FIRST EXAM 1301 | history-with-hagan

FIRST EXAM STUDY GUIDE

NOTE: STUDY GUIDES PROVIDE SOME INFORMATION ABOUT THE EXAM. THEY ARE NOT COMPLETE SOURCES OF INFORMATION. USE THE GUIDES BUT ALSO STUDY INFORMATION NOT SPECIFICALLY LISTED HERE.

REMEMBER, NO EXAM IN THIS CLASS IS DESIGNED TO TRICK. THERE ARE NO TRICK QUESTIONS. ANSWERS ARE EITHER RIGHT OR WRONG.

Lecture One: Europe Before the Discovery of the New World

This lecture sought to explain why Europeans became the first to discover the New World. To place European culture in an international context, this point, the lecture provided a brief analysis of certain African, Asian, and Central American societies from 1100-1400. It also argued that pre-discovery Europeans lived mostly rural, inward-looking, suspicious lives, and did not make obvious candidates for intercontinental exploration. Why’d they go exploring, then? What happened to them that didn’t happen to Africans, Asians, or Native Americans? This lecture argued that Europe transformed after a catastrophe that propelled the culture into an era of exploration, invention, and rebirth. This lecture lays down an important foundation in this class – catastrophe shapes history. We begin the class with catastrophe and end it with the Civil War.

There's a ton of information in these lectures. What you want to do is understand HOW that information is telling us about the past. Survey history like this is all about stories - stories of conquest, stories of disease and death, stories of war, stories about people.

The more detail in a story, the better you'll identify with it and understand it from the perspective of the people involved. That's why the lectures have so much information.

So, when you go through all the information on the study guide, don't try to learn each piece of information in its own bubble. First, get the story to which the information belongs. Then understand it in context.

Add a few dates here and there for historical context. Add a few names you can toss out into an essay. That's about i.

Here's what you need to know.

ALL OF THIS INFORATION IN BLUE ADDRESSES CONDITIONS IN THE WORLD UP TO THE 1300s AND NEW WORLD DISCOVERY. Here, we're dealing with the story of the Golden Age of Civilization.
The concept of the Golden Age of civilization
Angkor Wat and the Khmer people and their massive urban areas.
Timbuktu, its size and learning environment and trade networks.
Aztecs, their massive stone cities and huge urban areas.
The significance of the city
ALL OF THE INFORMATION IN RED ADDRESSES HOW EUROPE BEHAVED AS ONE OF THE GREAT CIVILIZATIONS OF THE GOLDEN AGE. Understand how it was similar and different from the rest of the world.
The behavior and attitudes of Europeans in the 1300s and 1400s
City and village life in 1300s-1400s Europe
The European attitude towards the outside world. The walls. The nervousness in nursery stories and Shakespeare.
The political situation in the 1300s
ALL THIS INFORMATION IN BOLD ADDRESSES THE STORY OF THE PERFECT CATASTROPHE THAT CHANGED EUROPE AND PREPARED FOR RENAISSANCE.
Great Famine
Mount Tarawera's role in the famine in Europe and Asia
The Black Death in Asia and Europe
The movement of the disease/the disease itself - how it got from Asia to Europe.
Caffa and its role in shifting the mystery disease from Asia to Europe.
The death toll of the Black Death
The actual disease involved.
ALL THIS INFORMATION IN RED IADDRESSES THE RENAISSANCE THAT CAME OUT OF BLACK DEATH AND ITS EFFECT ON EUROPE.
The Renaissance and the meaning of the word
Where it started;
The mentality of the Renaissance shown through guys like Newton.
Renaissance discoveries
Renaissance political developments and the rise of nations
Renaissance trade
ALL THIS INFORMATION ADDRESSES ABOUT HOW RENAISSANCE LED TO EXPLORATION ACTIVITIES, THE REASONS EUROPE TURNED TO THE OCEAN, AND THE PEOPLE INVOLVED.
1453 and Constantinople
Prince Henry the Navigator
Portuguese explorations in the 1400s down the coast of Africa
Vasco da Gama
The story of Christopher Columbus - how he became the one who got the Atlantic voyage.

Lecture Two: The Americas Before Discovery

Europeans often assumed that the New World was ripe for exploration and conquest. This lecture questioned that interpretation. A lot of what we know about Natives today was not available to European explorers back in the 1500s and 1600s. Therefore, they developed a flawed idea that North America was NEW and unsettled. This lecture argued that what we’ve always been told was a new world was actually something entirely different and that the incredible natural bounty explorers saw didn’t necessarily reflect what they thought. The Native American story is not really what most people think it is. Once again, catastrophe came into play.

Here, we've got a bunch of stories put together.

FIRST IS THE STORY OF WHY EUROPEANS THOUGHT THE NEW WORLD WAR JUST A NEW WORLD, UNSETTLED AND UNSPOILED. All of the following tell that story.
The Asian/Middle Eastern/African Conglomeration and how that shaped European thinking about civilizations and what they involved.
The limitations of European thinking and the reasons for those limitations. Why did Europeans think a city had to look a certain way? What influenced them?
The complete isolation of North America.
The whole issues of Natives and the Wheel and how we've misunderstood things.

NOW COMES THE STORY OF NOW NATIVES CAME TO NORTH AMERICA AND HOW EARLY ARCHEOLOGY SCREWED UP THEIR STORY.
Berengia
Blackwater Locality #1
Clovis points and the Clovis is Oldest argument.
13000 years ago
The implications of Clovis is Oldest

NOW THE STORY OF HOW CERTAIN ARTIFACTS CHALLENGE WHAT WE TRADITIONALLY THOUGHT ABOUT NORTH AMERICAN HISTORY.

Pre-Clovis sites and the nature of artifacts in these sites
Monte Verde Site
The Meadowcroft Rockshelter, Cactus Hill, La Sena, White Sands Locality #2
Kimmswick Site
The Koster site

NOW THE STORY OF URBANIZED CULTURES EMERGING IN NORTH AMERICA AND WHY EUROPEANS DIDN'T REALIZE WHAT THEY WERE SEEING:

The emergence of the Moundbuilding cultures and how extensively they built mounds
Ouachita, Poverty Point and the Archaic Period. Here, one needs to note that these cultures lived as urban hunter/gatherers. They built cities extraordinarily different from what Europeans believed an urban area should be.
Woodland Culture - Adena, Hopewell, Fort Ancient.
How Woodland cultures might be identified, the emergence of agriculture, pottery
Mississippian Culture and the types of mounds this cultures constructed.
The trade networks used by moundbuilding cultures
Cahokia, Moundville
The fate of many earthen mounds

NOW WE HAVE THE TRAGIC STORY OF HOW EUROPEANS MISINTERPRETED WHAT THEY SAW IN NORTH AMERICA - HOW THEY NEVER SAW THE COMPLEX HISTORY OF THE PREVIOUS STORY BECAUSE NATIVES AND URBAN CIVILIZATIONS DIED OUT.

THIS STORY ALSO GOT INTO THE STORY OF THE CLOVIS COMET, WHICH MIGHT HAVE DESTROYED MUCH OF NORTH AMERICA 1300 YEARS AGO.

Anasazi Culture and Chaco Canyon
The flight to Mesa Verde
The natural paradise of the New World and what might have happened to create it.
Runaway abundant nature = the absence of human beings.
The catastrophic disease epidemics and the significance of burial mounds.
The concept of the dual-catastrophe.
The Clovis Comet theory. How the comet 13000 years ago might have changed the nature of North America.

Lecture Three: Explorers (Written)

You’re going to find this a lot in history. Sometimes, it is work. All historians have to memorize and compile giant amounts of data. That’s just how it works. In this lecture, we covered some of the explorers who arrived in the New World. The lecture examined the contribution made by each. Someone, after all, had to be the first to figure out that North America was a continent. Someone had to figure out the Gulf of Mexico was not an ocean. The lecture went over who did what. It pointed out the high death toll among explorers. This lecture also told the story of the Aztec/Inca conquest and discussed the exploration/colonization of North America by explorers from several nations. There’s a lot of memorization and data compilation in this lecture. So be it.

KEEP FINDING THE STORIES;

First, we have the story of the original Europeans to see North America.

The Vikings

NEXT, THE STORIES OF THE EARLY EUROPEAN EXPLORERS AND WHAT EACH ONE CONTRIBUTED TO THE BODY OF KNOWLEGE.

The voyages of Columbus
John Cabot
Amerigo Vespucci
Giovanni Verrazano
Ferdinand Magellan
Jacques Cartier
Henry Hudson
Pineda

NOW THE STORY OF HOW EXPLORATION TURNED INTO CONQUEST AND WHAT THAT WAS LIKE. NOTE THE HUGE DEATH TOLL IN EXPLORATION AND CONQUEST:

The Conquest of the Caribbean
Hernan Cortez and the conquest of the Aztecs
Tenochtitlan
Montezuma
Francisco Pizarro and the Incas
Ponce de Leon
Panfilo Narvaez
Hernando de Soto
1519
Francisco Coronado
The colonization of North America - the timing and the people involved.
Joliet, Las Salle
The nations that tried to conquer and colonize the New World

FINALLY, THE STORY ABOUT HOW COLONIZATION AFFECTED BOTH NEW AND OLD WORLDS

The Columbian Exchange

Lecture Four: The British Arrive

Lectures now turned to the primary subject of American colonization (at least in United States history): British colonization efforts. This lecture discussed why the British arrived in the New World after France and Spain. It also studied one of the early, failed efforts at British colonization. Much of the lecture was devoted to an analysis of Virginia colony, the first major and permanent British colony planted in what is today the United States. At this point, lectures started setting out some of the early foundations of the American South. You need to remember the cultural information about 1600s Virginia because some of it survived into the 1800s.

LOTS OF STORIES HERE:.

FIRST THE STORY OF WHY BRITAIN DID NOT START TO COLONIZE UNTIL THE 1500s

John Cabot and the Germans
Martin Behaim and Nuremburg
The Northern Route across the Atlantic
The contrast between Spanish and Portuguese colonization activities and British
Issues that slowed British colonization activities
The War of the Roses/Hundred Years War
The Tudor and the issues they caused with religion.
The expenses involved in leaving the Catholic Church
The Problems with the North Atlantic.
Sir Humphrey Gilbert

NOW, THE CREEPY STORY OF THE FIRST BRITISH COLONY:

Walter Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth
Roanoke, the "Lost Colony"
Virginia Dare and the colonists of 1587
Croatan
John White
The Dare Stone - is it real?
The weird way the colony vanished and has never been located.

NOW, THE STORY OF THE COLONIAL EFFORT THAT WORKED - THE HISTORY BEHIND THE JAMESTOWN COLONY AND THE TERRIBLE START FOR THIS OPERATION.

The Virginia Company and the reasons it wanted a colony.
The Virginia Company of Plymouth and the Virginia Company of London
The different colony sites for the different halves of the company.
Jamestown, 1607
Pre-1617 Jamestown. Understand the first ten years and the significance of this time period to Virginia's history.

THE STORY OF THE COLONY AFTER THE REFORMS AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE ONE THING THAT SAVED IT - TOBACCO. THE EMERGENCE OF TOBACCO CULTURE.

The reforms after 1617 - the offers of land, women, elected government.
1619 and elected government
John Rolfe
Tobacco and its significance to/effects on the Virginia Colony
The desperate need for land and labor and the effects this need had on Virginia colony.
Tobacco culture
The significance of nicotine

THE STORY OF TOBACCO CULTURE IN THE 1600s - WHAT IT DID TO THE VIRGINIA COLONY AND THE FUTURE SIGNIFICANCE OF THIS INFORMATION.

Indentured servitude
The physical appearance of 1600s Virginia
The dress, sports, names, treatment of women in 1600s Virginia
For this story, you need a strong sense of how things work together – how the pressure felt by early settlers produced an aggressive, individualized and competitive tobacco culture, which treated people brutally. You need to be able to think forward as well – to analyze the effects this culture will have on the southern United States.

Lecture Five: The Pilgrims

North and South begin to take shape at this point. Lectures now turned to one of the early British colonies planted in the North. This lecture gave the history of Plymouth Colony, which has a remarkable story. The Pilgrims founded Plymouth after starting out as a small and secret sect of dissidents in Nottinghamshire, England. Nottinghamshire makes people think of Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham, and it should. Pilgrims and Nottingham are both from in same area. The Pilgrims fled England in order to practice their religion, then traveled to Holland, then crossed an entire ocean in support of their beliefs. One thing to consider about these people is the appeal of their religion, which must have been tremendous if it made them willing to cross the Atlantic on a cargo ship in its support.

SOME GREAT STORIES IN HERE. FIRST, THE STORY OF RELIGION IN ENGLAND AND HOW THE PILGRIMS EMERGED IN AN UNUSUALLY DISOBEDIENT PART OF BRITAIN.

The short live of the Pilgrim colony.
The nature of state church and Henry VIII
Anglican Church and the nature of religion in Britain
The Protestant Reformation and reformed churches
Queen Mary I, her actions, and their effects on Britain
Separatists
William Bradford's story and how he got started in alternative, illegal religious activities.
Scrooby
Nottinghamshire and the reasons why so many separatist groups flourished in this region of England.

NOW, ONE OF MY FAVORITE STORIES: THE STORY OF WHY THE PILGRIMS WERE SO INCREDIBLY DEDICATED TO THEIR RELIGION.

Pilgrim sermons - what they offered people, what people liked about them.
The lengths the pilgrims went to get to hear their sermons and practice their religion - their escape from England, their life in Holland.

FOLLOWED BY THE STORY OF HOW THE PILGRIMS CAME TO NORTH AMERICA:

How the Pilgrims paid for their trip across the ocean.
The Mayflower and the London Company.
Plymouth – founded 1620.
The Mayflower Compact and its significance.
Thanksgiving

LECTURE SIX: The Second Massachusetts Colony - MA Bay

This was the more powerful of the two Massachusetts Colonies. The Pilgrim colony at Plymouth was small and isolated. The Puritan Colony next door in Massachusetts Bay was exactly the opposite. This was an aggressive colony, rich and strong, and populated by people on a powerful religious mission. To understand this colony, one must know something about the state of religion in England, something about the actions of King Charles I, and something about the belief system followed by the Puritans. Massachusetts Bay is a big subject that weaves together a lot of different topics, and concludes with a mass murder.

One should note the substantial differences between MA Bay colony and Virginia Colony. One should also note how MA Bay culture seemed peaceful and educated on the surface, but could turn extraordinarily violent in response to specific triggers. This is a complex and deceptive colony that becomes the birthplace of the northern side of the Civil War.

So you need to know the following, at minimum:

FIRST COMES THE STORY OF THE INCREDIBLE ECONOMIC POWER OF THE PURITANS AND THEIR REASONS FOR LEAVING ENGLAND. THIS STORY INCLUDES ALL THE FOLLOWING:
The 200 ships in 1630, the Great Migration
The tremendous wealth behind this mass migration. The wealth of the Puritans should not be forgotten, as it played a significant role in their activities. Puritans were rich but not nobles or royal.
Charles I, his behavior, his story, and his fate.
The Purpose of the Puritan mission to America, especially in the Context of Charles I.
How the Puritans paid for so many people to cross the ocean.
Rector John White and his role in the Puritan "Errand" into North America.
The temporary nature of the Puritan Errand into the Wilderness. Understand that their North American colony was not supposed to be permanent.

THE NEXT STORY IS ABOUT THE MASSACHUSETTS BAY COLONY ITSELF:

The religion the Puritans brought to America.
Calvinism, Congregationalism, Presbyterianism.
What it means to be a Calvinist - the basic four ideas of this belief system.
Protestant Reformation
How the Puritans modified Calvinism to offer a way for people to earn a trip to heaven.
What was required to fulfill the contract offered by God - the achievement of utter faith. Becoming a visible saint. The difficulties of achieving utter faith.
The whole purpose of Massachusetts Bay colony
John Winthrop and the idea of the "The Errand into the Wilderness"
The purpose of the Puritan Migration to North America
The City on a Hill.

THE NEXT STORY IS ABOUT THE MASSACHUSETTS BAY COLONY ITSELF:

How religion infused all of MA Bay society.
The physical appearance of 1600s Massachusetts Bay colony
The dress, sports, names, treatment of women, and education in 1600s Massachusetts Bay
The comparison between Virginia and Massachusetts Bay - and the misleading nature of that comparison.

FINALLY, WE HAVE A STORY ABOUT THE DARK SIDE OF MASSACHUSETTS AND PURITAN CULTURE:

The nature of witchcraft accusations in New England, including events that could bring about an accusation. How accusations happened.
The quiet intolerance of Massachusetts culture. The willingness to kill to maintain focus on the mission and on religion.
The anger and concern in the colony after 1675, when colonists became aware the mission had failed.
The concerns that the Devil was active in Massachusetts, trying to end the mission.
The Salem Event - what happened and what brought it to an end.
The tremendous amount of witchcraft accusations and executions in MB colony after 1675.
TThe comparison between Massachusetts and Virginia cultures and the implications for the future.

Karen Hagan, Ph.D.

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