando DeSoto, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado and Pedro Menéndez de Avilés established military forts and accompanying religious missions including the oldest continuously inhabited European based city in the United States - St. Augustine, Florida.
In what is now New Mexico, Juan de Oñate and fellow Spanish settlers seized control of indigenous lands, sparking a local rebellion that killed 11 Spanish soldiers. Spanish military forces then destroyed the local village, or pueblo in Spanish, and killed hundreds of indigenous people; 12 years later, in 1610, Spanish settlers and priests founded the city of Santa Fe, the modern capital of New Mexico. The confrontations between Spanish settlers and the indigenous peoples would culminate in the Pueblo Rebellion of 1680, an event that you will study in the next chapter.
Contact between indigenous societies and Spanish explorers
Spanish explorers immediately encountered indigenous societies in North America and the Caribbean. Christopher Columbus (in)famously recounted his initial interactions with the inhabitants of the different islands of the northern Caribbean and how he could conquer their islands and enslave their populations with only a small military force.
These patterns of encounter and confrontation would continue over the next 300+ years, although as you have already read, the indigenous populations of the Americas would suffer catastrophic demographic losses, making Spanish conquest far more feasible than when Columbus, Cortés, Pizarro and other Spanish explorers first arrived in the Caribbean, Mexico, Perú and throughout what became the southern United States. In the next lesson, you will learn about the hierarchical social structures imposed throughout the Spanish empire in the Americas as well as the introduction of widespread enslavement of Africans by the Spanish and ultimately most European colonizers.