AMH2010 The Challenge of American History January 9 2012 United States is not a nation in the way that France and Germany are o They have ethno linguistic and religious entity E g France is mostly Catholic What defines the U S o The U S boundaries do not correlate with religious beliefs ethnicities o We have many protestants but still a ton of variation o U S isn t defined by any collective religious ethnic identity o American is not an ethnicity o Is the United States a State o U S is a geo political entity Great Britain Scots Irish Welsh Manx Russia The Russian Federation Canada Quebec and Canada o Created through processes of colonization Spain Catalonia Basque Galicians Above countries slowly absorbed occupied and colonized other proviences to form the state they are today The U S didn t form in the typical pattern that most countries did U S is a geo political entity not quite a nation not quite a state that came to occupy North American Let us study the history of the governing entity of the U S When does this begin o 1607 the founding of Jamestown o 1620 founding of Plymouth colony o 1765 first nation congress o 1776 declaration of independence signed Continental Congress No real unity amongst the states o 1789 Federal Government official constitution is ratified a new geo political entity is related that calls itself the U S o 1800 Thomas Jefferson believes this was beginning of U S Large amount of Americans were able to express their political will and shape the form of the deferral government Jefferson called it the real American revolution o 1865 End of Civil War Should it begin when the first humans came to inhabit what is now the U S January 11th 2012 U S has incorporated a variety of different nations U S has a very complex history it is very hard to put all the various strands into a single history Begin at 30 000 BC Bering Land Bridge o Elements of U S history that are very old o The ancestors of first inhabitants of America o During last ice age polar ice caps formed connecting Alaksa and Siberia Northeast Asia o People followed their game into western hemisphere and into America o Their descendents came to inhabit all of the Americans o 15000 BC People living as far south as southern tip of South America o Who were the people to cross the land bridge Immigrants just like everyone else that came to the U S later How are they different o Immigrant typically means came on your own volition doesn t apply to slaves o Immigrant experience Mobility Adaptability Diversity Mobility o they traveled great distances o Trade vectors paths through which goods moved o Negative of trade vectors disease especially after trade began with Europeans o An agricultural revolution occurred in central America People in the region devised a system of agricultural based on maze corn Corn doesn t fertilize itself it cant reproduce itself This tells us that the crop was entirely human cultivated Someone engineered a crop to produce food Somebody developed corn first genetically engineered food Agriculture allows for a food surplus allowing a lot of the energy of the people to go things besides food production Food surplus allows for trade to get things you wouldn t usually have Burial mounds in northern Mississippi Development of wealthy native societies on the Northwest coast due to Salmon fishing They had high level of social sophistication They fashioned salmon into cakes that they could then trade Fished in the Columbia River Celio Falls Diversity of these indigenous peoples o Different housing types that they built o Languages 329 different North American languages known Language is usually regarded as a chief maker of identity for the American natives Unlike European languages which are closely related native American languages usually had no relation whatsoever During the ice age various ethnicities came to the Americans First truly diverse immigrant society occurred in the and settled Americans Europeans had difficulty categorizing the various natives in the Americas Creek Indians inhabitant Georgia Alabama They were named Creeks because the Europeans didn t know what to call them so they called them Creeks based on the landscape Some people believe Natives were less intelligent inferior to Europeans not true not historically accurate Natives indigenous North America were o Very adaptable o Diverse o Often people see them all as the Indian stereotype o Various languages all fundamentally different across the country LANGUAGE AND IDNETITY o Among native societies language was the principle marker or identity o Non literate is not the same as illiterate Illiterate are people in a literate society who are able to read write Non literacy denotes the absence of that practice in the entire society They do not communicate using alphabetic writing o Non literate peoples identify themselves through speech o Natives often communicated with other tribes in their own languages and they would understand one another They spoke in their own tongues to identify who they were Each group knew both languages o The diversity of languages therefore was not a primitiveness it did NOT mean they didn t interact with one another o Multilingualism was the norm for natives o Diversity does not correspond with simplicity but instead complicity o We often think we know about these native groups but we are often quite wrong Just because we know where they lived and we have a name for them doesn t mean we know about them Creeks Who are they o Natives inhabiting central and southern GA AL o They were in reality though a very diverse people o They would not have said were the creeks o The term creeks comes from English fur traders who lumped them all together and called them the creeks Cimarrones African and Native American slaves who fled St Augustine and other Spanish settlements along the Camino Real between St Augustine and Mission St Louis Cimarrones communities formed near the St Johns formed by these run away slaves very negative term Cimarrone literally means feral wild or unruly Cimarrones intermarried with many Native Muscgean Muscogean speakers have no trilled rr sound So Cimarrones slowly became Cimallones which by the early 19th century had become Seminoles 1492 COLONIAL ERA BEGINS o New group of very mobile adaptive and diver peoples begin rriving by sea from a Europe o Mobility Adaptability Diversity o Who was more of the above English or Indians o English were clearly the predominate migrants to
View Full Document
Unlocking...