APUSH Unit 1 REVIEW (Period 1: 1491-1607)—Everything You NEED to Know

hey there and welcome back to heimlich's history in this video i'm going to teach you everything you need to know about unit 1 of the ap u.s history curriculum so if you're ready to get the brain cows milked let's get to it now you should know that this video is part of a larger set of review materials called the ap us history ultimate review pack it's a resource i made to help you get an a in your class and a five on your exam it's got note guides it's got two full ap practice exams it's got multiple choice questions for you to practice it's got everything you need to feel confident in this class and on your exam so if you want it link in description below let's go so the big picture of unit 1 is to understand the societal makeup of the americas before the europeans arrived and then once the europeans did arrive how did that affect them so let's begin in the beginning and talk about how the native societies existed before the arrival of the europeans and the big idea you need to get situated inside your brain fold for this section is this that the natives of the american continent were a diverse people that had diverse societies based on the kinds of environments in which they lived now we tend to think that the native americans were sort of a monolithic group that sort of roamed the planes hunting buffaloes and then returned at night to sleep in their teepees now the truth is some of them live that way but the native american cultures were much more diverse than that native americans in coastal regions constructed fishing villages there were other groups who lived more hunter gatherer nomadic type lifestyle and still others congregated in magnificent cities and built massive empires so let's do our best to come to terms with the diversity of the native american cultures that existed on the american continent before the europeans arrived and will do so by looking at them each in turn let's begin in what is today utah and colorado and let me introduce you to the pueblo people the pueblo were farmers which is to say a settled population who spent their time planting and harvesting crops like beans and squash in a corn like crop called maize and frankly their maze was amazing don't act like that's not funny and within these farms there's evidence of advanced irrigation systems which just means they were able to take river water and divert it so that it watered their crops and they also built small urban centers made out of hardened clay bricks and perhaps they're most famous for the magnificent cliff dwellings they left behind okay now let's go a little to the north and what is now colorado all the way up to canada this is known as the great basin region in the great plains region of the continent and the folks who lived here were nomadic and they were more hunter-gatherers than their neighbors to the south they wandered the great plains hunting buffalo and gathering enough food to live now these groups didn't build cities and towns but they did organize themselves into small egalitarian kinship bands and if you want a name for one of these groups a good example is the ute people over in the northwest and on down the pacific coast you had native peoples who developed permanent settlements because of the abundance of fish and small game and a diversity of plant life for example in present-day california you had the shumash people they built villages that were capable of sustaining nearly a thousand people and they participated in regional trade networks up and down the coast up in the pacific northwest you've got the chinook peoples who lived in similar ways to the chumash except they built extensive plank houses which housed whole families in kinship groups and now if we fly across the continent to the northeast i can introduce you to the iroquois people like the pueblo they were farmers who planted some amazing crops second time still funny they lived communally in what are called long houses which i maintain is a pretty good name because they were long and they were houses which would be very confusing if they were actually short in tents i was cracking myself up over here it was great anyway the point is they lived in long houses that were constructed from the abundant timber that was available in the area let's move westward a little and meet the folks who lived in the mississippi river valley the groups who lived here were again farmers because of the rich soil found in the region they also participated in trade up and down the main waterways found in that region and probably the most famous and certainly the largest of these groups was the cahokia which was a civilization boasting somewhere between ten thousand and thirty thousand people and this civilization had a centralized government led by powerful chieftains now the point of this survey of all these different peoples is to get you to understand one thing the natives of america developed distinct and increasingly complex societies and those societies were affected and shaped by the environment in which they lived and not only that they utilized vast trading networks that stretched all the way from south america all the way through north america and hark what doth my eyes behold upon yonder shore white people but wait let's back up and try to understand why europeans were arriving on the american shores at all first of all it's going to be very important for you to know that from the 1300s to the 1400s european kingdoms were changing significantly they were going through a process of political unification and were developing stronger more centralized states that were governed by monarchs one of the consequences of all this was a growing wealthy upper class who developed a taste for luxury goods from asia but there was a problem muslims controlled many of the land-based trading routes that stretched from europe to asia and that means that europeans in general were unable to establish trade with those regions on their own terms and that led them to seek out sea based routes for trade now the first european mover in this respect was portugal and they established a series of trading posts around africa historians call this a trading post empire and eventually gained a strong foothold in the indian ocean trade network now one of the chief ways they were able to do this was by deploying new maritime technology and adapting old technology and stop for a second if you don't know what the word maritime means it just means having to do with the sea so let's get some examples of these new and old technologies that the portuguese used they made use of updated astronomical charts which helped them with their reckoning as did their use of the astrolabe they also experimented with new ship designs which were smaller and faster and more nimble upon the rivers in the seas and they were devoted only to trade and on those ships they used borrowed technology like the latin sail and the stern post rudder all of which helped the ships navigate more accurately now after seeing the success of portugal had spain went ahead and jumped into the maritime game too during this time spain had just finished the reconquest of the iberian peninsula from the north african muslim wars and this had a couple of important consequences first the reconquest led a fire in their bellies to spread catholic christianity far and wide second the new power which the victory brought led them to seek new economic opportunities in the east and now enter christopher columbus he was an italian sailor who showed up to the spanish court of ferdinand and isabella seeking sponsorship in order to sail west in order to find new wealth in asian markets when he proposed this plan to ferdinand and isabella and showed them the kind of massive wealth that they could gain as a result of it their response which when being translated was uh duh and so columbus set out from spain and sailed west across the atlantic ocean in 1492 and a few months later he and his men ran into a giant continent that no european knew was there um what about the vikings okay yes the vikings but you know now columbus landed in what we know as the caribbean and found great wealth among the inhabitants of several of the islands and upon his return to spain tales began to spread far and wide of the hidden wealth of the new world and this created a fierce competition among european nations like portugal and france and england to explore these lands now i kind of breezed over it a little quickly but columbus's landing on san salvador in the bahamas was like a major turning point in world history and u.s history massive ecological changes occurred throughout the world because of the bringing together of these two hemispheres now the general term for this exchange is the colombian exchange by definition the colombian exchange is the transfer of people animals plants and diseases from the east to the west and from the west to the east now it's going to be important for you to know some of the specific items that were transferred between these two hemispheres and just for poops and giggles let's start with food from the americas food like potatoes and tomatoes and maize crossed the atlantic into europe needless to say when the europeans tasted this maze they were like this is amazing all right three times too much now from europe to the americas came things like wheat and rice and soybeans in terms of animals the americas sent over turkeys for example europeans introduces cattle and pigs and horses to the americas of great importance was the gold and silver found in the americas and transferred to europe and not to be forgotten people were the subjects of this transfer as well europeans made permanent homes in the americas and also introduced enslaved africans to the continents and finally maybe most significant was the exchange of disease among the two hemispheres when the europeans arrived in the americas they brought smallpox with them and that disease was entirely novel to the native populations of america and therefore they had no immunity to it whatsoever and as a result huge portions of their populations were decimated by the new disease on some islands whole populations were nearly extinguished now it's arguable whether the native americans introduced any diseases to the europeans but the europeans during their travels picked up syphilis and at least the story they told themselves was that they got it from the natives now let's get back to the wealth that came from the americas into europe because that had profound consequences namely it induced a profound societal and economic shift in european states you see in the centuries prior to this the societal and economic makeup of european states was largely organized by a system called feudalism under the system peasants lived and worked on a noble's land in exchange for that noble's protection but this influx of wealth had the effect of shifting feudalism into a more capitalistic system now capitalism is an economic system based on private ownership and free exchange and part of the impetus for this shift was the rise of joint stock companies to fund exploration now a joint stock company is just a limited liability organization in which a plurality of investors pooled their money to fund a venture and the limited liability piece means that if the venture failed then no one suffered the consequences entirely but if it succeeded everyone shared in the profits this is a much different model for funding exploration than the state-sponsored exploration like you saw in spain okay now with all of those generalities established we need to take a moment to look at the first major european player in the americas when it comes to colonization and that would be spain now upon gaining a foothold in the americas the spanish quickly realized that it was not the extraction of precious metals like silver and gold that was going to make them extremely wealthy although they did pursue that they found that it was going to be agriculture that was going to make the boom boom rain so in order to harness all that agricultural ambition they introduced something called the encomienda system this was an economic system whereby spaniards forced natives to work on their sprawling plantations and extract gold and silver in other locations and the spaniards found that this system benefited them for a while but they did start having problems the first problem is that they started having trouble keeping the natives subservient and enslaved because the natives were native and the spaniards were not the natives found many ways in order to escape the brutality of their enslavement and their subsurface the second problem encountered by the spaniards was that the natives were rude enough to continue dying in massive numbers because of the spread of smallpox so the solution to both of these problems was the importation of african and slave laborers to work the plantations this was a good solution in the spanish perspective because the africans didn't know the american geography and were less likely to escape and bonus africans have been mingling with europeans for centuries as part of vast trade networks in afro-eurasia and so they had developed more immunity to european diseases now it's going to be important for you to know that as spain came to dominate central and south america they fundamentally reordered the society that was there they introduced a new system of social classes called the casta system and it categorized people in the americas based on their racial ancestry on top of the heap were the peninsulares who were spaniards born in spain which is to say on the iberian peninsula hence peninsulares under them were the cryoyos or the creoles which were spaniards born in the americas and on the next level down were the casters which had several subdivisions mestizos were those born of spanish and native american blood mulattos were those of spanish and african blood and still lower you had the africans themselves and least of all were the native americans now as i just explained for the most part europeans look down on the natives to the europeans the native americans were basically just good for exploitation military alliances forced labor and subjects of christian conversion and even though these two groups were often in contention with one another each adopted practices and customs from the other's culture which was useful to them for example shift to north america for a moment and talk about english colonization and you see that the natives taught the english how to hunt in the forest and how to cultivate maize and the natives adopted iron tools and weapons introduced by the english even so the relationship between the europeans and the natives was largely difficult and very brutal and the europeans developed elaborate systems of belief that helped them justify their treatment of the natives many spaniards believe that native americans were ontologically less than human and that enabled them to dole out the harsh punishments and the harsh treatment that they gave them in their colonial ventures for example priests like juan guiness de sepulveda argued that native americans were indeed less than human and they actually benefited from the harsh labor conditions but there were priests who oppose this kind of thinking chief among them was bartolome de las casas las casas had actually spent time among the natives and came to see their humanity as worthy of defense and he actually persuaded the king to pass laws ending the slavery of the natives but don't worry the wealthy nobles who saw their hopes of wealth disappearing with the abolishment of slavery went ahead and got the king to repeal those laws europeans also developed belief systems that enabled them to justify the exploitation of african laborers as well and this they got from the bible in the book of genesis noah's son ham sins against his father and as a result noah curses ham's son kanan and all his descendants to be slaves for the rest of their lives but europeans during this period of exploration and colonization came to the conclusion that black's skin must have been the mark of ham because africans were destined to be slaves from the beginning now to be clear that is not what the bible says but that is how they read it all right that's what you need to know about unit 1 of ap u.s history you need help getting an a in your class and a 5 on your exam then grab my ultimate review packet and if you're feeling saucy and want to join the heimler family then go ahead and subscribe and come along heimler out

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Published: Mon Aug 24 2020