Age Of Exploration DBQ

n Lies My Teacher Told, James W. Loewen discusses how American students who enter college are less knowledgeable about their own history than any other subject. He claims that American history is the least liked and worst remembered subject in the American curriculum. High school students hate history and see it as “boring and irrelevant” (Loewen 2). Loewen argues that the uninteresting, Eurocentric treatment of history bores most elementary and high school students, who also find it irrelevant to their lives. To make learning more compelling, Loewen suggests that authors, publishers, and teachers should make history appealing and be engaging to the students. By presenting students with different viewpoints and stressing that history is

Upon the uncovering of the of the America’s by the European super powers, most of the native American tribes were quickly captured. The question arises as to why the Europeans conquered the Americans and not the other way around. Europe was able to prosper and grow while the indigenous groups of the Americas stayed in the past. European success over American tribes was attributed to the fact that the Europeans possessed more advanced technologies and skills that could be used against natives, Europeans were literate and could record knowledge and events easily, and the European diseases brought over were devastating to the unprepared indian populations.

It’s not a coincidence that every year on the second Monday of October, students have a day off from school. That day is used to commemorate Christopher Columbus’s arrival to the Americas. Christopher Columbus and many other explores departed from Europe seeking to discover new land. This time in history became know as the Age of Exploration. Historians debate whether the Age of Exploration is as great as it is said to be. There were several downsides to the Age of Exploration. This time period in history should clearly be remembered, but not celebrated due diseases that traveled and killed millions, and the unfair treatment of native peoples.

Christopher Columbus was an explorer and navigator born in 1451 in Genoa, Italy. When Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic Ocean from Spain in 1492, he hoped to reach eastern Asia. He thought he had reached Asia when he landed on an island in the Caribbean Sea. In fact he had opened up to Europeans a new world with two continents—North America and South America—and many islands.

The Columbian Exchange allowed the transformation of diseases between the two worlds. Diseases affected the Native Americans the most, demolishing nearly all of their population. The diseases spread rapidly throughout the New World, not only infecting the Native people. Moreover, affecting anyone who has exposed it, reaching many more places in the world including Mexico, Peru, and killing millions on the Carribean Islands. Europeans were already immune to the diseases other cultures endured.

Age of Exploration was a time of amazing adventure with causes that drastically change lives. In many ways, explorers change the state and the government, but what was for good than bad. The age of exploration brought technology, many different motives and effect in colonization. The age of exploration was a time of trouble, motivation drive, and inventions.

The Age of Exploration, starting from the 15th century and lasting until the beginning of the 17th century, was a period of time in which the Europeans explored the Americas and Africa while searching for a more efficient trade route with Asia. However, the Europeans did not just discover this lands, but also made use of them and the native population.The causes of the Age of Exploration were “God, Gold and Glory” which effects were the expansion of Christianity, importation of precious resources into Europe and colonization of new lands.

Prior to the discovery of the New World by Europeans, Native Americans populated what is presently North and South America in massive numbers; however, due to massive population loss, mainly caused by diseases introduced by Europeans and Africans, the Native Americans were unfortunately forced to live as inferiors to the Europeans.

The age of Exploration was a time when many countries in Europe sought a means of power by traveling to the new worlds in aid of helping their own countries by retrieving raw materials, slave labour, rare foods and spices, but also land that they could claim for their own countries. The most famous out of these countries during the time where England and Spain both they ruled large amounts of land during the late Renaissance period, but our main focus is during the early Renaissance period this was the time when Portugal and Spain where both trying to head East to claim valuable raw materials and spice, from India and many other countries along the way.

The Columbian Exchange occurred when Columbus arrived in the new world and disease, culture, crops, and animals were traded. This swap caused the great biological exchange. When the Spanish and later English came over to the new world along with crops and animals they also brought disease. Europeans, living among many diseases, had built immunity to the ailment, but since the natives had never been exposed to the illnesses they had no immunity and the disease quickly spread. The Europeans, unintentionally, started an epidemic that would spread throughout the Americas and single handedly kill millions of Natives. Europeans brought diseases such as cholera, malaria, measles, mumps, smallpox, typhoid, and yellow fever to name a few. The only known disease that the Natives probably had was syphilis. Although the Europeans inadvertently shared their diseases they did share other

With them came smallpox, measles, chicken pox, influenza, and many other diseases. “Before the arrival of Columbus, Native American disease wasn’t dominant in the land. Due to the lack of exposure of disease in their younger years, Native Americans were vulnerable to the European diseases that would come with the Columbian Exchange. The diseases would soon destroy many societies of the ancient Aztec, Maya, and Inca. Through many estimates it is foreseen that alien diseases caused over 50% deaths of the Native American population. On the other hand, Europeans didn’t have the same effect when they came in contact with these diseases. Exposed to the diseases at an early age, Europeans were mostly to fully immune. With the devastating effects of disease, native culture was starting to change. Persuaded that their native gods have abandoned them, many natives converted to Christianity. Forced by disease, natives usually married relatives that survived the diseases since appropriate partners were scarce. Furthermore, disease also influenced the African Slave Trade to the Americas. With Africans being immune to Old World diseases other than the Native Americans, many Europeans preferred the African as the better slave.”(The Great Disease Migration)

Historians differ on what they think about the net result of the European arrival in the New World. Considering that the Columbian Exchange, which refers to “exchange of plants, animals, people, disease, and culture between Afro-Eurasia and the Americas after Columbus sailed to the Americas in 1492,” led to possibly tens of millions of deaths on the side of the American Indians, but also enabled agricultural and technological trade (Henretta et al. 42), I cannot help but reflect on whether the effects should be addressed as a historical or a moral question. The impact that European contact had on the indigenous populations of North America should be understood as a moral question because first, treating it as a historical question is difficult due to lack of reliable historical evidence; second, the meaning of compelling historical claims is contestable as the academic historian perspective tends to view the American Indian oral history as invalid; and finally, what happened to the native Indians is morally repulsive and must be discussed as such.

The Columbian Exchange was the movement of people, animals, goods, plants, diseases, and microorganism that occurred in the sixteenth century. The effects of The Columbian Exchange on early American society were extensive. One of the most devastating effects was the spreading of disease that killed around ninety percent of the Native American population. When Europeans came to the New World they brought with them diseases such as, “smallpox, measles, typhus, and cholera”(document one). The native’s immune systems were not prepared to fight theses diseases and this lead to a catastrophic amount of fatalities. In document four we see evidence of a smallpox breakout through an illustration of native americans with spots covering their bodies.

However, trade and commerce had a negative effect on both sides as well, namely disease. Disease killed a lot of Native Americans as well as gave syphilis to the Old World. The Old World exchanged a vast amount of diseases, for example, smallpox, measles, malaria, yellow fever, influenza, and chick pox. In the New World, the diseases that were exchanged with the Old World were syphilis, polio, hepatitis, and encephalitis (“The Columbian Exchange Introduction”). Due to the fact that both Old and New Worlds had all those illnesses that were crossing the ocean, the Native American population was diminished. The cause of so many deaths was because Native Americans were incapable of surviving the

The Columbian Exchange had both positive and negative effects on the Europeans and Native Americans. The new world gave the old world precious metals such as gold and silver, agriculture such as tabacco, corn, pineapples, potatoes, tomatoes, vanilla, and chocolate. They also gave the old world a terrible disease called syphilis. The old world gave the new world agriculture such as wheat, sugar, rice, and coffee. Livestock such as horses, cows, and pigs. The old world gave the new world much more diseases than the new world gave the old world. The old world gave them diseases such as the bubonic plague, small pox, influenza, measles, typhus, and scarlet fever. These diseases killed many Native Americans because they did not build up the immunity