This document provides an outline for a chapter that will discuss the history of various peoples from around the world prior to significant contact between Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans in the Americas. The outline is divided into multiple sections that will cover: the Cherokee creation myth; early North American, Mesoamerican, South American, West African, and traditional European cultures prior to 1500; transformations within Europe from 1400-1600 including the rise of nation-states, Renaissance, and Reformation; European exploration led by the Portuguese, Columbus, Spanish conquistadors, and others from 1420-1600; and the effects of contact between native, African, and European peoples including disease epidemics, the slave trade, and cultural

1. CHAPTER 1 OUTLINE OUT OF OLD WORLDS, NEW
I. Introduction: The Cherokee Creation Myth
When different peoples tell stories to explain their origins,
sometimes the stories seem fantastical or heretical. Often, as in
the Cherokee myth of creation, certain themes sound familiar
to listeners or readers because different cultures share certain
views of the world. Most of these myths are not historical
accounts of migrations, lives of kings, or daily affairs. But they
are more than mere fictions intended to entertain people. Over
the centuries the Cherokee retold and reshaped the details of
their creation myth, putting in order the component parts of
the world and giving words to physical and psychological
phenomena as they understood them. The evolving myth gave
names and causes to what they experienced in their everyday
lives and collective expression to core values and what each
person might imagine as his or her reason for existence.
II. The First Americans, to 1500
A. Earliest North Americans
1. The Paleo-Indians
2. Climatic Change and Adaptation
3. The Agricultural Revolution
B. North American Cultures
1. Eastern Woodland Cultures
2. Adena and Hopewell Cultures
3. Mound-Builders of the Mississippi River Valley
4. Southwestern Cultures
a) The Hohokam
b) The Anasazi
c) The Pueblo
5. Algonquian
a) The Chesapeake Tribes
b) The Eastern Coastal Tribes
6. The Iroquoian
a) The Five Nations of the Iroquois
b) Hiawatha and the Great League of Peace

2. C. Mesoamerican and South American Cultures
1. The Olmec
2. The Toltec
3. The Maya
4. The Mexica (Aztec)
5. Early Andean Cultures
a) The Chavin Mountain Culture
b) The Mochicans
c) The Tiwanaku
6. The Incas
III. Old World Peoples in Africa and Europe, to 1500
A. West African Cultures and Kingdoms
1. West African Social and Community Structures
2. Ghana
3. The Songhai Empire
B. Traditional European Societies
1. European Social and Community Structures
a) Peasant Families
b) Peasant Relationships to the Land
c) Laws and Social Customs
2. The Economic Expansion of Europe
3. The Black Death
4. Commercial Expansion and Early Voyages of Exploration
IV. Europe’s Internal Transformation, 1400–1600
A. Agriculture and Commerce
1. Impact of Recurring Plagues on European Agriculture
2. Urban Development and an Expanding Middle Class
3. New Technology and Transoceanic Travel
4. Markets and Fairs
5. Changing Relationships to the Land
6. New Social and Legal Arrangements
7. Urban Expansion
8. Changing Commercial Relationships
B. The Nation-State and the Renaissance, 1400–1600
1. The Formation of the Nation State
a) Portugal and Spain
b) France
c) England
2. The Renaissance

3. a) Greco-Roman Influences
b) The Renaissance Impact on the Arts and Sciences
(1) Galileo Galilei
(2) William Shakespeare
(3) Machiavelli and The Prince
C. The Reformation, 1517–1563
1. Martin Luther and the 95 theses
Image 1: Martin
Luther who, in
attempting to reform
the Catholic Church,
set off the
Reformation.
2. The Impact of the Reformation
a) Germany
b) France
c) England
3. The English Puritans
V. From Across the Seas, 1420–1600
A. Portuguese Exploration and African Slavery
1. Old World Slavery
2. The Portuguese Slave Trade
3. Sugar and Slaves
B. Christopher Columbus
1. Columbus’ First Voyage and Early Native American
Encounters
a) The Arawak
b) The Taino
2. The Treaty of Tordesillas
3. Columbus’ Later Voyages
C. The Spanish Century
1. The Conquistadors
2. Hernan Cortes and the Aztec

4. Image 2: Aztec
religion practiced
human sacrifice
3. Pizarro and the Incas
4. Juan Ponce de Leon and Florida
5. Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca and Texas
6. Hernando de Soto and the Mississippi Valley
7. Francisco Vasquez de Coronado and the Search for
Cibola
D. The Effects of Contact
1. The Columbian Exchange
2. New World Slavery and the Middle Passage
3. European Cultural Adaptations
4. Native American Cultural Adaptations
VI. Conclusion
Native American, African, and European peoples had all been
experiencing centuries of profound changes before they
encountered each other. By the time Africans and Europeans
came to the western hemisphere, most peoples of the
Caribbean and the coastal mainland lived in sedentary villages
or semi-permanent encampments. They had organized
themselves into clusters of families and hierarchical
communities that were recognizable to Europeans, and they
identified among themselves leaders, servants, and specialists
of many kinds. From Aztec and Inca, to Pueblo and Seminole,
the Native Americans who experienced the most contact with
the first Europeans were sometimes closer culturally to the
strangers from across the Atlantic Ocean than they were to
nomads or hunter-gatherers who lived in high altitudes or
remote regions of their own American interior.
But differences ran deep as well. Long before peoples of
different continents mixed, thousands of different North

5. American cultures rose, flourished, and profoundly changed—
sometimes repeatedly—in dynamic interaction with each other.
Peoples of Africa and Europe, too, underwent significant
changes that laid the foundations for both cultural sharing and
cultural conflicts when they did finally meet.
Portuguese and Spanish explorers pushed aside Islamic
commercial supremacy with a burst of energy in the 1400s, and
went on to conquer islands and empires stretching over
thousands of miles in the New World. As we have seen, by 1450
medieval technological, agricultural, and commercial
innovations had changed living conditions dramatically within
Europe. Religious and political turmoil had uprooted huge
numbers of Europeans, many of whom became migrants in the
explorations westward to come. But changes were just as
momentous in the city-states and villages in the Americas, and a
rich and fluctuating heritage accompanied African peoples
forcibly removed from their homelands. These dynamic
conditions set certain parameters for the blending among
cultures in the New World.
Initial European dreams of glory and gold gave way quickly to
the reality of difference, disappointment, and sharpening
tensions among strangers. The first crude toeholds of Europeans
in the Americas contrasted sharply with the great Native
American city-states of Mound Builders, Aztec, Inca, and
southwestern peoples. And yet, within only a short period of
time, the demographic tables reversed. While life was no doubt
difficult for European colonizers, who experienced starvation,
death, and disease in the first years of each settlement,
millions of Indians and Africans throughout the Americas
perished by the steel weapons, harsh work regimens, oppressive
political authority, and especially the diseases of migrating
European strangers. As Spain extracted shiploads of hides and
precious metals from new lands, deadly diseases took a greater
toll on Native Americans than Europeans had ever experienced
in the bloodiest of wars. At the same time, Spanish and
Portuguese explorers and settlers required greater and greater
replenishment of slaves from Africa who, by the early 1500s,
performed an array of tasks as forced labor. This pattern, as we

6. shall see, repeated itself when other European empires arose in
the coming generations.