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US History 1

    Conquest    What You Should Know

The What You Should Know page for each study section is not what you should know before the class, but rather what educated people should know after they have studied history.

As students, we take it for granted that we should know whatever it takes to pass the exam. However I don't always give exams (some have claimed my classes are nothing but one long exam!). It's important for you as the student to have some sense of what out of the great flood of information you will learn is central or crucial.

If you have learned what I intend for you to learn, then you should be able to speak or write at least something, at least somewhat coherently, on each of the items here.

Our text devotes only one chapter to the conquest of the new worlds and the impacts on the old. But to be educated you should know the following:

Native Americans

Ø Major cultural classifications - both eco-cultural ( woodland, plains, desert etc.) and economic adaptations (hunter-gather, farmer - etc.)

  • locations where different adaptations were found

  • lifeways - how each type of people lived

  • representative groups of peoples major types

Ø Major socio-cultural divisions (band, tribe, chiefdom etc)

Ø Major North American Language families (Nadene, Algonquin etc.)

  • their rough location on a map

  • their extent through North America

ØEarly North American high civilizations: 

Adena, Hopewell, Mississippian, Hohokam, Mogollon, or Anasazi,  

(for at least one of the above:)  know

  • Locations

  • Origins and Influences

  • Rough time periods

  • Environmental Adaptations

  • Material Culture

  • Architecture

  • Social Structure

  • Religious Beliefs

Ø The Columbian Exchange

  • new world foods and their impacts on old world culture

  • new world wealth and its impact of old world economies

  • old world diseases and their impacts on new world peoples

  • old world lifeways and their impacts on new world landscapes

Exploration

Ø Major exploring powers

  • who they were

  • when they flourished

  • where they dominated

  • how they were financed

Ø Motives for exploration

  • demographics

  • economic conditions and changes

  • religious and cultural

  • historical and political

Ø Major explorers

  • who they were

  • where they were from

  • who they sailed for

  • where they went

  • what they found

Ø Rise of Mercantilism and Capitalism

Ø Development and Extension of Slavery and War

Ø Major US exploration expeditions - pathfinders, promoters, and explorers search for

  • the source of the Mississippi

  • a Northwest Passage

  • knowledge of Spanish holdings

  • furs, gold and commercial gain

  • passes through the mountains

  • Utopian paradise
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