1.1 Contextualizing Period 1

The course starts one year before Columbus on purpose. It tells you that American history does not begin with Europeans. Millions of people already lived in the Americas, in societies that had developed over thousands of years.

Estimates of the population of the Americas in 1491 vary widely, but many historians think it was tens of millions of people, with several million living north of Mexico. The largest cities were in Mesoamerica and the Andes. Tenochtitlan, the Aztec (Mexica) capital, was one of the biggest cities in the world, and the Inca Empire stretched about 2,500 miles along the Andes.

North of Mexico, most people lived in smaller societies. They spoke hundreds of languages and lived in ways that fit their environments: farming towns in the Southwest, mobile hunting bands on the Plains and in the Great Basin, fishing villages in the Northwest, and farming-and-hunting villages in the East (see 1.2).

Western Europe around 1491 was changing fast. Kings and queens were building stronger, more centralized states, which meant they could collect taxes, raise armies and pay for expensive voyages. In Spain, the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella united two large kingdoms, and in January 1492 they captured Granada, the last Muslim kingdom on the Iberian Peninsula. That victory, called the end of the Reconquista, left Spain eager for new conquests and new converts.

Europeans also wanted Asian goods like spices and silk, but those goods came through Muslim and Italian middlemen who raised the price. After the Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople in 1453, Europeans looked even harder for a sea route to Asia that skipped those middlemen.

The Renaissance renewed interest in learning, and the printing press (about 1450) spread maps, travel accounts and new ideas quickly. Portugal led the way at sea, working down the coast of West Africa during the 1400s. Bartolomeu Dias rounded the southern tip of Africa in 1488.

• Diversity: there was no single 'Native American' way of life. Environment shaped how each society lived.
• Exchange: plants, animals, people, germs and ideas crossed the Atlantic in both directions after 1492 (1.4).
• Conquest and labor: Spain built an empire on Native and African forced labor (1.5).
• Clashing worldviews: Europeans, Native Americans and Africans had different ideas about land, religion and gender, and each group adapted to the others (1.6).

Contextualization means placing a source or event inside the bigger picture of its time. On the exam it earns a point in the DBQ and LEQ, and it can be one part of a short-answer question. A good context statement is specific and takes a few sentences. It describes developments that set up the topic and then links them to the prompt.

For Period 1, strong context usually describes either the diversity of Native societies before contact or the political and economic changes in Europe that pushed exploration. Period 1 is a small share of the exam (about 4–6 percent), but it supplies context for later periods, so it is worth knowing well.