Reading Guide 1 Colonial Period (Pages 24-89) The Encounter (1492-1600) (Pages 24-57) 1400s: slave trade
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Binder Section 3: Handouts Item #2
Latin American History—Period 8 September ____, 2012 Reading Guide 1 Colonial Period (Pages 24-89)The Encounter (1492-1600) (Pages 24-57) 1400s: slave trade1 underway, led by Portuguese 1492: Completion of Reconquest in Iberian Peninsula; arrival of Columbus's expedition to Hispaniola ("the Indies") 1500: Pedro Alvares Cabral mistakenly lands in Brazil. For the first three decades of the 1500s Portugal ignored Brazil, concentrating on its monopoly trade with the Far East 1519: Spaniards first set foot in Mexico. By 1521 the Spaniards, along with aid from rival indigenous groups and the decimating power of European diseases, had conquered the Aztec empire2 1530s: Portugal sends settlers, beginning sugar cultivation and destruction of indigenous societies in Brazil. Indigenous populations replaced by slaves brought from Africa 1532: Pizarro captures and executes Atahualpa3 1540s: Major mining zones in Zacatecas and Potosí4 opened 1542: Spanish crown issues the New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians, limiting encomiendas 1544-49: Rebellion of Gonzalo Pizarro against new encomienda laws 1552: Bartolomé de las Casas publishes A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies Colonial Crucible (1600-1800) (Pages 58-89) 1680: Pueblo rebellion in New Mexico begins 1695: Zumbi, the king of Palmares5, killed 1749: Venezuelan cacao growers revolt 1740s-90s: Bourbon reforms tighten Spanish control over American colonies 1761: Yucatec Maya6 revolt in Yucatán peninsula 1765-66: Uprising in Quito against tax increases 1767: Jesuits expelled from Spanish America 1776: Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata created 1781: Comunero uprising in Colombia 1780-83: Rebellion of Tupac Amaru II7 in Peru and Upper Peru 1789-99: French Revolution 1791: Massive slave uprising in Haiti, beginning the Haitian revolution8 1796: Beginning of war between Spain and England 1799: Beginning of Napoleonic Wars 1804: Haiti declares independence 1806, 07: British invasion of the Río de la Plata 1807: Napoleon invades Portugal; royal family flees to Brazil 1808: Napoleon invades Spain; Joseph Bonaparte crowned king of Spain Slave TradeLatin America provides a historical laboratory for the study of African slavery and abolition. Plantations with enslaved workers of African descent existed from Cuba to Venezuela, Colombia, and Peru—not to mention Brazil, the greatest slavery-saturated society of all. In addition, slavery was also a profoundly urban phenomenon in Latin America. Even in regions like Argentina, without plantation agriculture, slaves worked as artisans and domestic servants in every colonial city founded by the Spanish and the Portuguese. In the early 1800s, a quarter of the population of Buenos Aires was made up of black slaves. Lima and Mexico City, places not associated today with inhabitants of African descent, were once full of slaves, too. In most parts of Latin America, slavery declined immediately after independence and was abolished totally around 1850. The great exceptions are Brazil and Cuba, where the importation of slaves actually accelerated during those years and abolition did not come until the 1880s. Given this panorama, historians have produced studies that allow them to compare slavery, and resistance to it—also abolition, and what followed it—in a vast variety of situations across hundreds of years. Students, too, can take a comparative approach.
Aztec EmpireThe Aztec empire presents us with an enigmatic combination of beauty and ugliness. The formal language of Moctezuma's imperial court was as delicate as a flower, yet the Aztec class structure was entirely as degrading and hierarchical as anything in medieval Europe. Aztec sculpture demonstrates a highly refined aesthetic sense, yet the sculptures accompanied habitual, systematic human sacrifice on a massive scale. And the most famous sacrifice, the excision of the still beating hearts of captured enemy warriors atop pyramids, was not the only kind. There was an entire sacred calendar involving various kinds of human sacrifice, including the sacrifice of young women chosen as a special honor to delight the bloodthirsty Aztec gods. In addition, many sacrificial victims were eaten. A paper on the Aztec empire will naturally touch on this horrifying but indubitably fascinating facet, yet it should in addition give some account of the complex social order of Tenochtitlan, its unusual construction in the middle of a lake, and its ingenious agricultural system. It should also describe the rapid growth of Aztec imperial power in the century before the arrival of Cortés, giving some sense of how Tenochtitlan fit in a larger context of Nahuatl-speaking city states. Questions for Analysis and Further Reflection:
AtahualpaThe achievements of the Inca empire are easy to appreciate because they were, above all, practical. The complexities of Mesoamerican calendar systems and the intricacies of their artistic representations can be grasped only by sustained study. Anyone, on the other hand, can immediately appreciate the engineering feats of the Inca empire—the system of mountain roads and relay communications, the swinging bridges thrown through the sky across yawning Andean gorges, the walls made of many-sided stones that interlocked for anti-seismic effect. The grandeur of Mesoamerican pyramids is dimmed, in modern eyes, by the sacrificial uses to which many were put. It is easier to admire Inca administration of imperial resources to promote general welfare, such as the systematic storage and distribution of grain to alleviate famine. A paper on the Incas can explore these achievements without idealizing the Inca empire, as many have done. Andean history contains recurrent idealizations of the Inca empire for students to consider, however. Quechua-speaking indigenous people often looked to their Inca past for inspiration under Spanish rule. Tupac Amaru II embodied that impulse in the 1790s. And in the 1920s, a Peruvian Marxist intellectual named José Carlos Mariátegui idealized the Inca empire as an example of a state committed to the welfare of its people. Questions for Analysis and Further Reflection:
PotosiThe silver mines of Potosí are surely among the most famous in world history. "To be worth a Potosí" was once a common expression to describe enormous riches. Indigenous people knew about Potosí silver before the Spanish arrived, but they did not exploit it on a large scale. Beginning in the 1570s, the Spanish made the "mountain of silver" into an enormous quasi-industrial conglomeration. But the miners were forced labor crews of indigenous people, organized by the old imperial Inca labor draft called the mita. The mines of Potosí produced their richest loads in 1600s, declining in importance thereafter, relative to other silver-producing locations. Mexican silver production eclipsed Peru's in the 1700s. A paper on Potosí might also explore the culture of more recent indigenous Bolivian miners who work in the tin mines. Miners played an important role in the Bolivian Revolution of the 1950s. Questions for Analysis and Further Reflection:
PalmaresPossibly for reasons of climate, settlements of escaped slaves, called quilombos and palenques, were much more frequent in Latin America than in the United States. The unfamiliarity of the English equivalent term "maroon settlement" aptly indicates the infrequency of the phenomenon in U.S. history. In contrast, quilombos, great and small, existed by the hundred throughout Brazil. There was a particularly large and lasting one in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, for example. But none can rival the kingdom of Palmares, inland from the sugar coast of Northeastern Brazil, where African slaves fled from plantations and created backland village settlements governed by African social institutions. Palmares lasted for most of a century, but many tiny quilombos and palanques lasted only a few years. Students interested in Spanish American palenques should direct their attention to the circum-Caribbean region. A paper on quilombos and palenques can explore the ways in which runaway slave communities tried to reproduce familiar African lifeways. Another aspect worth investigating is the complex relations that existed between quilombos or palenques and the slave societies from which they had escaped. Questions for Analysis and Further Reflection:
MayaMayan civilization peaked too early to impress the Spanish in the manner of the Inca and Aztec empires. The great Mayan ceremonial centers visited by modern tourists were all in ruin when the Spanish arrived in the 1500s. In fact, the highpoint of Mayan imperial organization was almost a thousand years earlier. Mayan city states were located in high mountains, in densely forested tropical lowlands, and on the arid Yucatán peninsula. Like the Mexicas (and other indigenous people of central Mexico), the Maya built stone pyramids, but they did not dedicate any to human sacrifice. A paper on the Maya will naturally linger, not on empire building but on Mayan culture. Mayan cities contained ball courts where opposing teams tried to get a rubber ball through a stone hoop. The game was not a sport, but a ritual, and often a matter of life and death, too. Mayan writing, composed of symbols called glyphs, was the most elaborate created by any indigenous civilization. In an attempt to eradicate Mayan indigenous religious belief, the Spanish conquistadors burned large collections of Mayan writings. The Mayan language lives on today, but its linguistic fragmentation mirrors the political fragmentation of the city states. Modern Mayan is a family of languages, rather than a single language. Quiché and Mam, two modern Mayan languages, are no more alike than English and German or French and Italian. Questions for Analysis and Further Reflection:
Tupac Amaru IIThis most important of colonial rebellions shook the high Andes and sent shockwaves throughout Spanish America. The mestizo who called himself Tupac Amaru II claimed Inca descent and took that name in memory of Tupac Amaru I, an Inca resistance leader and, subsequently, folk hero who fought a rear-guard action against the conquest in the 1500s. Like the 1810-1811 Hidalgo rebellion in Mexico, Tupac Amaru's uprising was initially "Americano," rather than indigenous, in focus—calling for an alliance among native-born whites, mestizos, and indigenous people against European-born Spaniards. Like Hidalgo's rebellion, however, Tupac Amaru's, once begun, became primarily indigenous and raged out of control, leaping south through the high plateaus like grass fire into Upper Peru (modern-day Bolivia), where it set off another, more stubborn revolt. Finally, like Hidalgo's rebellion, Tupac Amaru's showed that multiclass rebellions of Americanos against Spaniards could easily become more radical wars against the entire white ruling class. As a result, native-born whites in Mexico and Peru were among the last on the continent to embrace the patriot cause during the wars of independence. A paper on the rebellion should look at the ethnic and class makeup of those joining in the fight and consider the appeal they found in following Tupac Amaru. It is also important to highlight the context of colonial reforms in which the rebellion broke out, as well as the impact it had on colonial administrators during the wars of independence. Questions for Analysis and Further Reflection:
Haitian RevolutionHaiti began as the French side of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, divided between France and Spain. While Haiti does not fit within the normal historical meaning of Latin America, as defined by Iberian colonization, it nevertheless plays an important role in Latin American history. The reason is simple. The Haitian Revolution of the 1790s was the worst nightmare of Latin American slave owners, the greatest cautionary tale ever told on the plantations of the Americas. It occurred when French control over Haiti weakened during France's own revolutionary spasms. As doctrines of the "rights of man" rang in the streets of Paris, Haitian slaves rose up to slaughter and drive out the French plantation owners altogether. Their leader was Toussaint L'Ouverture, a former slave imbued with the spirit of the French Revolution. Haiti became a black republic, one that dominated the Spanish half of the island, as well. In 1815, at the low point of his struggle against Spain, Simón Bolívar got material aid and moral support from Haitian president Petión, who asked in return only that Bolívar free Venezuelan slaves. A paper on the Haitian Revolution should definitely include the classic work, The Black Jacobins. Questions for Analysis and Further Reflection:
LAH Reading Guide 1 Page of Directory: ourpages -> auto -> 2012 2012 -> Islamic Civilization Review Sheet 2012 -> Name U. S. History / 20 points 2012 -> Review 2 past ap questions 2012 -> Test Unit 6: The Gilded Age (1865 – 1900) part I 2012 -> Summer Reading Assignment 2012 -> Name Ms. K. Demircanli 2012 -> Unit #3: Revolution and the New Nation 2012 -> Setting: Time: 1941- 1945 Place: The story starts in the town of Sighet, in Hungarian Transylvania. Then Eliezer and his family are forced to go to several concentration camps in Europe: Auschwitz/ Birkenau (in Poland) 2012 -> Ap us history Individual/Group Study Projects 2012 -> The topics of study in this packet are Download 29.02 Kb. Share with your friends:
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