English Speaking World USA
O’Callaghan, B. (1990). An illustrated history of the U.S.A.
A New World
Chapter 1: The First Americans
August 3, 1492 Columbus set sail from Spain.
Set sail to the Canary Islands, turned west on the Atlantic Ocean.
October 12, 1492 arrived on an island he called San Salvador, and called the people “los
Indios”.
He wasn’t in India, Asia. But in America.
Different groups of Amerindians with different kinds of life and spoke over 300 separate
languages across USA & Canada.
Europeans called the continent “The New World”.
Ancestors of the Amerindians had been living there for 50,000 years. Probably came from
Asia crossed from Alaska south and east following caribar and buffalo.
12,000 years ago, descendants crossed the isthmus of Panama.
5,000 years ago, camp on Southern tip Tierra del Fuego (= Land of Fire)
More settled life
1. Highland Areas (Mexico) first farmers corn/maize
a. Cultivated plants were developed
b. By 5,000 BC: beans, squash, peppers
2. The Pueblo people (Arizona & New Mexico) best organized.
a. Lived in groups of villages, or towns built for safety on sides and tops of cliffs.
b. Shared terrace buildings made of adobe bricks.
c. Made clothing from cotton.
d. Wore boot shaped leather moccasins.
e. Grew crops of maize and beans with irrigation!
3. The Apache (never became settled farmers)
a. Wandered deserts and mountains.
b. Stole food from Pueblo neighbors.
c. Fierce and warlike.
4. The Iroquois (a “nation”) woods of northeastern North America skilled farmers.
a. Cleared fields from forest and grew beans, squash, and 12 different kinds of
maize.
b. Hunters and fisherman.
c. Used birch bark canoes.
d. Lived in permanent villages, wooden huts.
e. Fierce warriors built wooden stockades to protect their villages.
f. To win glory often fought one another.
5. The Sioux (= Dakota) (Dakota = allies, Sioux = enemies) from the Mississippi River
to the Rocky Mountains.
a. Depended upon the buffalo, grew no crops and built no houses.
b. Never remained on one pasture.
6. People of North America’s northwest coast: gathered nuts and berries.
,Tribes like the Haida large houses totem poles
Potlatch means “gift-giving”.
, Chapter 2: Explorers from Europe
There were other discoverers before Christopher Columbus.
AD 459: Buddhist Monk named Hoei-Shin sailed from China to Mexico.
AD 551: Irish Monk named Brendan the Bold.
Viking named Leif Ericson “Lucky Leif” from Iceland.
Prince Madoc, a Welsh explorer who landed in the Mobile Bay in 1170, apparently
left behind the Welsh language with the Indians.
Evidence of the Vikings were found in Newfoundland Foundations of huts built in Viking
Style, also found iron nails and the weight, or “whorl” from a spindle.
Vikings were a sea-going people from Scandinavia in northern Europe:
Told stories called ‘sagas’
Leif Ericson: from Greenland to the eastern coast of North America (AD 1000) named
it “Vinland the Good”.
More settlers came but it did not last. They left Vinland and it was forgotten.
Gold-hungry Spanish people colonized in America.
Hernan Cortes (1520s) conquered the Aztecs: a wealthy, city-building Amerindian
people who lived in Mexico.
Francisco Pizarro (1530s) attacked the Incas of Peru.
Conquistadores in Central and South America was the new empire made by conquerors.
Between 1539 and 1543 Hernando de Soto and Francisco Coronado explored southern part
of the now USA.
1565: St. Augustine was claimed. Followed by Santa Fe and New Mexico in 1609.
1497: King Henry VII hired Italian seaman John Cabot and he reached the rocky coast of the
Newfoundland.
1524: The French King, Francis I, sent Italian explorer Giovanni Verrazano to explore and he
anchored his ship in New York.
Ten years later, another French sailor, Jacques Cartier, found Montreal in Canada.
The reasons for going to the New Land was for many settlers to become rich, or for political
or religious reasons.
