The Americas before the Europeans
Channel: Miranda’s Learning Land
Date: 05/11/2022

Great civilizations had risen and fallen in the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans. In North America, the complex Pueblo societies including the Mogollon, Hohokam, and Anasazi as well as the city at Cahokia had peaked and were largely memories. The Eastern Woodland peoples were thriving, but they were soon overwhelmed as the number of English, French, and Dutch settlers increased.
Mesoamerica and South America had also witnessed the rise and fall of cultures. The once-mighty Mayan population centers were largely empty. In 1492, however, the Aztecs in Mexico City were at their peak. Subjugating surrounding tribes and requiring tribute of both humans for sacrifice and goods for consumption, the island city of Tenochtitlán was the hub of an ever-widening commercial center and the equal of any large European city until Cortés destroyed it. Further south in Peru, the Inca linked one of the largest empires in history through the use of roads and disciplined armies. Without the use of the wheel, they cut and fashioned stone to build Machu Picchu high in the Andes before abandoning the city for unknown reasons. Thus, depending on what part of the New World they explored, the Europeans encountered peoples that diverged widely in their cultures, traditions, and numbers.

Further Reading
Alchon, Suzanne Austin. 2003. A Pest in the Land: New World Epidemics in a Global Perspective. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Brown, Kathleen M. 1996. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Clendinnen, Inga. 1991. Aztecs: An Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cook, Harold John. 2007. Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Curtin, Philip D. 1990. The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Leon, Portilla Miguel. (1992) 2006. The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico. Boston: Beacon Press.
Mann, Charles C. 2005.1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. New York: Knopf.
--. 2011.1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. New York: Knopf.
Meltzer, David J. 2009. First Peoples in a New World: Colonizing Ice Age America. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Niane, Djibril Tamsir. 1965. Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali. Translated by G. D. Pickett. London: Longmans.
Northrup, David. 2013. Africa's Discovery of Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pagden, Anthony. 1995. Lords of all the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France C.1500-C.1800. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Prescott, William Hickling. 1936. History of the Conquest of Mexico, and History of the Conquest of Peru. New York: Modern Library.
Seed, Patricia. 1995. Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, Alan. 2002. American Colonies. New York: Penguin Books.
Thornton, John K. 1992. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wey Gómez, Nicolás. 2008. The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

This is a modification of an open-source textbook by openstax.org which is available for free at https://openstax.org/details/books/us-history