UNIT ONE: Terms and Concepts
I. The Shaping of North America
1. History was beginning first recorded 6,000 years ago. 500 years ago Spaniards discovered the Americas and soon started colonizing the new lands.
2. The theory of Pangaea suggests that the continents were once stuck together into one huge continent. Eventually they started drifting into separated landmasses, which gave birth to the modern continents.
3. Geological forces by the continental plates created the Appalachian and Rocky Mountains. The continental plates collided with each other, forming mountain chains.
4. The last Ice Age was spread heavily throughout North America, especially the modern Midwestern United States.
II. Peopling the Americas
1. The Land Bridge
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The three main Native American peoples included the Incas of Peru, the Mayas of Central America, and the Aztecs of Mexico. The Incas built a large network of roads and bridges linking their vast empire, which now composes the Andean states. The Mayas were mainly in the Yucatan Peninsula, but also in modern day Guatemala and Belize. They built magnificent pyramids. The Aztecs also built pyramids and practiced ritual sacrifices of captive peoples. The Aztecs would cut the heart out of the captive peoples as an offering for their gods.
III. The Earliest Americans
1. The development of corn, also known as maize around 5,000 B.C. in Mexico was a great success for their people, for they didn 't have to be hunter-gatherers anymore, they could settle in a certain area and become farmers. Towns and cities quickly grew throughout Mexico, and corn arrived in the modern day United States around 1,200 B.C.
2. The Pueblos Indians were the first American corn growers. They lived in adobe houses and pueblos. Pueblos are villages of cube-shaped adobe houses, stacked one on top the other and often beneath cliffs. They had advanced irrigation systems to divert water away from rivers to grown corn.
3. The so-called mound builders built big ceremonial and burial mounds that were located in the Ohio Valley. Cahokia, near East St. Louis today, had a population of about 40,000 people.
4. The Eastern Indians grew corn, beans, and squash in a system. Three sister farming worked this
4. The Great Ice Age thrust down over North America and scoured the present day American Midwest.
a. The cultivation of maize, introduced heavily by sophisticated civilizations such as the Incas, Mayans, and Aztecs, helped to feed large population sizes, thus facilitating the spread of its cultivation across North America. By 2000 BCE, Pueblo peoples, due to the new cultivation of maize, developed irrigation systems. By 1000 CE, maize reached to modern-day SE America, which influenced Creek, Choctaw, and Cherokee peoples by growing and feeding their populations.
Maize or corn is a domesticated plant of the United States. The Native Americans founded it and it quickly spread to other parts of the world. The Native Americans transformed maize by carefully cultivating. Maize developed from a wild grass called Teosinte that originally grew in Southern Mexico, 7,000 years ago. The Teosinte kernels looked completely different from the kernels of today’s corn or maize. Teosinte kernels were small and separated from each other. The first cobs of corn were only a couple inches long with only eight rows of kernels. The cobs eventually started to grow and increases the yields of the crops. Maize agriculture did not reach Southern New England until a thousand years ago.
Native Americans that migrated from Mexico brought along corn to various parts of America. Therefore, maize dispersed into the southwestern regions of the United States and to Peru. In addition to this agricultural migration, corn managed to make its way across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe. In an article written by Lance Gibson and Garren Benson of Iowa State University’s Department of Agronomy, corn was introduced to Europeans during
Let us start with the simple definition of continent. By definition, a continent is a huge piece of land separated from other land masses by oceans. But if we think about it, this definition is little questionable because neither North America nor South America are separated by oceans. Similar is the case with Asia, Europe,
In the long time period after the first people(Siberian nomads) migrated to America through the Bering strait, their descendants expanded throughout the continent.
2. Hypothesis of continental drift and Pangaea: Alfred Wegener created the hypothesis of continental drift, stating about 220 million years ago all the land masses were combined to create Pangaea. The southern portion of the supercontinent was Gondwana, which Africa was the core of. Then as years passed the continents began to split apart and spread across the globe. As the tectonic plates move, earthquakes, volcanoes, mountains ranges, and other landforms were created. Because Africa was centralized in Pangaea, it gives ideas to the reason for the rift valleys, and lack of mountain ranges.
The continental drift theory is the theory of how pangaea was pushed apart and made the world we know today. The theory was that before all humans the continents that made the world was once combined to make pangea. and over millions of years they slowly separated to make the world we know today.
Pangea was a supercontinent that consisted of seven continents, it existed until the Triassic period where the continents started to drift 200-225 millions years ago. The theory was thought of by Abraham Ortelius. Evidently, three centuries later in 1912 by German scientist Alfred Lothar Wegener had a theory about how South America and Africa could fit together. Following in Wegener’s footsteps, Alexander Du Toit, a professor of geology, and his supporters theorized that Pangea first split into two separate into 2 large continents. Laurasia, in the north, and Gondwanaland in the south. Laurasia and Gondwanaland later split into the 7 continents we know today.
Mountains when two plate boundaries collide with each other. This process can also be called orogeny. Mountains form at subduction zones and can form with two oceanic plates, two continental plates, and with one oceanic and continental.
During the Early Cretaceous stage Gondwana broke apart into many of the continents and countries that we know today; one of which being Africa. Africa began to drift North along with India closing up the area we now know as the Mediterranean basin. All of these collisions have shaped the tectonic activity and geo-dynamics of the landscape around the Mediterranean. The Alps were formed as result of the collision between Africa and Eurasia (Hinsbergen et al, 2009). During the Oligocene epoch, the African plate and Eurasian plate moved towards each other putting pressure on one another, and thus the sediment accumulated into folds. This is also called Orogenesis. These folds contain major low angle faults from NE-SE as result of thrusting and
The history behind North America goes way back and has been told in many different ways. But it was originally inhabited by Native Americas. These people migrated during the end
With slavery coming to an end the direct effect of that is the reshaping of North america. One example of the reshaping of North America is westward expansion. Settlers had one goal in mind, gain territory for crops and expansion of farming. Farmers would expand west to search of gaining territory for themselves and also hoping to gain slaves but quickly failed as they entered into free states. Westward expansion limited most people seeking for new material due to the fact that laws are in place for that reason.
One of the main questions people ask is how did it happen? The answer lies with the plate tectonics. Tectonic plates are pieces of the crust that move slowly across the earth. They can move away from each other which is known