Amanda Jacobs
SST309-03
Final Unit plan
Lesson Planning Guide
5th Grade History Unit: Three World Interaction
Introduction:
The unit I have chosen is a fifth grade History unit focuses mainly on the aspect of the effects of the colonization of America
through Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans. The History standards are under Three world interactions. This unit
encourages students to think about the past, and to use primary and secondary sources to compare Europeans American Indians, and
Africans who converged in the western hemisphere after 1492 with respect to views and culture. Additionally this unit will last last about two weeks
and will encourage students to find out more about the different approaches different European countries had when approaching
the Native Americans thy ran into when coming to colonize America.
Rational: (Rationale)
It is important for students to understand the differences between the past and the present, and it will be easy for them to use
their own families and people they know to find out information about the past and apply it to what the world is like now. Also,
by using different artifacts and records to find out information on the past will help the students begin to use research to find out
answers to questions. By learning about the cultures of their family and of the people around them, the students will begin to
have a better understanding about other people and just how to be respectful to each and every person they encounter in their
lives.
1. KUDs: The road map
Unit
GLCE-code and exact
wording
Verbs
Know-what will
students know upon
learning this?
U1.4
5-U1.4.1
Describe the
convergence of
Europeans, American
Indians and Africans in
Describe
Students will be able
to describe from the
perspective of
Europeans,
American Indians,
Understandwhat will
students
understand
Students will
understand the
convergence of
the Europeans,
American
Do-what will
students do to show
they understand
Vocabulary
I can
Students will be
able to connect
perspective view
statements from the
Europeans,
-convergence
-Europeans
-American
Indians
-Africans
I can describe the
union of
Europeans,
American Indians
and Africans in
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North America after
1492 from the
perspective of these
three groups.
5-U1.4.2
Use primary and
secondary sources
(e.g., letters, diaries,
maps, documents,
narratives, pictures,
graphic data) to
compare Europeans
and American Indians
who converged in the
western hemisphere
after 1492 with respect
to governmental
structure, and views on
property ownership
and land use.
5-U1.4.3
Explain the impact of
European contact on
and Africans about
their convergence
after 1492.
Final Unit plan
Indians, and the
Africans after
1492.
Use
primary
and
secondary
sources
Students will use
primary and
secondary sources to
compare Europeans
and American
Indians in the
Western Hemisphere
after 1492. While
taking into
consideration their
governmental
structure, and views
on ownership and
land use.
Students will
understand how
to use primary
and secondary
sources to
understand
Europeans and
American
Indians view
points on
ownership and
land use after
1492.
Explain
Students will explain
the difference
between the British
Students will
understand the
difference in
American Indians,
and Africans to the
correct individuals
when given a listing
of them
-students will great
vin diagrams
comparing and
contrasting
American Indians,
Europeans, and
Africans,
-Students will create
and present a
presentation on the
major perspectives
of Europeans,
American Indians,
and Africans
Students will be able
to understand who
published the
primary and
secondary source/
whose viewpoints
they are from when
given them.
- Students will be
able to make a
comparison and
-North America
North America
after
1492.
-primary source
-secondary source
- letters
-diaries
- maps
-narratives
-converged
-western
hemisphere
-governmental
structure
- property
ownership
-land use.
I can use primary
and secondary
sources to
identify American
Indians and
Europeans.
-British
-French
-impact
I can explain the
difference
between different
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American Indian
cultures by comparing
the different
approaches used by the
British and French in
their interactions with
American Indians.
5-U1.4.4
Describe the
Columbian Exchange
and its impact on
Europeans, American
Indians, and Africans.
Describe
Final Unit plan
and French
approaches to the
American Indians an
their impact on the
American Indians
approaches and
there
consequences of
the British and
the French.
Students will be able
to explain the
Columbian exchange
and its impact on
Europeans,
American Indians,
and Africans
Students will
understand the
Columbian
exchange and its
impact on
Europeans,
American
Indians, and
Africans
contrast chart on the
British and French
Interactions with the
American Indians
based on their
approaches and
impacts
-students will make
a poster on the
different influence
of the British and
the French
-Students will be
able to complete the
map activity.
-Students will be
able to read and
comprehend the
book and articles
provided to read in
class
-students will be
able to classify
which crops,
animals and disease
went Old World
New World and
New World Old
World
2. Assessment ideas: a. How will you know they’ve learned it? And b.How will you grade it?
a. vocabulary lesson: Bingo
b. Lesson 1:5-U1.4.1 and U1.4.2: discussion and handouts
c. Lesson 2:5-U1.4.1 and U1.4.2: presentation and Vin Diagram
d. Lesson 1: 5-U1.4.3: jigsaw activity, posters, and class discussion
e. Lesson 1: 5-U1.4.4: Columbian Exchange Graphic organizer, discussion
f. Lesson 2: 5-U1.4.4 ticket out the door
-cash crops
-disease
-
European
countries contact
with American
Indians
-Columbian
Exchange
-Continent
-Import
-Native
-Spatial Diffusion
-Old World
-New World
-natural resources
-trade
-natural balance
-trading posts
-disease
I can explain the
impact of the
Columbian
exchange in the
Europeans,
American
Indians, and the
Africans
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Final Unit plan
g. Lesson 3: 5-U1.4.4: Map activity
h. Lesson 4: 5-U1.4.4: movie notes, time line
3. Sequence of Instruction: What will you do? What will they do?
Include:
 Pre-test/Anticipatory set: the hook
 Lessons: How will you take them where they need to go?
 Gradual release
 HOTS/Blooms
 Instructional strategies/Social constructs: How will they work?
 Technology
 Cooperative activity
 Graphic organizers
 Formative assessment/checking for understanding as they go along
 Resources needed: What materials and resources will they need?
 Stated in each lesson
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Lesson and Title
Final Unit plan
Lessons: How will you take them where they need to go?
(Step-by-Step plan from A-Z)
And
Instructional strategies/Social constructs: How will they
work?
(AND what will YOU do?)
 Present the number of students on the board.
 Announce it as the number of students in the room.
 Erase and then write the number of students on the
board diminished by eighty percent. [based on virgin
soil epidemic assumptions]
 Inform them that this number represents who is still
alive after ten days of initial contact with one person
who has smallpox.
unit introduction/
Anticipatory set/hook
Resources needed: What materials and
resources will they need?
(Page #s read, graphic organizers, books,
posters, realia, etc…)
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Marker
white board/chalk board/overhead
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blank bingo boards
-one for each student
vocabulary packets
One for each student
cards with bingo words on one half
and definitions on the other half.
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Unit
vocabulary
day
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Teacher introduces vocabulary lesson
Teacher hands out the Vocabulary packets
informs students that they are to randomly fill in their
bingo sheet and leave one free space on the car. They
must become familiar with the definitions of the words
that they write on their bingo cards thought because I
will not say the word you have written on your sheet
when the card is picked but will say the definition of the
word
After this instruction the teacher will allow students
randomly fill in their bingo sheet with one term per
square and one free space in the middle. They should
do this in ink so that words cannot be changed during
the game.
Teacher will walk around and stamp their free space
once they have approved their bingo sheet. So they can
tell them they now have a “valid” bingo card.
Teacher will shuffle all the term cards and then draw
one card and give a definition for the term. Students
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Final Unit plan
will then have to cross off the correct word that matches
the definition. If students are struggling, have students
chorally give the answer or give clues to help them.
 When a student gets BINGO, they then have to repeat
the words and the definitions in order to claim the
“prize”.
 Continue playing until others get BINGO, again having
each winner restating the terms and the definitions that
they marked off. Sometimes terms will be repeated.
This is OK because we want the students to hear the
definitions several times and restated in the language the
students understand (in their own words).
 During this time the teacher will be able to correct any
errors in thinking as a whole group. Usually, other
students were also struggling with the same terms. So
this became an efficient and effective whole class
review. Students would also open up and ask:
“Miss/Mr, what’s the difference between __________
and ___________?” I would use those moments to reteach a concept or clarify.
Have students look at the picture slides and tell you what
they see in the first set of pictures, and write that down…
do the same thing for all three groups of pictures that
they see
Review with the students past information learned in
this unit and introduce new topic of discussion with
power point
Break class in to small home groups and then number off
each individual in the groups (Jigsaw activity)
Each individual in their home groups will get in their
numbered groups and read articles provided in the
handouts.
When all are done taking note on the articles they will go
back to their home groups and meet. Since each student
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Pictures power point (changing faces)
Power point on lesson(European
Impact on native Americans)
 Print off student notes for power point
 How a jigsaw activity workshttp://www.jigsaw.org/steps.htm
 Articles
http://lincoln.lib.niu.edu/nativeamerican.htm
l
Native American Relations
http://www.mpm.edu/wirp/icw-144.html
Relations between Native
Americans and British
http://www.wvculture.org/history/indland.h
Amanda Jacobs
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Lesson 1: 5-U1.4.4
is an expert on that given article they will teach their
class mates about it.
Each group will make a poster based on the information
they have learned to present to the class
As a class after this activity teacher will discuss with
students what they have learned and make a comparison
contrast sheet between the impact that the British and
the French had on the Native Americans.
-teacher will write them on the board: or
place them in the power point based on articles and
students will write them down
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Lesson 2: 5-U1.4.4
Final Unit plan
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Ask students to list what foods they ate yesterday
Explain vocabulary words and concepts from
vocabulary list
-use ear of corn or potato for cultural diffusion comcept
Hand out new world old world hand out
Divide students up into groups and have them decided if
what they have eaten is oriented in new world or old
world food
Columbian exchange graphic organizer
Small group discussion
review
Before lesson students should have read Columbian
tml
Native American Clashes with
European Settler
http://www.academicamerican.com/colonial
/topics/nativeam.htm
Native American Culture
http://www.lcmm.org/navigating/QuadCurri
culum_LastingImpact.pdf
Europeans and Native
Americans Lasting Impact
 Poster board and poster making
supplies
 Plain paper for comparison contrast
sheet
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Lined paper
Pencils
Vocabulary handout or made into a
over head
Ear of corn or potato
New world old world handout
Columbian exchange graphic organizer
Columbian exchange reading
(homework)
White board, over head, ect to write ideas
Amanda Jacobs
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Lesson 3: 5-U1.4.4
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Lesson 1:5-U1.4.1 and
U1.4.2
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Final Unit plan
exchange. Accordingly when the class starts teacher and
students will review meaning of Columbian exchange
and discuss this reading
Review impact of disease and how people saw disease
-write on one section of the board
Talk about what they believe disease is at that points of
time (past 1492)
Read Disease and Catastrophe
have students replace themselves in the era and imagine
effects/ thoughts different cultures would have had on
disease
imagine what Europeans might have thought as they
went to new areas and what these thoughts encouraged
have students do a 321 strategy to get out the door of the
class room
Start class off with power point for review of yesterdays
materials and as an introduction to African Americans
in the Columbian exchange
Have students read The Real Globalization Story
Discussion of articles and what their thoughts are
Go over the flow of the Columbian exchange so
students can grasp it using over head picture and
markers) have students do the map activity
Introduce the lesson by displaying images of the Library
of Congress and sharing a brief history of the need for a
new congressional library.
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Points to convey:
-After the British burned the original Capitol
building in 1814, Thomas Jefferson offered his
personal library to Congress in order to re-establish a 
collection of books for congressional use.
-After the collection outgrew its space in the Capitol 
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on
Disease and Catastrophe reading handout
Power point on Columbian Exchange
The Real Globalization Story
Over head for Columbian exchange flow
Markers to draw on over head
Picture of the world so you can draw the
pathway
Map activity hand out
 loc.gov
 Images of the Library:
“Aerial view of Capitol Hill featuring the
Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building
behind the U.S. Capitol” (Download, PDF, 1.93
MB)
“Exterior view. Torch of Learning, cupola, and
dome.” (Download PDF, 1.21 MB)
“Exterior view. Illuminated west façade view at
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Final Unit plan
building, plans were made to build a freestanding
library. The new building opened in 1897.
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-The artist John White Alexander created six mural
paintings for the new library based around one theme.
 Present class with investigative questions (display or
write on board):
-What story from the past was Alexander trying to tell
through this series of paintings?
-Why was this appropriate for the building of a new
congressional library?
 Explain that the class will now observe and analyze the
paintings from John White Alexander’s mural in the
Thomas Jefferson building of the Library of Congress to
try to answer the investigative questions.
Note: If students do not have much experience with
primary source analysis, consider modeling this
beforehand using the primary source analysis tool and
an image already in the classroom. For tips and prompts,
refer to Using Primary Sources.
-Distribute one copy of the
Primary Source Analysis Tool to each
student. Tell students they will be working in groups,
but will each be responsible for recording information
about each painting on their own graphic organizers.
-Divide class into 6 groups, and give each group one
picture of either: “The Cairn”, “Oral Tradition”
or “Hieroglyphics” . Two groups will analyze each
picture.
-Post the third copy of each picture on the board,
randomly.
-Assign or allow students to choose someone from each
group to perform the following tasks:
-Facilitator: keeps the conversation focused on the
night.” (Download, PDF, 926 KB)
“Great Hall. View of first and second
floors.” (Download, PDF, 2.5 MB)
 “The Cairn”(PDF, 306 KB),
 “Oral Tradition” (PDF, 339KB )
 “Hieroglyphics” (PDF, 283 KB).
 “Guiding Questions”
 Primary Source Analysis Tool
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“Picture Writing” ,“Manuscript Book” ,
or “The Printing Press”
Amanda Jacobs
SST309-03
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Final Unit plan
paintings and reminds members that they are going to
answer the two investigative questions.
-Guide: presents the group with guiding questions at the
appropriate moments, i.e., when the conversation stalls.
**Distribute one copy of “Guiding Questions” to each
Guide.
-Reporter: collects group answers and reports back to
class on how they would answer the investigative
questions. **Distribute one additional blank
Primary Source Analysis Tool to each reporter.
Direct each reporter to put the group’s answers
near the posted copy of the image analyzed.
After each group posts its analysis, give them a copy
of “Picture Writing” ,“Manuscript Book” , or “The
Printing Press” to analyze. Distribute additional copies
of the blank Primary Source Analysis Tool as needed.
Facilitators, guides, and reporters may keep or change
their roles during the second analysis. Again, have each
reporter put the group’s answers near the posted copy of
the image analyzed. (Teacher option: as groups finish,
allow students to read other groups’ posted answers.)
Reconvene the whole class. Have reporters share group
findings and evidence to support each group’s answers
to the investigative questions. Record students’ ideas
under the image of each painting on the board or chart
paper.
With direction from students, place the paintings in
chronological order at the front of the room.
-Have students respond to the question: “What story
from the past did Alexander tell?” Discuss.
-How does seeing the whole series change how they
think about the investigative questions?
-Explain that Alexander’s title is The Evolution of the
Amanda Jacobs
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Final Unit plan
Book and ask: “Why do you think this was an
appropriate theme for the new library building?”
Discuss. (The United States Congress had built a grand
new building for its library. The library was intended to
provide materials on every field of human knowledge.
Alexander’s mural images show a timeline of human
communication from prehistory to the invention of the
printing press.)
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Lesson 2:5-U1.4.1 and
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U1.4.2
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teacher will break students into 5 groups one group for
political systems( including authority civic values and the
organization of practice of government), one for social
organizations (including population levels, urbanization,
family structure, and modes of communication), one for
economic systems (including ststems of labor, trade,
concepts of property and expansion and exploitation of
natural resources), one for dominant ideas and values
(including religious belief and practice, gender roles, and
attitudes toward nature), and last one for political
systems (including concepts of political authority, civic
values, and the organization and practice of government)
teacher will hand out rubrics and inform students that
each group is responsible for presenting the information
on their assigned area on Europeans, Africans, and
Native Americans before they converged in the western
hemisphere after 1492
Teacher will give students a 4 of class sessions to gather
information and put a presentation together. While
students are doing this teacher will insure that students
are gathering correct information so what they share to
the class is valid.
Teacher will set aside 2 days for groups to present their
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library resources
computer lab
computer in classroom
paper and markers for Vin diagram
Foldables
classroom time
Amanda Jacobs
SST309-03
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Final Unit plan
presentations.
When groups have finished their presentations they will
present them in front of the class. While each group is
presenting students will fill the grid provided for each of
the 3 groups
Class session after presentations are done the class will
make a comparison and contrast vin diagram with all the
groups a form of assessment. It will be in foldable form
NAME: Amanda Jacobs
GRADE LEVEL/COMM. SETTING: 5th grade
TOPIC/UNIT: Three World Interactions UNIT DAY:
1
LESSON TITLE: unit vocabulary introduction
AGE OF TARGET POPULATION: ages 10-12 years old
UNIT GOALS THAT THIS LESSON MEETS:
This lesson will help students think and understand the vocabulary words that they are going to come into contact with during this
unit. As well it forms a basis in prior knowledge so when the terms are introduced again they have a place to connect them
within their brain forming stronger neuron pathways.
GLCE’s ADDRESSED IN THIS LESSON:
-5-U1.4 unit vocabulary
-Students will become familiar with the vocabulary words that they will be learning throughout this unit.
Amanda Jacobs
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Final Unit plan
TEACHER PREPARATION (Anything the teacher must do prior to the teaching of this lesson.)
-blank bingo boards
-one for each student
-vocabulary packets
One for each student
-cards with bingo words on one half and definitions on the other half.
PROCEDURE
1. Teacher talks to students about how they started a new unit yesterday that we are going to get introduced to the vocabulary
that is in this unit today by playing vocabulary bingo.
2. Teacher hands out the Vocabulary packets and informs students that they are to randomly fill in their bingo sheet and leave
one free space on the car. They must become familiar with the definitions of the words that they write on their bingo cards
thought because I will not say the word you have written on your sheet when the card is picked but will say the definition of
the word
3. After this instruction the teacher will allow students randomly fill in their bingo sheet with one term per square and one free
space in the middle. They should do this in ink so that words cannot be changed during the game.
4. Teacher will walk around and stamp their free space once they have approved their bingo sheet. So they can tell them they
now have a “valid” bingo card.
5. Teacher will shuffle all the term cards and then draw one card and give a definition for the term. Students will then have to
cross off the correct word that matches the definition. If students are struggling, have students chorally give the answer or
give clues to help them.
6. when a student gets BINGO, they then have to repeat the words and the definitions in order to claim the “prize”.
7. Continue playing until others get BINGO, again having each winner restating the terms and the definitions that they marked
off. Sometimes terms will be repeated. This is OK because we want the students to hear the definitions several times and
restated in the language the students understand (in their own words).
8. During this time the teacher will be able to correct any errors in thinking as a whole group. Usually, other students were also
struggling with the same terms. So this became an efficient and effective whole class review. Students would also open up
and ask: “Miss/Mr, what’s the difference between __________ and ___________?” I would use those moments to re-teach a
concept or clarify.
Amanda Jacobs
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Final Unit plan
EVALUATION/ASSESSMENT OF LESSON OBJECTIVES: (HOW WILL YOU DETERMINE IF YOU HAVE BEEN SUCCESSFUL):
Attach the evaluation instrument and the answer key.
-the day its self is a way to get students introduced to the vocabulary words and review what
they have read when
they read them though placing them on their sheets.
REFERENCES:
1. http://novelinks.org/uploads/Novels/ParadiseLost/Vocab%202%20Bingo.pdf
2. http://www.billybear4kids.com/BINGO/Games/BLANK.shtml
3. http://www.wordcentral.com/cgi-bin/student?book=Student&va=Native%20American
4. http://knowledgecenter.unr.edu/help/using/primary.aspx
Vocabulary Bingo
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Final Unit plan
Vocabulary Definition List
1. Converge: to tend or move toward one point or one another or to come together and unite in a common interest
2. Europeans: a person born or living in Europe or a person of European ancestry.
3. American Indians: a member of any of the indigenous peoples of the western hemisphere; especially a Native American of North
America.
4. Primary source: A primary source is a document, speech, or other sort of evidence written, created or otherwise produced during the
time under study. Primary sources offer an inside view of a particular event. Examples include: Autobiographies, diaries, e-mail,
interviews, letters, minutes, news film footage, official records, photographs, raw research data, speeches. Also art, drama, films, music,
novels, poetry. Finally, buildings, clothing, DNA, furniture, jewelry, pottery.
5. Secondary source: Secondary sources provide interpretation and analysis of primary sources. Secondary sources are one step removed
from the original event or "horse's mouth."
6. Western hemisphere: the half of the earth lying west of the Atlantic Ocean comprising North America, South America, & surrounding
waters
7. British: the people of Great Britain or their descendants
8. French: the people of France or their descendents
9. Impact: to have a strong effect on
10. Columbian Exchange: Exchange of animals, plants culture, human population, disease, and ideas from the old world and new word.
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Final Unit plan
11. Continent: one of the great divisions of land (as North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, or Antarctica) on the
globe
12. Import: to bring (as goods) into a country from another country usually for selling
13. Spatial Diffusion: The distribution of ideas, products, culture, technology, innovation, languages and so on across space to other
people.
16. Old World: comprises Africa, Asia, and Europe
17. New World: The New World is one of the names used for the Western Hemisphere, specifically America
18. Natural resources: something (as a mineral, waterpower source, forest, or kind of animal) that is found in nature and is valuable to
humans (as in providing a source of energy, recreation, or scenic beauty
19. Trade: to give in exchange for something else
20. Natural balance: that says that ecological systems are usually in a stable equilibrium
21. Trading posts: A station or store in a sparsely settled area established by traders to barter supplies for local products.
22. Disease: an abnormal bodily condition of a living plant or animal that interferes with functioning and can usually be
recognized by signs and symptoms
23. Cash crops: A crop, such as tobacco, grown for direct sale rather than for livestock feed.
24. Christopher Columbus: Italian navigator who discovered the New World in the service of Spain while looking for a route to China
25. Catastrophe: a sudden disaster
NAME: Amanda Jacobs
GRADE LEVEL/COMM. SETTING: 5th grade
TOPIC/UNIT: Three World Interactions UNIT DAY:
3-6ish
LESSON TITLE: convergence of Europeans, American Indians, and Africans in North America
AGE OF TARGET POPULATION: ages 10-12 years old
UNIT GOALS THAT THIS LESSON MEETS:
This lesson will help students think and understand the convergence of Europeans, American Indians and Africans in North
America after 1492 from the perspective of these three groups. Also it will allow students to understand the political systems( including
authority civic values and the organization of practice of government), one for social organizations (including population levels,
urbanization, family structure, and modes of communication), one for economic systems (including systems of labor, trade, concepts of
property and expansion and exploitation of natural resources), one for dominant ideas and values (including religious belief and practice,
Amanda Jacobs
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Final Unit plan
gender roles, and attitudes toward nature), and last one for political systems (including concepts of political authority, civic values, and
the organization and practice of government) for each group.
GLCE’s ADDRESSED IN THIS LESSON:
-5-U1.4.1
TEACHER PREPARATION (Anything the teacher must do prior to the teaching of this lesson.)
-library resources
-computer lab
-computer in classroom for presentations
-paper and writing materials for Vin diagram foldable
-classroom time
PROCEDURE
1. teacher will break students into 5 groups one group for political systems( including authority civic values and the
organization of practice of government), one for social organizations (including population levels, urbanization, family
structure, and modes of communication), one for economic systems (including systems of labor, trade, concepts of property
and expansion and exploitation of natural resources), one for dominant ideas and values (including religious belief and
practice, gender roles, and attitudes toward nature), and last one for political systems (including concepts of political
authority, civic values, and the organization and practice of government)
2. teacher will hand out rubrics and inform students that each group is responsible for presenting the information on their
assigned area on Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans before they converged in the western hemisphere after 1492
3. Teacher will give students a few days in class to gather information and put a presentation together. While doing this they are
insuring that students are gathering correct information so what they share to the class is valid.
4. When groups have finished their presentations they will present them in front of the class. While each group is presenting
students will fill the grid provided for each of the 3 groups
5. As a class we will make a comparison and contrast vin diagram with all the groups a form of assessment. It will be in foldable
form
EVALUATION/ASSESSMENT OF LESSON OBJECTIVES: (HOW WILL YOU DETERMINE IF YOU HAVE BEEN SUCCESSFUL):
Attach the evaluation instrument and the answer key.
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-As a form of assessment each group will present the information that they have provided in a presentation in front of
class and be graded based on the rubric provided
-as a overall from of evaluation/assessment the class will make a comparison and contrast vin diagram between all three
groups in foldable form.
REFERENCES:
http://nchs.ucla.edu/Standards/historical-thinking-standards-1/3.-historical-analysis-and-interpretation#section-0
Presentation Rubric
1
Organization
Subject
Knowledge
2
Audience has
Audience cannot
difficulty
understand
following
presentation because
presentation
there is no sequence
because student
of information.
jumps around.
Student does not have Student is
grasp of information; uncomfortable
student cannot
with information
answer questions
and is able to
about subject.
answer only
3
4
Total
Student presents
Student presents
information in
information in
logical, interesting
logical sequence
sequence which
which audience can
audience can
follow.
follow.
Student is at ease
Student
and answers most
demonstrates full
questions with
knowledge (more
explanations and
than required) by
some elaboration.
answering all
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Visual Aids
Student uses
superfluous visual
aids or no visual aids.
Mechanics
Student's presentation
has four or more
spelling errors and/or
grammatical errors.
Eye Contact
Student makes no eye
contact and only
reads from notes.
Verbal
Techniques
Student mumbles,
incorrectly
pronounces terms,
and speaks too
quietly for audience
in the back of class to
hear.
Group Work
Cannot work with
others in most
situations. Cannot
share decisions or
responsibilities.
rudimentary
questions, but fails
to elaborate.
Student
occasionally uses
visual aids that
rarely support the
presentation.
Presentation has
three misspellings
and/or
grammatical
errors.
Student
occasionally uses
eye contact, but
still reads mostly
from notes.
Student's voice is
low. Student
incorrectly
pronounces terms.
Audience
members have
difficulty hearing
presentation.
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class questions
with explanations
and elaboration.
Student's visual
Student's visual aids
aids explain and
relate to the
reinforce the
presentation.
presentation.
Presentation has no
more than two
misspellings and/or
grammatical errors.
Presentation has
no misspellings or
grammatical
errors.
Student maintains
eye contact most of
the time but
frequently returns to
notes.
Student maintains
eye contact with
audience, seldom
returning to notes.
Student's voice is
clear. Student
pronounces most
words correctly.
Most audience
members can hear
presentation.
Student uses a
clear voice and
correct, precise
pronunciation of
terms so that all
audience members
can hear
presentation.
Works well with
Works with others,
others. Takes part in
but has difficulty
most decisions and
sharing decisions
shares in the
and responsibilities.
responsibilities.
Works very well
with others.
Assumes a clear
role in decision
making and
responsibilities.
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Sources
A= 26-28
Presentation has at
least 3 or each
primary and
secondary sources
B= 24-25
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Presentation has at
least2 of each
primary and
secondary sources
C= 21-23
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Presentation has at
least1 of each
primary and
secondary sources
D= 19-20
Venn Diagram Foldable
1. Fold a large sheet of construction paper,
“hotdog” style.
2. Roll into thirds and press down when it is fairly
even. This is hard for the students to do at first.
Presentation has
no primary and
secondary sources
F= 0-18
Total
Points:
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3. Cut up the fold marks to form three tabs.
Label.
4. Have the students draw Venn
circles (hopefully more balanced
than I did!) They can put
illustrations on the cover.
5. Have them complete the Venn on the side of the foldable.
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NAME: Amanda Jacobs
GRADE LEVEL/COMM. SETTING: 5th grade
TOPIC/UNIT: Three World Interactions UNIT DAY:
LESSON TITLE: impact of European contact on American Indian cultures
AGE OF TARGET POPULATION: ages 10-12 years old
UNIT GOALS THAT THIS LESSON MEETS:
This lesson will help students think about the impact that European Contact had on American Indian Cultures. Focusing on the
difference between the British and French interactions with American Indians and how it affected the American Indians culture.
GLCE’s ADDRESSED IN THIS LESSON:
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-5-U1.4.3: Explain the impact of European contact on American Indian cultures by comparing the different approaches used by the British
and French in their interactions with American Indians.
Learning outcomes:
-Students will analyze the effects of the British on the American Indians Culture.
-Students will analyze the effects of the French on the American Indians Culture.
TEACHER PREPARATION (Anything the teacher must do prior to the teaching of this lesson.)
-teacher computer and projector (if none create into over head or handouts)
- Power point
-Articles on events
-poster board
-markers/ poster making utensils
PROCEDURE:
1. Play native American music clip from Smithsonian to get lesson started
2. Review with the students past information learned in this unit and introduce new topic of discussion with power point
3. Break class in to small home groups and then number off each individual in the groups
This is a jigsaw activity - http://www.jigsaw.org/steps.htm
4. Each individual in their home groups will get in their numbered groups and read articles
 http://lincoln.lib.niu.edu/nativeamerican.html
Native American Relations
 http://www.mpm.edu/wirp/icw-144.html
Relations between Native Americans and British
 http://www.wvculture.org/history/indland.html
Native American Clashes with European settler
 http://www.academicamerican.com/colonial/topics/nativeam.html
Native American Culture
 http://www.lcmm.org/navigating/QuadCurriculum_LastingImpact.pdf
Europeans and Native Americans Lasting Impact
-have to print this one from web site link
5. When all are done taking note on the articles they will go back to their home groups and meet. Since each student is an
expert on that given article they will teach their class mates about it.
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6. Each group will make a poster based on the information they have learned to present to the class
7. As a class after this activity teacher will discuss with students what they have learned and make a comparison contrast
sheet between the impact that the British and the French had on the Native Americans.
-teacher will write them on the board: or place them in the power point based on articles
EVALUATION/ASSESSMENT OF LESSON OBJECTIVES: (HOW WILL YOU DETERMINE IF YOU HAVE BEEN SUCCESSFUL):
Attach the evaluation instrument and the answer key.
-group poster
-individual presentation to home groups
-comparison contrast chart
References
1. http://www.studyzone.org/testprep/ss5/c/impactl.cfm
2. http://www.ancestor.com/dna/native-american-genealogy-dna-testing-for-native-american-heritage/
3. http://nacwr.blogspot.com/2011/08/native-americans-dont-dream-we-have.html
4. http://dogoodanddowell.blogspot.com/2010/11/presidential-proclamation-national.html
5. http://www.firstpeople.us/FP-Html-Pictures/native-american-photographs-01.html
6. http://www.studyzone.org/testprep/ss5/c/impactl.cfm
Power Point Hand Out
 The first European to see what is now New York State was ________________ in 1524, when he sailed into
New York Bay. It is said that many Native Americans came to the shore to look at these "newcomers". No
trading occurred with Verrazano, but he was impressed with the abundance of______________found here,
and returned to France and told them about those resources.
 The next European to see this area was Jacques Cartier in 1536. He sailed on the
__________________________ and was interested in trading for furs with the Native Americans, as
_______ were very popular in Europe for making hats and coats.
 It was in 1603, that the Frenchman Samuel de Champlain came to northern New York to actually set up a
fur ________ with the Native Americans. He became friendly with the ____________ there and later sided
with them against the Iroquois in an attack. He gave the Algonquians guns. After that battle, the Iroquois
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always thought of the French as the _________. This will prove to be very costly to the French at later
dates
.
 The Europeans wanted ______, especially beaver pelts (skins), from the Native Americans here.
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 What did the Native Americans want from the Europeans? They wanted _______ _____ and copper
kettles to replace the gourd bowls and clay pots they had always used. They also wanted metal ax heads that
would cut better than their stone ones. They also wanted glass beads, decorative jewelry, woolen blankets,
and ______. They became more and more dependent on the European goods and even welcomed the setting
up of trading posts.
 Guns dramatically changed the Natives' way of life. Hunting with a gun allowed the Natives to kill _______
animals for food and fur, which upset the _________ _________. In some areas, the beaver population
was nearly ________ _______ by the fur trade. Beavers were near extinction in New York.
 The first permanent Dutch trading post was in _______ ___ (now Albany) around 1625. The next
settlement was in New Amsterdam (now New York City). The island of _____________ was sold by the
Lenni Lenape Native Americans for tools, beads, and clothing worth ______. Actually it is thought that the
Native Americans misunderstood the idea of "ownership", and thought they were being paid for some
resources being used by the settlers there. The Native Americans did not believe in anyone "owning" the
land.
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 Another area of a major European impact on the Native Americans was the introduction of _________ such
as smallpox and cholera. The Natives' immune system was not prepared to fight those new diseases. The
traditional Native medicines did not work well against those diseases and some tribes were totally _______
________ by the sicknesses.
 Soon there were many European settlers here, and the Native Americans were ___________ to change their
way of life and to move to more isolated areas
 There are many groups of explorer from different countries that entered the united states to explore. Two of the
main groups were the British and the French.
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DEFINITIONS
1. Spatial Diffusion: The distribution of ideas, products, culture, technology, innovation, languages and so on across space to other
people.
2. Old World: comprises Africa, Asia, and Europe
3. New World: The New World is one of the names used for the Western Hemisphere, specifically America
4. Natural resources: things that come from nature which people used to produce goods and provide services (e.g. water, trees, oil,
metals, fish, etc.)
5. trade: an exchange of goods and services
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Jigsaw in 10 Easy Steps
The jigsaw classroom is very simple to use. If you're a teacher, just follow these steps:
1. Divide students into 5- or 6-person jigsaw groups. The groups should be diverse in terms of gender, ethnicity, race, and ability.
2. Appoint one student from each group as the leader. Initially, this person should be the most mature student in the group.
3. Divide the day's lesson into 5-6 segments. For example, if you want history students to learn about Eleanor Roosevelt, you might
divide a short biography of her into stand-alone segments on: (1) Her childhood, (2) Her family life with Franklin and their
children, (3) Her life after Franklin contracted polio, (4) Her work in the White House as First Lady, and (5) Her life and work
after Franklin's death.
4. Assign each student to learn one segment, making sure students have direct access only to their own segment.
5. Give students time to read over their segment at least twice and become familiar with it. There is no need for them to memorize it.
6. Form temporary "expert groups" by having one student from each jigsaw group join other students assigned to the same segment.
Give students in these expert groups time to discuss the main points of their segment and to rehearse the presentations they will
make to their jigsaw group.
7. Bring the students back into their jigsaw groups.
8. Ask each student to present her or his segment to the group. Encourage others in the group to ask questions for clarification.
9. Float from group to group, observing the process. If any group is having trouble (e.g., a member is dominating or disruptive),
make an appropriate intervention. Eventually, it's best for the group leader to handle this task. Leaders can be trained by
whispering an instruction on how to intervene, until the leader gets the hang of it.
10. At the end of the session, give a quiz on the material so that students quickly come to realize that these sessions are not just fun
and games but really count.
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Native American Relations
By Drew E. VandeCreek, Ph.D.
Several Native American tribes inhabited the territory that became the State of Illinois in 1818. Sac and Fox predominated in Northern
Illinois. Kickapoo made their homes in central Illinois. Cahokia, Kaskaskia, Michigamea, Moingwene, Peoria and Tamaroa lived along
the Mississippi, Wabash and Illinois Rivers of southern and central Illinois. Together, these five tribes formed the Illinois Confederacy, a
loose alliance designed to provide mutual defense against more powerful neighbors.
Most Native Americans relied upon a combination of agriculture, hunting and gathering for their subsistence. Indian women supervised
the farming of maize (or corn), beans, squash, pumpkins and other crops, and also gathered fruits, nuts, and roots from the countryside.
Men organized fishing and hunting parties and enjoyed considerable leisure time devoted to athletic contests, gambling and other
pursuits.
Illinois' Native American inhabitants embraced religious beliefs quite unlike the Christianity that white European settlers brought to
North America. Indians organized their spiritual lives around no central creed or dogma. Rather, individual tribes developed rites and
practices based upon a communitarian spiritual sense and reverence for nature. Among most tribes everyday acts assumed a ceremonial
significance. Western visitors, conquerors and interpreters have struggled to grasp Native American religion and culture to this day.
Native American society provided individuals with considerable personal freedom. Families, clans, and tribes made localized decisions in
the absence of central authority.
Despite this emphasis upon individualism, tribal warfare marked Native American life. Most of the Illinois tribes took up annual
hostilities with their neighbors as a normal part of intertribal relations. War commanded considerable importance in Native American
cultures, and young men took up arms in search of heroism and honor that would earn them the respect of their peers.
In the seventeenth century the face of warfare changed for Illinois Indians, however. Attacks from powerful Sioux to the north and west
pushed warfare beyond its familiar, limited scope and taxed the confederation's small resources. By the 1650 the powerful Iroquois
Confederacy, equipped with firearms provided by Dutch traders, had pushed the Sac, Fox and Kickapoo from lower Michigan and into
northern Illinois and Wisconsin. Eventually the Iroquois reached Illinois itself, further damaging the Illinois Confederacy.
French missionaries and settlers arriving in Illinois in the late seventeenth century encountered an Illinois Confederation buckling under
the pressure of attacks from the North and East. From the 1650s until the Sac Chief Black Hawk's defeat in 1832 Illinois would remain a
contested region among Native Americans.
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The arrival of great European empires and the rise of the United States of America further complicated social and political relations in
this period. French, and later British traders and settlers established themselves in Illinois as parts of a unique cultural mixture historians
have dubbed a "Middle Ground."
In this context, European and Native American cultures mingled. Europeans and Native Americans reached understandings of one
another, often built upon fundamental misconceptions, that facilitated good relations and trade. Many French trappers and traders married
Indian women, beginning a pattern of cross-cultural kinship ties and creolization.
The unstable, though generally peaceful and prosperous, relations of the Middle Ground characterized life in Illinois until the French and
Indian War of the mid-eighteenth century. In this conflict Native American tribes aligned themselves with the French and suffered a
decisive defeat at the hands of the British Empire.
Despite their opposing roles in the conflict, the British proved a temporary ally for Native Americans in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth century. In the period after the French and Indian War the British had declared the northwestern region encompassing today's
Ohio, Michigan, Illinois and Indiana to be off-limits to settlement by English settlers. The outcome of the American revolution shattered
this promising arrangement for the Indian tribes, and sent American settlers pouring westward. First arriving along the southern Illinois
River bottoms, Americans pushed northward onto the prairie after 1820, and established Chicago.
Despite Americans' claim to the Northwest Territories, the British remained a major presence there for several decades and collaborated
with Indian forces led by the Shawnee chieftain Tecumseh to battle Americans in the unsuccessful War of 1812. The United States
secured its Northwest Territories in the War of 1812, and shattered Tecumseh's dream of a powerful new Indian confederacy able to stem
white settlement in the West.
Illinois represented the next frontier as white settlers pushed westward after the War of 1812. Meeting little resistance from the shattered
Illinois Confederacy, white Illinoisans' hunger for land met its first resistance there in 1832 when Chief Black Hawk, a representative of
the once-powerful Sac and Fox tribes, balked at his band's banishment west of the Mississippi and returned to Illinois. His decisive defeat
at the hands of the Illinois militia and federal forces, marked the end of the Middle Ground and the beginning of Illinois' integration into
the United States of America.
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Bibliography
Albers, Patricia and Beatrice Medicine. The Hidden Half: Studies of Plains Indian Women. Washington, D.C.: University Press of
America, 1983.
Black Hawk. An Autobiography. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1955.
Cayton, Andrew R.L. and Fredrika J. Teute. Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 17501830. Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
Davis, James E. Frontier Illinois. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998.
Hauser, Raymond. "The Illinois Indian Tribe: From Autonomy and Self-Sufficiency to Dependency and Depopulation." Journal of the
Illinois State Historical Society May 1976: 134-135.
Mancall, Peter C. and James H. Merrell, eds. American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers from European Contact to Indian Removal,
1500-1850. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Nichols, Roger L. Black Hawk and the Warrior's Path. Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1992.
Nichols, Roger L. American Indians in U.S. History. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003.
Tanner, Helen Hornbeck. Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986.
White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1991.
Whitney, Ellen M. "Indian History and the Indians of Illinois." Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society May 1976: 139-146.
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Relations between the Indians and British
The British and French signed a treaty in 1763 that ended the French and Indian War (also called the Seven Years' War)
in North America. As the victors, the British claimed all of Canada and the present-day Midwest, including Wisconsin.
The British had little time to enjoy their new empire, for within a few months of signing the treaty, Indian resistance
threatened to strip them of their lands. An Ottawa chief from Detroit named Pontiac led the uprising, which attracted
many tribes throughout the Midwest and Canada.
For a long time, historians believed that French residents of Quebec had provoked the Indians into rising up against the
British. More recent studies assert that the resident French had little if any role to play in the uprising. Instead, Pontiac and
other tribal leaders hoped that by rising up, they could lure the French army back to North America. Moreover, Indian
people did not like the British because--unlike the French--they distributed very few gifts and presents. In Indian cultures,
giving gifts symbolized friendship, and the French used gifts extensively to cement strong alliances with Indian
communities. The British were initially reluctant to give the Indians generous presents, and this made Indian people
reluctant to deal with the British and live under British rule.
British Consolidate Control
The British army managed to put down the uprising, but it took until 1765. Detroit was held in a six-month siege, and the
Ojibwe decimated the entire British garrison at the Straits of Mackinac. Pontiac sent representatives to Milwaukee to solicit
support from the Wisconsin Indians, but certain factors prevented them from joining Pontiac. First, Lieutenant James
Gorrell commanded the small British garrison that arrived at Green Bay in October 1761, and he successfully managed to
diffuse tensions with the Indian communities in Wisconsin by giving them gifts. Moreover, one Wisconsin tribe, the
Menominee, were involved in a dispute with Ojibwe from Mackinac and refused to fight alongside of them. By 1766, the
British and the rebellious tribes concluded a peace treaty, and the British changed their policies in response to the uprising.
After 1766, the British distributed more presents to the Indians and also allowed the fur trade to go on as it had during the
French regime. Many traders who came to Wisconsin during this time were French Canadians, but British subjects and
American colonials came as well. The British had no military presence in Wisconsin during this time. Lieutenant Gorrell
occupied the old French fort at Green Bay and renamed it Fort Edward Augustus, but his superiors ordered him to leave in
July 1763. Afterward, the nearest British post was Fort Michilimackinac at the Straits of Mackinac in Michigan. Later the
British moved the post to nearby Mackinac Island and renamed it Fort Mackinac. Relations between the British and
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Wisconsin Indians slowly improved after Pontiac's Rebellion. Indian communities at Green Bay and in northern Wisconsin
all became pro-British. However, around the southern shore of Lake Michigan, particularly at Milwaukee, the Indians had
little love for the British.
top
Intermarriage
Once peace was finally established, British companies moved to take over the Great Lakes fur trade. The ranks of the fur
trade continued to be dominated by French Canadians, but after 1763 British traders began to appear as well. Many were
English, but a large proportion were Scottish. Like French-Canadian men, English and Scottish traders also married Indian
women; this is one reason why some Great Lakes Indians have English and Scottish last names today. Unlike Europeans,
Indians did not use race as the basis for exclusion or inclusion into their societies, and children of these European-Indian
unions were welcomed into tribal societies.
Not all children of Indian-White marriages joined their mothers' tribes. Some Indian women raised their children in furtrading towns such as Green Bay, Prairie du Chien, and Mackinac Island. While these children were of American Indian
heritage and usually knew the languages and customs of their mothers' tribes, they often did not consider themselves to be
Indians. They thought of themselves as metis (may-tee'), a French word meaning "mixed blood." During the 1700s and
early 1800s, there were metis communities throughout the Great Lakes region. While most were of French-Canadian and
Indian descent, a sizable number came from English and Scottish ancestry as well.
top
U.S. War for Independence
Both the Indian and métis communities overwhelming sided with the British during the American Revolution. Although
the major battles of the War for Independence occurred far from Wisconsin, the British needed the Indians of the region for
military manpower. Very early during the revolution, the Americans posed a direct threat to Canada, and the famous
Charles de Langlade (who was half Ottawa) led Indians from Wisconsin and Michigan in two campaigns against the
Americans in 1776 and 1777.
The situation changed in 1778 when a Virginia militia officer named George Rogers Clark led a small army of Virginian
and Kentuckian militiamen into Illinois and Indiana and captured French settlements there. While in Illinois, he eagerly
sought to win the Indians of the Midwest over to the side of the United States. One of his staunchest adherents was a
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Potawatomi chief from Milwaukee named Siggenauk. After siding with the United States, Siggenauk and another
Milwaukee chief, Naakewoin, then effected a diplomatic coup by winning over most of the Indians around the southern tip
of Lake Michigan and converting them to the American cause. The Indians around Green Bay and in northern Wisconsin,
on the other hand, continued to support the British.
top
Varying Involvement
Wisconsin Indians on both sides became engaged in fighting in the Midwest. At the time, St. Louis was in Spanish
Louisiana, and the Spanish and the rebel colonies were both fighting the British during the revolution. The Indians of
Green Bay, northern Wisconsin, and upper Michigan joined the British in an attack against St. Louis in 1780. The attack
failed, and some Indians who took part in it were attacked by Indians under Siggenauk as they retreated through Illinois.
The next year, Siggenauk and Naakewoin led a combined French, Spanish, and Indian force from St. Louis and
successfully attacked and destroyed Fort St. Joseph, the British post in southern Michigan.
This was the last major campaign in the Midwest in which Wisconsin Indians took part. The Midwestern theater was not
strategically important to either side, and the war was decided on the battlefields of America's eastern seaboard. The British
surrendered in 1781, and the 1783 peace treaty between the United States and Great Britain transferred the entire transAppalachian West, including Wisconsin, to the United States.
top
Slow Transition
This did not end the British role in the Midwest. The United States, unlike Britain, sought to dispossess tribes of their land
to make room for a land-hungry population. The Indians knew this, and for this reason they generally continued to side
with the British. The United States did not occupy any part of Wisconsin or even the upper Midwest until almost fifteen
years after the American Revolution. The British refused to give up posts at places such as Mackinac Island and Detroit
until the United States agreed to certain stipulations of the 1783 treaty. Moreover, the United States focused most of its
energy on defeating the powerful Indian confederacy in Ohio between 1790 and 1794. While this war did not directly effect
Wisconsin Indians, a few tribes, particularly the Sauk and Fox, fought alongside the Ohio Indians.
The United States defeated the Ohio Indians in 1794 and forced them to sign a treaty that gave away much of their land.
That same year, the United States and Great Britain signed Jay's Treaty, which settled outstanding differences between the
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two countries. The British abandoned their posts in the Midwest, and the United States gradually began to make its
presence known in the region. While the United States did not establish military posts in Wisconsin, it took over the British
Fort Mackinac in 1796 and established forts at Chicago (Fort Dearborn, 1803), and Des Moines (Fort Madison, 1808).
top
U.S. Control Shaky
These small forts were inadequate for controlling a large geographical area with a population opposed to their presence.
Wisconsin tribes and resident fur traders remained solidly British during the 1790s and early 1800s for a number of
reasons. First, British companies such as the North West Company controlled the regional fur trade. Second, wars against
the Ohio Indians in the 1790s revealed to all Midwestern Indian tribes that the United States wanted to acquire their lands.
Even Indians such as Siggenauk--who once supported the Americans--had a change of heart and supported the British
instead.
A final reason for Wisconsin Indians' vehement anti-American turn was that in 1805 an Ohio Indian named Tenskwatawa,
or the Shawnee Prophet, began to preach Indian resistance to American encroachment. He gained many adherents
throughout the Midwest and Wisconsin, and Ojibwe from as far away as Lake Superior flocked to his village in Ohio and
later in Indiana to hear his message. The Ho-chunk were particularly receptive to his message. The Shawnee Prophet's
brother, Tecumseh, took an active role in forming a military confederacy of several Midwestern and Southeastern tribes to
resist American expansion.
top
War of 1812
This occurred as the United States and Great Britain drifted toward war. The British in Canada and Indians under
Tecumseh's leadership became allies against the United States. When the War of 1812 began, the weakness of America's
hold over the Midwest was apparent. A combined Indian and British military force departed from their fort on nearby St.
Joseph's Island and conquered the American fort at Mackinac Island without firing a shot. Meanwhile, the Potawatomi
slaughtered the entire American garrison at Chicago. British fur trader Robert Dickson organized Wisconsin Indians to
fight the United States. The Menominee, Ho-chunk, Ojibwa, Ottawa, Santee Dakota, Sauk, and Fox all fought on the side
of the British during the war. Wisconsin tribes spent most of the war fending off American attempts to regain control of the
region.
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In 1814, the United States established a small post at Prairie du Chien called Fort Shelby, but the Indians and British militia
quickly conquered it, renamed it Fort McKay, and defeated two American relief expeditions sent up the Mississippi River
from St. Louis to retake it. That same year, Indians from Wisconsin and Michigan repelled an American military force that
attempted to retake Mackinac Island. The United States found the area of Wisconsin and northern Michigan virtually
unassailable, and throughout the War of 1812, Wisconsin remained firmly in the hands of the British and their Indian allies.
top
British Leave Area to US
In 1814, the United States established a small post at Prairie du Chien called Fort Shelby, but the Indians and British militia
quickly conquered it, renamed it Fort McKay, and defeated two American relief expeditions sent up the Mississippi River
from St. Louis to retake it. That same year, Indians from Wisconsin and Michigan repelled an American military force that
attempted to retake Mackinac Island. The United States found the area of Wisconsin and northern Michigan virtually
unassailable, and throughout the War of 1812, Wisconsin remained firmly in the hands of the British and their Indian allies.
Much to the shock of the Indians and to British agents in Canada, the British government decided to let the United States
have the entire Midwest, including what is now Wisconsin. With Britain's firm military hold on he region, it certainly could
have demanded to keep the region, but treaty commissioners in Europe decided otherwise. The United States and Britain
signed a peace treaty in 1814, and the fighting ended in 1815. After this, the Midwest passed into the hands of the
Americans. The British would not make another attempt to conquer the region, but they retained strong ties to the Indians
there in case another war broke out with the United States.
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Native American Clashes with European Settlers
Emergence of Tribes
By 1600, organized tribes such as the Delaware and Shawnee had moved into present-day West Virginia. In addition, the powerful
Iroquois Confederacy began exerting its influence on the region. The Confederacy was an alliance of five Iroquois-speaking nations -Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca -- formed in present-day New York in the late 1500s. In 1722, the Tuscaroras joined
the Iroquois Confederacy, which became known as the Six Nations. When Europeans first explored western Virginia in the late 1600s,
they discovered few Native Americans. Historian Otis Rice suggests this absence was due to the Five Nations, "which sought domination
of the Ohio Valley as part of their effort to control the fur trade with the Dutch, and later the British. . . ." (WV: A History, 9). The
Confederacy controlled the valley but other tribes were permitted to settle there. For example, a Shawnee village existed at present-day
Point Pleasant and a Delaware village flourished at Bulltown in present-day Braxton County well into the 1700s.
European Exploration & Settlement
As the Confederacy fought smaller tribes for control of western Virginia, European colonists set their own designs on the Ohio Valley. In
1607, English colonists landed at Jamestown, Virginia. Based on various explorations, the British and French laid claim to the territory
comprising present-day West Virginia and Native Americans were forced west. Many of the tribes were destroyed by constant warfare
and catastrophic diseases. At the same time, trade with the Europeans proved a strong attraction, enabling the Indians to acquire valuable
new products, such as guns, steel hatchets, cloth, and kettles. The fur trade in particular made many tribes powerful and more aggressive.
The Indian nations successfully played one European power against another. For instance, the British formed an alliance with the
Iroquois Confederacy to cut the French out of the lucrative fur trade. However, the Six Nations also negotiated treaties and traded with
the French.
Treaties
As part of their negotiations, the British secured three treaties which opened the western Virginia frontier to European settlement: Treaty
of Albany (1722) and Treaty of Lancaster (1744) with the Six Nations and Treaty of Logstown (1752) with the Delaware and Shawnee.
At Lancaster, Virginia negotiators convinced the Six Nations to surrender their land to the "setting sun," which the Confederacy
interpreted as the crest of the Alleghenies and the British interpreted as all of western Virginia. Following the Treaty of Lancaster and the
end of King George's War (1748) between England and France, Virginia pioneers pushed west of the Alleghenies.
Native American Concept of Land
A major factor in the treaty disputes was Native Americans' concept of land. Indians fought among themselves over hunting rights to the
territory but the Native American idea of "right" to the land was very different from the legalistic and individual nature of European
ownership. John Alexander Williams describes this in his book, West Virginia: A History for Beginners:
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The Indians had no concept of "private property," as applied to the land. Only among the Delawares was it customary for families, during
certain times of the year, to be assigned specific hunting territories. Apparently this was an unusual practice, not found among other
Indians. Certainly, the idea of an individual having exclusive use of a particular piece of land was completely strange to Native
Americans.
The Indians practiced communal land ownership. That is, the entire community owned the land upon which it lived. . . .1
French & Indian War
In 1754, hostilities broke out between English and French troops in western Pennsylvania. English troops under a young commander,
George Washington, were overwhelmed by the French at Fort Necessity, beginning a lengthy war for control of the American colonies.
While the English had made it clear they intended to settle the frontier, the French were more interested in trade. This influenced the
Delaware and Shawnee to side with the French. Although the Six Nations officially remained neutral, many in the Iroquois Confederacy
also allied with the French.
Early defeats in the French and Indian War led Virginia Governor Robert Dinwiddie to construct forts in the South Branch Valley. From
1756 to 1758, Native Americans wreaked havoc on the new forts, attacking Fort Evans in present-day Berkeley County and forts Seybert
and Upper Tract in present-day Pendleton County, as well as sites throughout the Monongahela, New River, and Greenbrier valleys. In
November 1758, the British captured Fort Duquesne at present-day Pittsburgh, the key to French control of the Ohio Valley. The
following year, French troops lost Quebec, crippling their military strength. The loss of French military support temporarily calmed
tensions between Native Americans and settlers in western Virginia. The Treaty of Paris in 1763 ended the French and Indian War and
gave England title to virtually all territory east of the Mississippi River.
Proclamation of 1763 & Pontiac's War
With the French eliminated, Native Americans were left alone in their fight against British colonial aggression. In the summer of 1763,
Pontiac, an Ottawa chief led raids on key British forts. Shawnee chief Keigh-tugh-qua, or Cornstalk, led similar attacks on western
Virginia settlements in present-day Greenbrier County. By the end of July, Indians had captured all British forts west of the Alleghenies
except Detroit, Fort Pitt, and Fort Niagara. On August 6, British forces under Colonel Henry Bouquet retaliated, destroying Delaware and
Shawnee forces at Bushy Run in western Pennsylvania, which ended the hostilities.
Fearing more tension between Native Americans and settlers, England's King George III issued the Proclamation of 1763, prohibiting
settlement west of the Allegheny Mountains. However, many land speculators such as George Washington violated the proclamation by
claiming vast acreage in western Virginia. The next five years were relatively peaceful on the frontier. In 1768, the Six Nations and
Cherokee signed the Treaty of Hard Labour and the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, relinquishing their claims on the territory between the Ohio
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River and the Alleghenies to the British. With the frontier again open, settlers flooded into western Virginia and the speculators made
small fortunes in rent on the lands they had acquired.
Battle of Point Pleasant
The Shawnee had never given up their claims to western Virginia and interpreted the rapid settlement as acts of aggression. Hostilities
reached a climax in 1773 when land speculator Michael Cresap led a group of volunteers from Fort Fincastle (later renamed Fort Henry)
at present-day Wheeling and raided Shawnee towns in what became known as Cresap's War. One of the worst atrocities of the conflict
was the murder of several family members of Mingo chief Tah-gah-jute, who had been baptized under the English name Logan. Logan,
who had previously lived peacefully with the settlers, killed at least 13 western Virginians that summer in revenge.
Virginia Governor John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, plotted to crush the Shawnee and end hostilities. Dunmore drew up a plan to trap the
Shawnee between two armies. The governor personally led the northern army while land speculator Andrew Lewis led a smaller force
from the south. But Shawnee leader Cornstalk struck the southern regiment before it united with Dunmore's troops. On October 10, 1774,
Cornstalk's force of approximately 1,200 men attacked Lewis at the confluence of the Kanawha and Ohio rivers at present-day Point
Pleasant. After the battle, which resulted in significant losses on both sides, the Shawnee retreated to protect their settlements in the
Scioto Valley in present-day Ohio. As a condition of the subsequent Treaty of Camp Charlotte, the Delaware, Shawnee, and Mingo
relinquished all claims to land south of the Ohio River. The Battle of Point Pleasant eliminated Native Americans as a force on the
frontier for the first three years of the American Revolutionary War, which began in April 1775, clearing the way for peaceful settlement
of the region.
Revolutionary War & the Aftermath
At the same time as Dunmore's War, tensions mounted between American colonists and the British. When the Revolutionary War began,
many American soldiers who had previously served in the British army fought for the Continental Army. Native Americans remained
generally neutral for the first two years of the war. In August 1775, the Shawnee, Delaware, Mingo, Seneca, Wyandot, Potawatomi, and
Ottawa had agreed to the Treaty of Pittsburgh, recognizing the Ohio River as the Indian boundary and pledging neutrality. By the end of
1776, the treaty had fallen apart and Native Americans began randomly attacking settlements. In June 1777, British negotiator Henry
Hamilton met with tribal leaders at Detroit and gained the support of the Chippewa and Ottawa as well as some Mingo and Wyandot.
This agreement nullified the Treaty of Pittsburgh and effectively brought most Native Americans into the war on the side of the British.
On the night of August 31, Wyandot and Mingo forces attacked Fort Henry at present-day Wheeling. During the three-day siege, the
Indians destroyed most of the homes around the fort and killed a number of soldiers in the fort. With the support of the British, Native
Americans had enormous initial success against colonists in the Ohio Valley.
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One of the worst atrocities of the war on the frontier occurred at Fort Randolph at present-day Point Pleasant. In November 1777,
Cornstalk and two companions visited the fort to inform Captain Matthew Arbuckle that the Shawnee had decided to support the British.
Arbuckle was suspicious and held Cornstalk prisoner. After two hunters were killed near the fort, colonial militiamen assassinated
Cornstalk and his son Elinipsico.
In the spring of 1778, the British, Wyandot, and Mingo launched an offensive on frontier forts. On May 16, Indians first attacked Fort
Randolph then proceeded east to the Greenbrier Valley settlements. They attacked Fort Donnally, west of Lewisburg, for hours before
reinforcements drove the Indians back.
In 1778, George Rogers Clark temporarily broke the British-Indian alliance with victories in the Illinois territory at Kaskaskia, Cahokia,
and Vincennes. Colonials rejected an attempt by Wyandots and some Shawnee to negotiate a peace in 1779. Although the main British
army surrendered at Yorktown, Virginia, on October 19, 1781, occasional clashes occurred on the frontier. The bloodiest Revolutionary
War battle in western Virginia began on September 10, 1782. Wyandot, Delaware, and British forces attacked Fort Henry. The most
dramatic story associated with this siege of Fort Henry is the daring run of Elizabeth Zane, who allegedly carried gunpowder to the fort
amidst heavy gunfire. The settlers held the fort and, after three days, the Indians and their British allies gave up. Soon thereafter, the
British ordered a halt to all attacks on the frontier.
After the Revolutionary War officially ended in 1783, settlers again poured into western Virginia. Most Native Americans moved their
villages westward into Indiana, although they occasionally raided forts in western Virginia. Frontier settlers, such as Lewis Wetzel,
Samuel Brady, and Simon Girty, formed independent military units to combat these attacks, often perpetrating brutal assaults on Native
Americans. Hostile actions between Indians and settlers continued in western Virginia until 1794, when General Anthony Wayne
defeated Native Americans at Fallen Timbers in present-day northwestern Ohio. The subsequent Treaty of Greenville effectively
removed all remaining Indian claims to western Virginia.
Notes
1. John Alexander Williams, West Virginia: A History for Beginners (Charleston, WV: Appalachian Editions, 1993), 64.
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Native American Cultures
Copyright © 2006 Henry J. Sage
Native American Cultures: The Pre-History of America
At the time Columbus discovered America millions of Indians had been living in the Western Hemisphere for tens of thousands of years.
During the latter part of the Ice Age, a land bridge existed between Asia and Alaska across what is now the Bering Strait, and all
evidence indicates that the Native American tribes migrated from Mongolia, through Alaska and Canada and eventually all the way down
to South America, with some settling in favorable locations in the north and others moving on. Over time, they developed into distinct,
separate Indian cultures.
Thus North and South American Indians were extremely diverse, with varied physical traits, linguistic groupings, ethnic
characteristics, customs, cultures, and so on. Indeed the Indians in North America were probably far more diverse than
the people of the nations of northwestern Europe in 1500. In Central America the Aztecs had a large powerful empire,
while along the eastern coast of North America Indians lived in smaller tribes and subsisted by both agriculture and by
hunting and gathering. Farther south the Mayas and Incas had advanced civilizations that had progressed far in
mathematics, astronomy, and engineering. In the western part of North America nomadic tribes roamed over the Great
Plains in search of buffalo and other game and often came into conflict with other tribes over the use of their hunting
grounds.
When game became more scarce, perhaps due to over-hunting or from other causes, many American Indian groups turned to agriculture
as a means of subsistence. In so doing American Indians became perhaps the best farmers in history, developing new crops and refining
farming methods that they later shared with the colonists from Europe. Dozens of foodstuffs consumed in the world today, including
corn, potatoes, various beans, squash, and so on, were developed by Native American farmers. When the European colonists first
arrived, their survival often depended on their adoption of Indian hunting and farming practices.
Indians also understood the use of natural medicines and drugs, and many of their healing techniques are still used by medical people
today. Indian foods, especially corn and the potato, transformed European dietary habits, and in fact the impact of the potato on Ireland’s
population was so great that it led to much of the Irish immigration to America in the 1800s.
A thorough investigation of Native American cultures, even those in North and Central America, is an apt subject for lengthy study; the
literature on pre-Columbian America is rich indeed. What is important to know is that Indian and European cultures affected each other
profoundly, a phenomenon that has been called the Colombian Exchange—the exchange of habits, practices, living techniques, and
resources between the Indians and the Europeans.
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The Native American cultures in the Western Hemisphere found their societies disrupted or even destroyed by the impact of the
Europeans, some of which was deliberate, and some of which was a result of the transmission of diseases to which the American Indians
were not immune. The introduction of firearms, alcohol, and other European artifacts also had deep and unpredictable effects. But the
impact of the Indians on European culture was also deeply significant.
For reasons that are not fully understood, some groups of Indians vanished without being affected by the Europeans. One such group
were the Anasazi of the southwestern United States. They built spectacular dwellings in the cliffs in New Mexico; some of their
settlements carved into the rocks contained hundreds of rooms. But somewhere around the year 1300 they left their rock palaces, never
to return, for reasons unknown. Anasazi link.
Native Americans and Europeans
Ironically, in North America the presence of the native cultures made it possible for the first English settlers to maintain a foothold on the
new continent. The Jamestown colony and the New England Pilgrims certainly owed their mere survival to the help and assistance of
Indians. The Indian cultures that the Europeans encountered were in many ways just as sophisticated, or in some instances even more
sophisticated, than the European cultures that arrived in the first ships. The Indians never thought of themselves as inferior to whites; in
fact, the opposite was often the case.
The arrival of the Europeans also upset the balance of power among the North American Indian tribes, both in
the eastern woodland regions and later on the Great Plains and in the deserts of the Southwest. Europeans
frequently had a romanticized view of the Indians as “noble savages,” and some Europeans believed them to
be one of the ten lost tribes of Israel. In eastern tribes women frequently held power, and in fact some were
tribal chiefs. Europeans often rated Indians as inferiors, which then justified their harsh treatment of the
Indians later on.
Probably the greatest misunderstanding between Europeans and Indians was their differing concepts of land,
or land ownership. The European believed that you could drive four stakes in the ground, parcel off a square of land, and claim
ownership of that piece of ground. Such individual ownership of a section of land was completely alien to the Indian way of thinking.
Certainly Indian tribes fought over the use of land on which to hunt or fish or even practice agriculture, though the agricultural tribes
tended to be less warlike than hunting tribes. But the idea of “ownership” of land was something they did not understand. For some
Indians the land itself was sacred, held as a mother goddess. For many Indians the idea of plowing soil to plant crops was as good as
blasphemy, and many aspects of nature—rivers, ponds, even rocks—performed similar functions as the saints in Christian cultures. Even
after they had made deals with the Europeans for the purchase of land, the meaning of what they had done was often unclear and led to
further conflict.
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Many Indians tribes were traders and had built complicated economic relationships with their neighboring tribes, so they understood the
idea of commerce as is existed within their own system of barter and exchange. The European impact on this trading culture was often
destructive, however, as the Europeans sought to trade and exchange different kinds of goods from what the Indians were used to.
The nature of warfare also illustrated cultural differences and heightened the conflict between Europeans and Indians. Native Americans
fought hard, and the ability to sustain pain and suffer physical punishment with stoicism was a sign of honor. The loot in Indian warfare
was often the capture of women and children of enemy tribes, especially when the population of an aggressor tribe was threatening for
some reason. Thus many Europeans saw Indian ways of warfare as primitive and barbarous, while Indians in turn thought European
practices such as hanging were destructive of the soul.
Despite all the conflicts, in certain ways the Indians benefited from the contact with the Europeans. The horse, for example, had become
extinct in North America long before the Spaniards arrived. But when the Spaniards brought their superior breed of Arab horses to North
America, within a few generations the Indians of the Southwest had taken to the horse with amazing speed. The horse transformed the
culture of the Plains Indians almost immeasurably; consider the difficulty of tracking and killing a fast-moving buffalo on foot, compared
with the ability to run down one on horseback. Plains Indians became the greatest light cavalry in the history of the world. Armed with
rifles or bows and arrows, Plains Indians could hold their own against any cavalry detachment anywhere on the open plains. That they
eventually succumbed to the superior military power of the United States was less a factor of individual skill than it was of organization
and numbers.
The history of the interaction between the Indians and whites begins with Columbus, and the story is a long, tragic tale of greed;
relentless pushing, shoving, and grabbing of land; insensitivity; xenophobia; and even genocide. The cultural differences between
Indians and Europeans and their American descendants continue to this day. As we go through the history of Americans and the United
States, we will pick up the thread of this story again.
References:





Native Roots: How the Indians Enriched America, by Jack Weatherford
Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World, by Jack Weatherford
Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (Civilization of the American Indian), by Vine Deloria
Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492–2000, by Peter Nabokov
North American Indians: A Comprehensive Account (2nd ed.), by Alice B. Kehoe
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Poster Grading Rubric
Team: ________________ Reviewer’s Initials: _________
Event: ________________ Date: ________________
Excellent
(A)
Good
(B)
Adequate
(C)
Communicates
mission and
Activities of
Team
Clearly
conveys
an excellent
understanding
of the mission,
project, and
activities of
the team that
can be
understood by
a wide
audience.
Conveys a
good
understanding
of the mission,
project, and
activities of
the team that
can be
understood by
most audience
Adequately
conveys a
Readable
Visually
Appealing
Professional Contains
Required
Information
The poster
has
excellent
visual
appeal,
shows
creativity
Poster
The poster
Language
contains all
is easily
used is
required
readable
appropriate. information:
from 4 ft
Poster is
Name of
away.
very
team, Name
Excellent
professional of Project
use of
in
Partner
visuals to
appearance
Enhance the and free
information. from errors.
The poster
has good
visual
appeal
and some
creativity
The poster
is readable
from 4 ft
away. Good
use of
visuals to
convey
information
The poster
has
Some
portions
Language
used
is
appropriate.
Poster is
professional
in
appearance
and mostly
free from
errors.
Language
used is
Poster is
missing one
of the
required
items.
Poster is
missing
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Marginal
(D)
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basic
understanding
of the mission,
project, and
activities of
the team that
can be
understood by
a limited
audience.
adequate
visual
appeal
with
limited
creativity
of the
poster
are not
readable
from 4 ft
away. Some
use of
visuals to
convey
informatio
Poster
marginally
conveys an
understanding
of the mission,
project, and
activities of
the team
The poster
is not
visually
appeal ling
nor creativ
Poster is
difficult to
read from 4
ft away.
Little use of
visuals to
convey
information
Not
Not
Completed completed.
(F)
Grade
Over all comments:
Not
Not
completed. completed.
Final Unit plan
mostly
appropriate.
Poster is
somewhat
professional
in
appearance
and
contains
two or more
errors.
Language
used is not
appropriate.
Poster is not
professional
in
appearance
and contains
several
errors
Not
completed.
two of the
required
items
Poster is
missing
more than
two of the
required
item
Not
completed.
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NAME: Amanda Jacobs
GRADE LEVEL/COMM. SETTING: 5th grade
TOPIC/UNIT: Three World Interactions
UNIT DAY:
LESSON TITLE: Columbian Exchange lesson 1
UNIT GOALS THAT THIS LESSON MEETS:
This lesson will help students think about the effects of the Columbian Exchange, particularly the effects of exchange of plants
and animals between the New and Old World. Also how it affected European and Native populations in the early settlement of the
Americas. This lesson helps students identify key concepts and vocabulary words related to the Columbian Exchange
GLCE’s ADDRESSED IN THIS LESSON:
-5-U1.4.4
LEARNING OUT COMES:
-Students will classify Old and New world foods
-Students will use graphic organizer to categorize their food intake for one day
-Students will participate in an interactive discussion.
MATERIALS:
• Handout: List of Old World and New World Plants, Animals, and Diseases
-one for every student
• Handout: Graphic Organizer on Columbian Exchange
-one for every student
• vocabulary list: Columbian Exchange, Spatial Diffusion….
-either an over head, white on white board, or have a hand out for each student
• Realia: ear of corn, potato, tomato, etc.
-a couple
 Columbian exchange Reading
-one for each student for homework
PROCEDURES:
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Allow approximately one 50-minute class period for instruction and 10 minutes for assessment.
1. Ask students to list on paper the foods that they ate either yesterday (morning classes) or today (afternoon classes).
2. Explain Columbian Exchange vocabulary words and concepts vocabulary list
3. Use an ear of corn or a potato in short explanation of concept of cultural (spatial) diffusion.
4. Hand out list of plants, animals, and diseases that came from Old World and New World.
5. Divide students into small groups of about four. Have them working in small groups decide whether the foods they have eaten recently
originated in either the Old World or New World. Some foods (pizza) may have ingredients from both worlds.
6. Pass out materials for the Columbian Exchange graphic organizer. Have students fold the handout and put title and student name on
the front panel. They may also add other pertinent information and an illustration of a Columbian Exchange product. On the
graphic organizer inside each student should name the continents in the Old World and New World and list foods they normally
eat in either the Old World or New World arrows. Then each student should add at least one animal from the Old World and the
New World. On the back panel have students write in their own words the definitions of spatial diffusion and Columbian
Exchange and write a sentence or two on the relationship between the two concepts.
7. Regroup students into their small groups. Have them discuss how the Columbian Exchange affected each of them personally and at
least one impact on world history
8. If time permits, review the concepts associated with the Columbian Exchange, and the products from the Old World and the New
World.
10. Assign reading homework of the Columbian exchange
TECHNOLOGY:
If you have extra time have students used the Internet to find out more information on the Columbian Exchange. Use phrases
“Columbian Exchange” or “Seeds of Change” to search the Internet
.
ASSESSMENT:
-The short review of the Columbian Exchange concepts and products. Assess students by asking them to list five Old World and
five New World contributions. Then ask them to explain the significance of the Columbian Exchange in history.
-As well the graphic organizer is a form of assessment.
EXTENSION:
Have students select one of the Old World or New World products and research the importance of and impact of that product on
history and the contemporary world.
RESOUCES:
1. http://schools.ldisd.net/docs/3-01.9thlessonsiop_000.pdf
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2. http://spider.georgetowncollege.edu/htallant/courses/his111/columb.htm
Columbian Biological Exchange
3. http://daphne.palomar.edu/scrout/colexc.htm
Columbian Exchange
4. http://www.learnnc.org/lp/pages/2652
Homework Reading
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Columbian Exchange Vocabulary
Spatial diffusion: The distribution of ideas, products, culture, technology, innovation, languages and so on across space to other
people.
Columbian exchange: The Columbian Exchange was a dramatically widespread exchange of animals, plants, culture, human
populations including slaves, communicable disease, and ideas between the Eastern and Western hemispheres (Old World
and New World).
Old World: comprises Africa, Asia, and Europe
New World: The New World is one of the names used for the Western Hemisphere, specifically America
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The Columbian Exchange
New world
(The Americas)
Pineapples, Tomatoes,
papaya, strawberries
Old world
(Asia, Europe, Africa
Apples, bananas, citrus
fruits, grapes, melons,
peaches, pears
broccoli, cabbage, carrots,
lettuce, onions, radishes
barley, oats, rice, rye, wheat
Contribution
Taro, Yams
Starchy Roots
Chickpeas, lentils, peas
Black pepper, cinnamon,
cloves, ginger
Coffee, tea
Sugar cane, olives
Cattle, chickens, donkeys,
goats, horses, pigs, sheep
Cholera, malaria, measles,
mumps, smallpox, typhoid,
yellow fever
Legumes
Spices
Manioc, peanuts, potatoes,
sweet potatoes
Beans, lima beans
Chili peppers, vanilla
Drinks
Other plans
Animals
Chocolate
Quinine, tobacco
Guinea pigs, llamas, turkeys
Disease
Syphilis
Fruits
Vegetables
Cereals and Grain
avocados, green beans,
pumpkins, squash
Maize (corn)
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The Columbian Exchange
BY J.R. MCNEILL
The arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas marked the meeting of previously separate biological worlds. (John
Vanderlyn, Landing of Columbus. Commissioned 1836/1837; placed 1847. Capitol Rotunda, Washington, D.C.More about the painting)
Geologists believe that between 280 million and 225 million years ago, the earth’s previously separate land areas became welded into a
landmass called Pangaea. About 120 million years ago, they believe, this landmass began to separate. As this happened, the Atlantic
Ocean formed, dividing the Americas from Africa and Eurasia. Over the course of the next several million years in both the Americas
and in Afro-Eurasia, biological evolution followed individual paths, creating two primarily separate biological worlds. However, when
Christopher Columbus and his crew made land in the Bahamas in October 1492, these two long-separated worlds were reunited.
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Columbus’ voyage, along with the many voyages that followed, disrupted much of the biological segregation brought about by
continental drift.
After Columbus’ arrival in the Americas, the animal, plant, and bacterial life of these two worlds began to mix. This process, first
studied comprehensively by American historian Alfred Crosby, was called the Columbian Exchange. By reuniting formerly biologically
distinct land masses, the Columbian Exchange had dramatic and lasting effects on the world. New diseases were introduced to American
populations that had no prior experience of them. The results were devastating. These populations also were introduced to new weeds and
pests, livestock, and pets. New food and fiber crops were introduced to Eurasia and Africa, improving diets and fomenting trade there. In
addition, the Columbian Exchange vastly expanded the scope of production of some popular drugs, bringing the pleasures — and
consequences — of coffee, sugar, and tobacco use to many millions of people. The results of this exchange recast the biology of both
regions and altered the history of the world.
The flow from east to west: Disease
By far the most dramatic and devastating impact of the Columbian Exchange followed the introduction of new diseases into the
Americas. When the first inhabitants of the Americas arrived across the Bering land bridge between 20,000 and 12,000 years ago, they
brought few diseases with them. Why? For one reason, they had no domesticated animals, the original source of human diseases such
as smallpox and measles. In addition, as they passed from Siberia to North America, the first Americans had spent many years in extreme
cold, which eliminated many of the disease-causing agents that might have traveled with them. As a result, the first Americans and their
descendants, perhaps 40 million to 60 million strong by 1492, enjoyed freedom from most of the infectious diseases that plagued
populations in Afro-Eurasia for millennia. Meanwhile, in Asia and Africa, the domestication of herd animals brought new diseases spread
by cattle, sheep, pigs, and fowl.
Soon after 1492, sailors inadvertently introduced these diseases — including smallpox, measles, mumps, whooping cough,
influenza, chicken pox, and typhus — to the Americas. People who lived in Afro-Eurasia had developed some immunities to these
diseases because they had long existed among most Afro-Eurasian populations. However, the Native Americans had no such immunities.
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Adults and children alike were stricken by wave after wave of epidemic, which produced catastrophic mortality throughout the Americas.
In the larger centers of highland Mexico and Peru, many millions of people died. On some Caribbean islands, the Native American
population died out completely. In all, between 1492 and 1650, perhaps 90 percent of the first Americans had died.
This loss is considered among the largest demographic disasters in human history. By stripping the Americas of much of the human
population, the Columbian Exchange rocked the region’s ecological and economic balance. Ecosystems were in tumult as forests regrew
and previously hunted animals increased in number. Economically, the population decrease brought by the Columbian Exchange
indirectly caused a drastic labor shortage throughout the Americas, which eventually contributed to the establishment of African slavery
on a vast scale in the Americas. By 1650, the slave trade had brought new diseases, such as malaria and yellow fever, which further
plagued Native Americans.
The flow from east to west: Crops and animals
Oranges, now a staple of the Florida economy, didn’t grow in the Americas until after the arrival of Spanish explorers. Image source.About the photograph
Eurasians sent much more than disease westward. The introduction of new crops and domesticated animals to the Americas did almost as
much to upset the region’s biological, economic, and social balance as the introduction of disease had. Columbus had wanted to establish
new fields of plenty in the Americas. On his later voyages he brought many crops he hoped might flourish there. He and his followers
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brought the familiar food grains of Europe: wheat, barley, and rye. They also brought Mediterranean plantation crops such as sugar,
bananas, and citrus fruits, which all had originated in South or Southeast Asia. At first, many of these crops fared poorly; but eventually
they all flourished. After 1640, sugar became the mainstay of the Caribbean and Brazilian economies, becoming the foundation for some
of the largest slave societies ever known. The production of rice and cotton, both imported in the Columbian Exchange, together with
tobacco, formed the basis of slave society in the United States. Wheat, which thrived in the temperate latitudes of North and South
America and in the highlands of Mexico, eventually became a fundamental food crop for tens of millions of people in the Americas.
Indeed, by the late 20th century, wheat exports from Canada, the United States, and Argentina were feeding millions of people outside
the Americas. It is true that the spread of these crops drastically changed the economy of the Americas. However, these new crops
supported the European settler societies and their African slave systems. The Native Americans preferred their own foods.
When it came to animals, however, the Native Americans borrowed eagerly from the Eurasian stables. The Columbian Exchange
brought horses, cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, and a collection of other useful species to the Americas. Before Columbus, Native American
societies in the high Andes had domesticated llamas and alpacas, but no other animals weighing more than 45 kg (100 lbs). And for good
reason: none of the other 23 large mammal species present in the Americas before the arrival of Columbus were suitable for
domestication. In contrast, Eurasia had 72 large animal species, of which 13 were suitable for domestication. So, while Native Americans
had plenty of good food crops available before 1492, they had few domesticated animals. The main ones, aside from llamas and alpacas,
were dogs, turkeys, and guinea pigs.
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The introduction of horses made hunting buffalo much easier for the Plains Indians. Paul Kane, Assiniboine Hunting Buffalo, ca. 1851-1856. National Gallery of Canada,
Ottawa, Ontario.About the painting
Of all the animals introduced by the Europeans, the horse held particular attraction. Native Americans first encountered it as a
fearsome war beast ridden by Spanish conquistadors. However, they soon learned to ride and raise horses themselves. In the North
American great plains, the arrival of the horse revolutionized Native American life, permitting tribes to hunt the buffalo far more
effectively. Several Native American groups left farming to become buffalo-hunting nomads and, incidentally, the
most formidableenemies of European expansion in the Americas.
Cattle, sheep, pigs, and goats also proved popular in the Americas. Within 100 years after Columbus, huge herds of wild cattle
roamed many of the natural grasslands of the Americas. Wild cattle, and, to a lesser degree, sheep and goats, menaced the food crops of
Native Americans, notably in Mexico. Eventually ranching economies emerged, based variously on cattle, goats, or sheep. The largest
ranches emerged in the grasslands of Venezuela and Argentina, and on the broad sea of grass that stretched from northern Mexico to the
Canadian prairies. Native Americans used the livestock for meat, tallow, hides, transportation, and hauling. Altogether, the suite of
domesticated animals from Eurasia brought a biological, economic, and social revolution to the Americas.
The flow from west to east: Disease
In terms of diseases, the Columbian Exchange was a wildly unequal affair, and the Americas got the worst of it. The flow of disease from
the Americas eastward into Eurasia and Africa was either trivial or consisted of a single important infection. Much less is known about
pre-Columbian diseases in the Americas than what is known about those in Eurasia. Based on their study of skeletal
remains, anthropologists believe that Native Americans certainly suffered from arthritis. They also had another disease, probably a form
of tuberculosis that may or may not have been similar to the pulmonary tuberculosis common in the modern world. Native Americans
also apparently suffered from a group of illnesses that included two forms of syphilis. One controversial theory asserts that the venereal
syphilis epidemic that swept much of Europe beginning in 1494 came from the Americas; however, the available evidence remains
inconclusive.
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The flow from west to east: Crops and cuisine
Maize has become a dietary staple in southern Africa.Image source. About the photograph
America’s vast contribution to Afro-Eurasia in terms of new plant species and cuisine, however, transformed life in places as far apart as
Ireland, South Africa, and China. Before Columbus, the Americas had plenty of domesticated plants. By the time Columbus had arrived,
dozens of plants were in regular use, the most important of which were maize (corn), potatoes, cassava, and various beans and squashes.
Lesser crops included sweet potato, papaya, pineapple, tomato, avocado, guava, peanuts, chili peppers, and cacao, the raw form of cocoa.
Within 20 years of Columbus’ last voyage, maize had established itself in North Africa and perhaps in Spain. It spread to Egypt, where it
became a staple in the Nile Delta, and from there to the Ottoman Empire, especially the Balkans. By 1800, maize was the major grain in
large parts of what is now Romania and Serbia, and was also important in Hungary, Ukraine, Italy, and southern France. It was often
used as animal feed, but people ate it too, usually in a porridge or bread. Maize appeared in China in the 16th century and eventually
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supplied about one-tenth of the grain supply there. In the 19th century it became an important crop in India. Maize probably played its
greatest role, however, in southern Africa. There maize arrived in the 16th century in the context of the slave trade. Southern African
environmental conditions, across what is now Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and eastern South Africa, suited maize
handsomely. Over the centuries, maize became the primary peasant food in much of southern Africa. In late 20th-century South Africa,
for example, maize grew in two-thirds to three-quarters of the region’s cropland.
Despite maize’s success, the humble potato probably had a stronger impact in improving the food supply and in promoting
population growth in Eurasia. The potato had little impact in Africa, where conditions did not suit it. But in northern Europe the potato
thrived. It had the most significant effect on Ireland, where it promoted a rapid population increase until a potato blight ravaged the crop
in 1845, bringing widespread famine to the area. After 1750, Scandinavia, the Low Countries, Germany, Poland, and Russia also
gradually accepted the potato, which helped drive a general population explosion in Europe. This population explosion may have laid the
foundation for world-shaking developments such as the Industrial Revolution and modern Europeanimperialism. The potato also fed
mountain populations around the world, notably in China, where it encouraged settlement of mountainous regions.
Cassava root. Photo by David Monniaux, 2005.About the photograph
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While maize and potatoes had the greatest world historical importance of the American crops, lesser crops made their marks as well.
In West Africa, peanuts and cassava provided new foodstuffs. Cassava, a tropical shrub native to Brazil, has starchy roots that will grow
in almost any soil. In the leached soils of West and Central Africa, cassava became an indispensable crop. Today some 200 million
Africans rely on it as their main source of nutrition. Cacao and rubber, two other South American crops, became important export items
in West Africa in the 20th century. The sweet potato, which was introduced into China in the 1560s, became China’s third most
important crop after rice and wheat. It proved a useful supplement to diets throughout the monsoon lands of Asia. Indeed, almost
everywhere in the world, one or another American food crops caught on, complementing existing crops or, more rarely, replacing them.
By the late 20th century, about one-third of the world’s food supply came from plants first cultivated in the Americas. The modern rise of
population surely would have been slower without them.
In contrast, the animals of the Americas have had very little impact on the rest of the world, unless one considers its earliest
migrants. The camel and the horse actually originated in North America and migrated westward across the Bering land bridge to Asia,
where they evolved into the forms familiar today. By the time of the Columbian Exchange, these animals were long extinct in the
Americas, and the majority of America’s domesticated animals would have little more than a tiny impact on Afro-Eurasia. One
domesticated animal that did have an effect was the turkey. Wild animals of the Americas have done only a little better. Probably after
the 19th century, North American muskrats and squirrels successfully colonized large areas of Europe. Deliberate introductions of
American animals, such as raccoons fancied for their fur and imported to Germany in the 1920s, occasionally led to escapes and the
establishment of feral animal communities. However, no species introduced from the Americas revolutionized human affairs or animal
ecology anywhere in Afro-Eurasia. In terms of animal populations as with disease, the Americas contributed little that could flourish in
the conditions of Europe, Africa, or Asia.
The Columbian Exchange in the modern world
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At Lake Ontario in Canada, zebra mussels cling to the inside of a rusty pipe. Image source. About the photograph
As the late dates of the introduction of muskrats and raccoons to Europe suggest, the Columbian Exchange continues into the present.
Indeed, it will surely continue into the future as modern transportation continues the pattern begun by Columbus. Recently, for example,
zebra mussels from the Black Sea, stowed away in the ballast water of ships, invaded North American waters. There they blocked the
water intakes of factories, nuclear power plants, and municipal filtration plants throughout the Great Lakes region. Just as the arrival of
Christopher Columbus’s ships in America in the 15th century resulted in the worldwide exchange of disease, crops, and animals, the
20th-century practice of ships using water as ballast helped unite the formerly diverse flora and fauna of the world’s harbors
and estuaries. Similarly, air transport allows the spread of insects and diseases that would not easily survive longer, slower trips. Modern
transport carries on in the tradition of Columbus by promoting a homogenization of the world’s plants and animals. To date, however, the
world historical importance of modern exchanges pales beside that which took place in the original Columbian Exchange.
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NAME: Amanda Jacobs
GRADE LEVEL/COMM. SETTING: 5th grade
TOPIC/UNIT: Three World Interactions
UNIT DAY:
LESSON TITLE: Columbian Exchange lesson 2
UNIT GOALS THAT THIS LESSON MEETS:
This lesson will help students think about the effects of the Columbian Exchange, particularly the exchange of disease as it
affected the psychology of the Europeans, Africans, and Native populations in the early settlement of the Americas. This lesson, in the
form of a facilitated class discussion, should be done after students have read “The Columbian Exchange” and before they read “Disease
and Catastrophe.”
GLCE’s ADDRESSED IN THIS LESSON:
-5-U1.4.4
LEARNING OUT COMES:
-Students will analyze the effects of the Columbian Exchange.
-Students will use higher order thinking to imagine the psychological effects of disease
the Europeans.
-Students will participate in an interactive discussion.
on native cultures, African cultures and
MATERIALS:
-“The Columbian Exchange” reading handouts
- one per student
-“Disease and Catastrophe” reading handouts
-one per student
PROCEDURE:
1. Before conducting this discussion, students should have read “The Columbian Exchange,” but should not have read “Disease and
Catastrophe.”
2. Review with the students the meaning of the Columbian Exchange and discuss the assigned reading
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(an exchange of crops, animals, and disease between the Americas and Europe and Africa).
3. Teacher will draw 2 lines on the board, which split it into three sections to write students Ideas on.
4. Ask the students about the impact of disease on the Native Americans. This could involve a deeper discussion
-write on one section of the board or over head
(Diseases devastated the Native cultures — perhaps 90% of the indigenous population died in the years after the arrival of Europeans
and Africans to the Americas.)
-link to first day hook in class as reminder
-Ask how they believe it effective native Americans base on their existing knowledge
5. Explain that during this period in human history people did not know the causes of diseases. Ask the students to put themselves in the
place of people living in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. What do they think might have caused diseases?
-still write in section one
(Answers will vary. You may want to lead the discussion so students understand that many believed illness was a curse from an evil
person or a punishment from God.)
6. Next ask the students to consider how disease was actually transmitted to the native populations during the decades after 1492.
-write in section one
(Disease was brought very early on by the sailors and early explorers. It would have been transmitted from them to the Indians during
trade or other contact. The natives would have unwittingly brought the disease to their own peoples who had not been in contact with the
Europeans.)
7. Read the following excerpt from “Disease and Catastrophe“:
“Hit by wave after wave of multiple diseases to which they had utterly no resistance, they [the indigenous peoples] died by the millions.
Disease spread from the paths of explorers and the sites of colonization like a stain from a drop of ink on a paper towel.
In fact, in North America, disease spread faster than European colonization. When
Valley in the early 1500s he found large,
Hernando de Soto explored the Mississippi
thriving cities connected by networks of trade. By the time Rene-Robert de La Salle
followed de Soto’s footsteps in the 1680s, those cities had evaporated.
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8. Ask the students to again place themselves in the place of people from the time of exploration. First, have them imagine what the native
cultures might have believed about the devastation. Allow the students to share some of their thoughts.
-Write in section two of the board
(Answers will vary.)
9. Have the students then imagine what the Europeans might have thought as they went into new areas only to find empty native villages
and cities.
-Write in section 3 of the board
(Answers will vary. However, you should lead the students to compare what they have already discussed about the causes and
transmission of disease in the period when thinking about the interpretation that the Europeans may have taken — that God had removed
the Indians so that the Europeans could spread throughout the New World.)
10. Ask the students how this belief might have encouraged even more expansion and settlement by Europeans.
-write in section 3
11. Have students do a 321 to get out the door and as a form of assessment after the unit
The idea is to give students a chance to summarize some key ideas, rethink them in order to focus on those that they are most intrigued by,
and then pose a question that can reveal where their understanding is still uncertain. Often, teachers use this strategy in place of the usual
worksheet questions on a chapter reading, and when students come to class the next day, you're able to use their responses to construct an
organized outline, to plot on a Venn diagram, to identify sequence, or isolate cause-and-effect. The students are into it because the discussion
is based on the ideas that they found, that they addressed, that they brought to class.
How Does It Work?
Students fill out a 3-2-1 chart with something like this:
3 Things You Found Out
2 Interesting Things
1 Question You Still Have
Now, that's just the suggested version. Depending upon what you're teaching, you can modify the 3-2-1 anyway you want. For instance,
if you've just been studying the transition from feudalism to the rise of nation-states, you might have students write down 3 differences
between feudalism and nation-states, 2 similarities, and 1 question they still have.
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Got A Version I Can Print Out?
But of course! You can download and print a version of a blank 3-2-1 chart and the generic version as described above. They are both on
the same sheet; you can copy and cut them into half-sheets.
ASSESSMENT
-This activity is, in itself, an assessment of the progress of students in higher order thinking
discussion
-321 out the door strategy
RESOURCES
1. http://www.learnnc.org/lp/pages/2652
skills. Assess by participation in the
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Disease and catastrophe
BY DAVID WALBERT
Of all the kinds of life exchanged when the Old and New Worlds met, lowly germs had the greatest impact. Europeans and later Africans
brought smallpox and a host of other diseases with them to America, where those diseases killed as much as 90 percent of the native
population of two continents. Europeans came away lucky — with only a few tropical diseases from Africa and, probably, syphilis from
the New World. In America, disease destoyed civilizations.
Endemics and epidemics: How disease works
A disease becomes endemic in a population when it continues to be passed from person to person without needing to be re-introduced
from outside sources. The common cold, for example, is endemic in the United States — if we closed the borders and sterilized
everything that entered the country, we’d still be sneezing half the winter. Malaria, which is passed from person to person by mosquitoes,
is endemic in parts of Africa. If you live in a region where a particular disease is endemic, you are likely to get that disease at some point
during your life.
DI S E AS E AND DO ME S T IC ANIMAL S
Although all populations of animals, including humans, are subject to disease, humans who live in close contact with domesticated
animals are particularly at risk. Many of the diseases that have plagued humanity are caused by microorganisms that originally affected
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only other species of animals. When humans began to domesticate animals for agricultural purposes, some of those microorganisms
mutated into a form that could cause disease in humans. Diseases that come to humans from other animals are calledzoonotic diseases.
Measles, smallpox, influenza, diphtheria, the common cold, and tuberculosisprobably came to humans from other animals and are
now transmitted directly from human to human. Other zoonotic diseases are still transmitted by animals. Yellow feverand malaria, for
example, are transmitted by mosquitoes. Bubonic plague is carried by rats (though it is also highly contagious among humans), and rabies
can be carried and transmitted by any mammal.
Because Europeans, Asians, and Africans had many more domestic animals than American Indians, they had acquired more
endemic diseases. Large centers of population like the cities of Europe and Asia also attracted rats that carried diseases like the bubonic
plague.
NAT URAL RE S IS TANCE A ND E PIDE MICS
When a deadly disease is endemic in a population, over many generations, that population gradually builds up a resistance to it. Most
serious diseases are especially likely to kill infants and children. Children who die of a disease obviously won’t live to reproduce. But not
everyone dies from even the most serious diseases. Some people have combinations of genes that help their immune systems to
successfully fight particular diseases. A child who survives smallpox, for example, and grows up will pass on his smallpox-resistant
genes to his children. Since people with genes that help them resist the endemic disease are more likely to live, reproduce, and pass on
their genes, while people who lack those genes are more likely to die in childhood, over time, all of the surviving population will have
those genes.
An endemic disease isn’t always present in a population at the same level. There can still be epidemics — outbreaks of the disease
that spread faster and to more people than is typical. But epidemics are more likely, and more serious, in a population where a disease is
not endemic. There, people are sickened more easily, become weaker, and pass the disease along more quickly. The most serious
epidemics are of diseases or strains of diseases new to a population. Epidemics of influenza (the “flu”), for example, tend to come from
new strains of the influenza virus.
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Europeans, Asians, and Africans had a natural resistance to smallpox, measles, typhoid, and other diseases endemic to the Old
World. These diseases were still deadly — smallpox killed some 60 million Europeans over the course of the eighteenth century — but
not as deadly as they would have been in a population that lacked the natural resistance.
American Indians, who lived on a continent where the smallpox virus and other Old World microbes did not exist, had no natural
resistance to them. When Europeans arrived, infection spread like wildfire, killing not only the young, old, and weak but healthy adults in
the prime of life.
Disease in the Americas
Not only smallpox but measles, tuberculosis, diphtheria, whooping cough, and influenza arrived in the Americas with European
conquistadors and colonists. Enslaved Africans brought malaria, yellow fever, and denge (breakbone fever), which thrived in the
Caribbean and warmer parts of North America. Slave traders, in turn, carried yellow fever back to Europe, and European traders and
explorers may have brought home syphilis from the Americas. Nowhere, though, did disease have the devastating impact it did in the
New World.
This was not the first time that a new disease had been introduced into a human population. In the 1300s, Mongol armies and traders
from Central Asia brought the bubonic plague to Europe, and the resulting epidemic — the “Black Death” — killed one-third of the
population of Western Europe.
But even the Black Death can’t compare to the devastation of the indigenous peoples of North and South America. Hit by wave after
wave of multiple diseases to which they had utterly no resistance, they died by the millions. Disease spread from the paths of explorers
and the sites of colonization like a stain from a drop of ink on a paper towel.
In fact, in North America, disease spread faster than European colonization. When Hernando de Soto explored the Mississippi
Valley in the early 1500s he found large, thriving cities connected by networks of trade. By the time Rene-Robert de La Salle followed de
Soto’s footsteps in the 1680s, those cities had evaporated.
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In parts of North Carolina, disease may have come later. Smallpox may have arrived in the 1500s in the wake of Soto’s expedition,
and it may have struck the Indians of the Outer Banks when the English arrived to settle Roanoke Island. Its worst damage, though, came
later. In the late 1600s, the colonial population grew rapidly, and many more slaves were imported from Africa, where most people were
not exposed to smallpox at a young age as they were in England. This made conditions right for an epidemic among the colonial
population, and between 1696 and 1700, that epidemic occurred, first in Virginia, then moving south through the Carolinas and west to
the Mississippi. The expanding network of colonial trade among the Indians (including a trade in Indian slaves) quickly carried smallpox
throughout the Southeast. Death rates were as high as 90 percent in some communities — and it was only the beginning of a century of
epidemics.
As a result, by 1700, North Carolina east of the mountains was sparsely populated. The English colonists in North America found a
wilderness ready for the taking, and the Indians who remained were not numerous enough to stop them.
H O W MANY PE O PL E DIE D ?
Estimating the number of deaths due to imported diseases is difficult for two reasons. First, we have only rough estimates of the
population of most of the Americas even after Europeans arrived and started counting people. Then, researchers use data on present-day
epidemics to estimate what a likely death rate would have been for a population with no immunity to any of the diseases Europeans
brought. A small inaccuracy in the estimated death rate can lead to very different estimates of population, and researchers argue about
both numbers.
The figure most often cited is that 90 to 95 percent of the native population of the Americas died between the time Columbus landed in
the Caribbean and the end of the eighteenth century. That percentage is based largely on epidemiology — the study of how diseases
spread in populations. But no one knows exactly how many people died, because no one knows exactly how many people were here in
1491, before Columbus arrived.
In 1910, James Mooney, an ethnographer at the Smithsonian Institution, made the first scholarly estimate of the indigenous
population of the Americas. Mooney used old documents to estimate that in 1492, North America had 1.15 million inhabitants. Mooney
was widely respected in his field, and for decades, other researchers accepted this figure. Then, in 1966, anthropologist Henry F. Dobyns
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used new research in epidemiology to estimate that 95 percent of the native population of the Americas died after European contact — 95
percent of an original population of 90 to 112 million people, more than the population of Europe at that time!
Based on further research, Dobyns later reduced his estimate to 18 million people. Other researchers estimate far fewer, as low as
1.8 million. Others have proposed numbers in between. But regardless of whether 1 million people died or 100 million, scholars agree
that disease devastated native populations, cultures, and societies. To put those numbers in perspective, consider that 1.8 million people is
the population of Charlotte, Raleigh, Greensboro, Durham, Winston-Salem and Fayetteville combined; 18 million is more than twice the
current population of the state of North Carolina; and 100 million is a a third of the population of the United States.
Who’s to blame?
Historians also debate whether Europeans were guilty of genocide — the deliberate killing of an entire ethnic group. That question has
many layers, and it’s difficult to answer — or even to ask — without succumbing to emotion or ideology. When millions of people die,
we naturally look for someone to blame, but the desire to assign blame can prevent us from fully understanding the past.
Europeans certainly understood the impact of disease on American Indians. The Spanish learned quickly that the native populations
of the Caribbean and Central America were highly susceptible to diseases. When John Lawson traveled through North Carolina in 1701,
he noted repeatedly in his journals that the populations of the Indians he met were greatly reduced from only a short time earlier.
Europeans also had a rough idea of how some diseases, such as smallpox, were transmitted, and they understood the importance
of quarantine.
John Lawson, traveling through South Carolina in 1701, wrote about the effect of smallpox on the Sewee Indians:
These Sewees have been formerly a large Nation, though now very much decreas’d since the English hath seated their Land, and all other
Nations of Indians are observ’d to partake of the same Fate, where the Europeans come, the Indians being a People very apt to catch any
Distemper they are afflicted withal; the Small-Pox has destroy’d many thousands of these Natives, who no sooner than they are attack’d
with the violent Fevers, and the Burning which attends that Distemper, sling themselves over Head in the Water, in the very Extremity of
the Disease; which shutting up the Pores, hinders a kindly Evacuation of the Pestilential Matter, and drives it back; by which Means
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Death most commonly ensues; not but in other Distempers which are epidemical, you may find among’em Practitioners that have
extraordinary Skill and Success in removing those morbifick Qualities which afflict ‘em, not often going above 100 Yards from their
Abode for their Remedies, some of their chiefest Physicians commonly carrying their Complement of Drugs continually about them,
which are Roots, Barks, Berries, Nuts, &c. that are strung upon a Thread. So like a Pomander, the Physician wears them about his Neck.
An Indian hath been often found to heal an English-man of a Malady, for the Value of a Match-Coat; which the ablest of our English
Pretenders in America, after repeated Applications, have deserted the Patient as incurable; God having furnish’d every Country with
specifick Remedies for their peculiar Diseases.
Lawson had great respect for the traditional medicine of the Indians, which was based on herbal cures and rituals and was often quite
effective against illnesses and maladies present before Europeans arrived. Although Indians tried to adapt their system of medicine to
new diseases, viruses such as smallpox simply overwhelmed them.
At least one European used smallpox as a military weapon. Lord Jeffrey Amherst, commanding general of British forces in America
during the Seven Years War (or French and Indian War, 1756–1763), distributed blankets from smallpox victims as a way to crush an
Indian uprising and “to Extirpate this Execrable Race.”1 Amherst, at least, went on record in favor of genocide.
Other Europeans, from the Spanish in the 1500s to English colonists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, saw the spread of
smallpox as divine intervention. They believed that by wiping out the native population and clearing the continent for European
settlement, God was declaring himself on their side.
But although there are rumors and stories of other similar attempts to spread smallpox among native populations — by the Spanish
in Central America and by the U.S. government in the nineteenth century — no documentary evidence survives to prove them. Although
plenty of Europeans wanted the Indians out of their way, few seem to have engaged in deliberate biological warfare.
Finally, it’s worth remembering that germs weren’t discovered until the nineteenth century, and that although inoculation had been
proven to work, most Europeans still feared it. People’s understanding of disease was still poor. Note Lawson’s disdain for “English
pretenders” — European doctors who claim to practice superior medicine, but are less successful than their Indian counterparts.
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European physicians believed, for example, that some diseases were caused by an excess of blood in the body, and “cured” them by
attaching leeches to patients’ skin to “bleed” them.
There was, probably, no way to stop the spread of disease once peoples long isolated came into contact. Even had Europeans been
horrified by the spread of smallpox among the Indians and thrown the weight of their medical system against it, they would have been
opening an umbrella against a hurricane.
O T H E R KIL L E RS
It’s important to remember that in addition to disease, war and slavery killed American Indians. How many people were killed is difficult
— perhaps impossible — to know. Clearly, though, war and slavery were deliberate acts on the part of Europeans, and some of the wars
fought between colonists and Indians were genocidal in intent — that is, the colonists attempted to wipe out an entire native population.
Wars between colonists and Indians often led to massacres of native villages. In the Pequot War, which took place in New England in the
1630s, the colonial militia burned the village of Mystic, killing an estimated 600 to 700 Pequot Indians — mostly women and children.
But both sides engaged in this kind of warfare: The Tuscarora War began in North Carolina in 1711 when parties of Tuscarora Indians
attacked plantations and killed families of colonists. But weakened and diminished by disease, American Indians were nearly always
unsuccessful in colonial wars.
What’s clear is that millions of American Indians died, and most European colonists were content to have them out of the way. That
feeling was usually mutual, but Europeans, armed with better weapons and with disease as an ally, prevailed. How they prevailed is a
complex story that would play out over centuries.
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Smallpox
This photograph of a smallpox victim appeared in the Baltimore Health News in 1939 as a warning to people who had not been
vaccinated. (“This Man Was Never Vaccinated Against Smallpox,” Baltimore Health News 16, no. 2 (Nov. 1939). Image provided by
Chapin Library of Rare Books, Williams College. More about the photograph)
Smallpox is a serious, contagious, and sometimes fatal infectious disease caused by the variola virus. There is no specific treatment for
smallpox disease, and the only prevention is vaccination. The name smallpox is derived from the Latin word for “spotted” and refers to
the raised bumps that appear on the face and body of an infected person.
The variola virus first emerged in human populations thousands of years ago. Historically, smallpox had a mortality rate of as much
as 30 percent — that is, it killed 30 percent of people who contracted it. Mortality was highest among infants and children. In the
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eighteenth century, smallpox killed some 60 million Europeans. In the Americas, it killed as much as 90 percent of
the indigenous population after contact with Europeans introduced the disease. As late as 1967, some 2 million people worldwide died of
smallpox.
Smallpox is now eradicated — eliminated from nature — after a successful worldwide vaccination program. The last case of
smallpox in the United States was in 1949. The last naturally occurring case in the world was in Somalia in 1977. Smallpox is the only
human infectious disease ever completely eradicated. Today, the variola virus exists only in laboratory stockpiles.
Transmission
Generally, direct and fairly prolonged face-to-face contact is required to spread smallpox from one person to another. Smallpox also can
be spread through direct contact with infected bodily fluids or contaminated objects such as bedding or clothing. Rarely, smallpox has
been spread by virus carried in the air in enclosed settings such as buildings, buses, and trains. Humans are the only natural hosts of
variola. Smallpox is not known to be transmitted by insects or animals.
A person with smallpox is sometimes contagious with the onset of fever, but the person becomes most contagious with the onset of
rash. At this stage the infected person is usually very sick and not able to move around in the community. The infected person is
contagious until the last smallpox scab falls off.
Smallpox disease
Incubation period (7–17 days; not contagious)
Exposure to the virus is followed by an incubation period during which people do not have any symptoms and may feel fine. This
incubation period averages about 12 to 14 days but can range from 7 to 17 days. During this time, people are not contagious.
Initial symptoms (2–4 days; sometimes contagious)
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The first symptoms of smallpox include fever, malaise, head and body aches, and sometimes vomiting. The fever is usually high, in the
range of 101 to 104 degrees Fahrenheit. At this time, people are usually too sick to carry on their normal activities. This is called
the prodrome phase and may last for 2 to 4 days.
Early Rash (about 4 days; most contagious)
A rash emerges first as small red spots on the tongue and in the mouth.These spots develop into sores that break open and spread large
amounts of the virus into the mouth and throat. At this time, the person becomes contagious.
Around the time the sores in the mouth break down, a rash appears on the skin, starting on the face and spreading to the arms and
legs and then to the hands and feet. Usually the rash spreads to all parts of the body within 24 hours. As the rash appears, the fever
usually falls and the person may start to feel better. By the third day of the rash, the rash becomes raised bumps. By the fourth day, the
bumps fill with a thick, opaque fluid and often have a depression in the center that looks like a bellybutton. (This is a major
distinguishing characteristic of smallpox.) Fever often will rise again at this time and remain high until scabs form over the bumps.
Pustular rash (about 5 days; contagious)
The bumps become pustules — sharply raised, usually round and firm to the touch as if there’s a small round object under the skin.
People often say the bumps feel like BB pellets embedded in the skin.
Pustules and scabs (about 5 days; contagious)
The pustules begin to form a crust and then scab. By the end of the second week after the rash appears, most of the sores have scabbed
over.
Resolving scabs (about 6 days; contagious)
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The scabs begin to fall off, leaving marks on the skin that eventually become pitted scars. Most scabs will have fallen off three weeks
after the rash appears. The person is contagious to others until all of the scabs have fallen off.
Scabs resolved (not contagious)
Scabs have fallen off. Person is no longer contagious.
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NAME: Amanda Jacobs
GRADE LEVEL/COMM. SETTING: 5th grade
TOPIC/UNIT: Three World Interactions
UNIT DAY:
LESSON TITLE: Columbian Exchange
UNIT GOALS THAT THIS LESSON MEETS:
This lesson will help students think about the effects of the Columbian Exchange, particularly the effects it had on African
Americans.
GLCE’s ADDRESSED IN THIS LESSON:
-5-U1.4.4
LEARNING OUT COMES:
-Students will analyze the effects of the Columbian Exchange on African Americans
-students will understand the flow of the Columbian exchange.
MATERIALS:
-teacher computer and projector (if none create into over head or handouts)
- Power point
-print power point on for each student
-power point slide with world map on it or over head with world map on that teacher can draw flow of Columbian exchange on
- map activity
-one for each student
-computers (if available to get pictures for maps could use magazine images)
-Atlantic Monthly Article
PROCEDURE:
1. Start of day by power point for a review and introduction in Africa involved in the Columbian exchange.
-teachers will present the PowerPoint and students will follow in the power point notes
2. Have students read “ the real Globalization Story”
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3. Have the students then imagine what the Europeans might have thought as they went into new areas in Africa.
(Answers will vary. However, you should lead the students to compare what they have already discussed about the causes and
transmission of disease in the period when thinking about the interpretation that the Europeans may have taken — that God had removed
the Indians so that the Europeans could spread throughout the New World.)
4.
Now go over the flow of the Columbian exchange so they can fully grasp it by starting in Europe and going to Africa and the new world
(south and north)
-
Teacher will use world map and draw the flow of the Columbian exchange on it
5. To help them grasp this idea of the flow of the Columbian exchange have students complete the map activity
6. finish this lesson by reading a quotation from the Atlantic Monthly article “1491”
“Bradford” mentioned in the article is William Bradford, the second governor of the Plymouth Colony. It sums up what many of
the colonists believed about their divine duty to populate the New World: “The good hand of God favored our beginnings,” Bradford
mused, by “sweeping away great multitudes of the natives … that he might make room for us.”
ASSESSMENT:
-Grade map activity according to grading rubric
REFERENCES:
1. http://www.slideshare.net/HeatherP/columbian-exchange-powerpoint-3138285
2. http://www.slideshare.net/dmcdowell/columbian-exchange
3. http://home.earthlink.net/~mrstephenson_history/Unit-02/ColumbianExchangeMapActivity.html
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The Real Story of Globalization
Trade is an economic activity, but its greatest impact may be biological. Charles C. Mann on stowaway earthworms, far-flung potatoes and the world made
by Columbus.
By CHARLES C. MANN
In the great tropical harbor of Manila Bay, two groups of men warily approach each other, their hands poised above their weapons. Cold-eyed, globe-trotting
traders, they are from opposite ends of the earth: Spain and China.
The Spaniards have a big cache of silver, mined in the Americas by Indian and African slaves; the Chinese bring a selection of fine silk and porcelain,
materials created by advanced processes unknown in Europe. It is the summer of 1571, and this swap of silk for silver—the beginning of an exchange in
Manila that would last for almost 250 years—marks the opening salvo in what we now call globalization. It was the first time that Europe, Asia and the
Americas were bound together in a single economic network.
Th
The silk would cause a sensation in Spain, as the silver would in China. But the crowds that greeted the returning ships had no idea what they were truly
carrying. We usually describe globalization in purely economic terms, but it is also a biological phenomenon. Researchers increasingly think that the most
important cargo on these early transoceanic voyages was not silk and silver but an unruly menagerie of plants and animals, many of them accidental
stowaways. In the sweep of history, it is this biological side of globalization that may well have the greater impact on the fate of the world's people and
nations.
Some 250 million years ago, the Earth contained a single landmass known as Pangaea. Geological forces broke up this vast expanse, forever splitting Eurasia
and the Americas. Over time the two halves of Pangaea developed wildly different suites of plants and animals.
Before Columbus sailed the Atlantic, only a few venturesome land creatures, mostly insects and birds, had crossed the oceans and established themselves.
Otherwise, the world was sliced into separate ecological domains. Columbus's signal accomplishment was, in the phrase of the historian Alfred W. Crosby,
to reknit the seams of Pangaea.
After 1492, the world's ecosystems collided and mixed as European vessels carried thousands of species to new homes across the oceans. The Columbian
Exchange, as Mr. Crosby called it, is why we came to have tomatoes in Italy, oranges in Florida, chocolate in Switzerland and chili peppers in Thailand.
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A growing number of scholars believe that the ecological transformation set off by Columbus's voyages was one of the establishing events of the modern
world. Why did Europe rise to predominance? Why did China, once the richest, most advanced society on earth, fall to its knees? Why did chattel slavery
take hold in the Americas? Why was it the United Kingdom that launched the Industrial Revolution? All of these questions are tied in crucial ways to the
Columbian Exchange.
Where to start? Perhaps with the worms. Earthworms, to be precise—especially the common nightcrawler and the red marsh worm, creatures that did not
exist in North America before 1492.
Well before the start of the silk-and-silver trade across the Pacific, Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors were sailing the Atlantic in search of precious
metals. Ultimately, they exported huge supplies of gold and silver from Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, vastly increasing Europe's money supply. But
those homebound ships contained something else of equal importance: the Amazonian plant known today as tobacco.
Intoxicating and addictive, tobacco became the subject of the first truly global commodity craze. By 1607, when England founded its first colony in Virginia,
London already had more than 7,000 tobacco "houses"—cafe-like places where the city's growing throng of nicotine junkies could buy and smoke tobacco.
To feed the demand, English ships tied up to Virginia docks and took in barrels of rolled-up tobacco leaves. Typically 4 feet tall and 2½ feet across, each
barrel weighed half a ton or more. Sailors balanced out the weight by leaving behind their ships' ballast: stones, gravel and soil. They swapped English dirt
for Virginia tobacco.
That dirt very likely contained the common nightcrawler and the red marsh worm. So, almost certainly, did the rootballs of plants that the colonists imported.
Before Europeans arrived, the upper Midwest, New England and all of Canada had no earthworms—they had been wiped out in the last Ice Age.
In worm-free woodlands, leaves pile up in drifts on the forest floor. Trees and shrubs in wormless places depend on litter for food. When earthworms arrive,
they quickly consume the leaf litter, packing the nutrients deep in the soil in the form of castings (worm excrement). Suddenly, the plants can no longer feed
themselves; their fine, surface-level root systems are in the wrong place. Wild sarsaparilla, wild oats, Solomon's seal and a host of understory plants die off;
grass-like species such as Pennsylvania sedge take over. Sugar maples almost stop growing, and ash seedlings start to thrive.
Spread today by farmers, gardeners and anglers, earthworms are obsessive underground engineers, and they are now remaking swathes of Minnesota,
Alberta and Ontario. Nobody knows what will happen next in what ecologists see as a gigantic, unplanned, centuries-long experiment.
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Before Columbus, the parasites that cause malaria were rampant in Eurasia and Africa but unknown in the Americas. Transported in the bodies of sailors,
malaria may have crossed the ocean as early as Columbus's second voyage. Yellow fever, malaria's frequent companion, soon followed.
By the 17th century, the zone where these diseases held sway—coastal areas roughly from Washington, D.C., to the Brazil-Ecuador border—was dangerous
territory for European migrants, many of whom died within months of arrival. By contrast, most West Africans had built-in defenses, acquired or genetic,
against the diseases.
Initially, American planters preferred to pay to import European laborers—they spoke the same language and knew European farming methods. They also
cost less than slaves bought from Africa, but they were far less hardy and thus a riskier investment. In purely economic terms, the historian Philip Curtin has
calculated, the diseases of the Columbian Exchange made the enslaved worker "preferable at anything up to three times the price of the European."
Did the Columbian Exchange cause chattel slavery in the Americas? No. People are moral agents who weigh many considerations. But anyone who knows
how markets work will understand the pull exerted by slavery's superior profitability.
Much more direct was the role of the Columbian Exchange in the creation of Great Britain. In 1698, a visionary huckster named William Paterson persuaded
wealthy Scots to invest as much as half the nation's available capital in a scheme to colonize Panama, hoping to control the chokepoint for trade between the
Pacific and the Atlantic. As the historian J.R. McNeill recounted in "Mosquito Empires," malaria and yellow fever quickly slew almost 90% of the 2,500
colonists. The debacle caused a financial meltdown.
At the time, England and Scotland shared a monarch but remained separate nations. England, the bigger partner, had been pushing a complete merger for
decades. Scots had resisted, fearing a London-dominated economy, but now England promised to reimburse investors in the failed Panama project as part of
a union agreement. As Mr. McNeill wrote, "Thus Great Britain was born, with assistance from the fevers of Panama."
But Scots could hardly complain about the consequences of the Columbian Exchange. By the time they were absorbed into Britain, their daily bread, so to
speak, was a South American tuber now familiar as the domestic potato.
Compared with grains, tubers are inherently more productive. If the head of a wheat or rice plant grows too big, the plant will fall over, killing it. There are
no structural worries with tubers, which grow underground. Eighteenth-century farmers who planted potatoes reaped about four times as much dry food
matter as they did from wheat or barley.
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Hunger was then a familiar presence in Europe. France had 40 nationwide food calamities between 1500 and 1800, more than one every decade, according to
the French historian Fernand Braudel. England had still more. The continent simply could not sustain itself.
The potato allowed most of Europe—a 2,000-mile band between Ireland and the Ukraine—to feed itself. (Corn, another American crop, played a similar role
in Italy and Romania.) Political stability, higher incomes and a population boom were the result. Imported from Peru, the potato became the fuel for the rise
of Europe.
The sweet potato played a similar role in China. Introduced (along with corn) from South America via the Pacific silver trade in the 1590s, it suddenly
provided a way for Chinese farmers to cultivate upland areas that had been unusable for rice paddies. The nutritious new crop encouraged the fertility boom
of the Qing dynasty, but the experiment soon went badly wrong.
Because Chinese farmers had never cultivated their dry uplands, they made beginners' mistakes. An increase in erosion led to extraordinary levels of
flooding, which in turn fed popular unrest and destabilized the government. The new crops that had helped to strengthen Europe were a key factor in
weakening China.
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Getty Images
American forests are being devastated by foreign pests—and forests full of dead trees are prone to catastrophic fires. A fire in Washington State, above.
The Columbian Exchange carried other costs as well. When Spanish colonists in Hispaniola imported African plantains in 1516, the Harvard entomologist
Edward O. Wilson has proposed, they also brought over some of the plant's parasites: scale insects, which suck the juices from banana roots.
In Hispaniola, Mr. Wilson argues, these insects had no natural enemies. Their numbers must have exploded—a phenomenon known as "ecological release."
The spread of scale insects would have delighted one of the region's native species: the tropical fire ant, which is fond of dining on the sugary excrement of
scale insects. A big increase in scale insects would have led to a big increase in fire ants.
This is only informed speculation. What happened in 1518 and 1519 is not. According to an account by a priest who witnessed those years, Spanish homes
and plantations in Hispaniola were invaded by "an infinite number of ants," their stings causing "greater pains than wasps that bite and hurt men."
Overwhelmed by the onslaught, Spaniards abandoned their homes to the insects, depopulating Santo Domingo. It was the first modern eco-catastrophe.
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A second, much more consequential disaster occurred two centuries later, when European ships accidentally imported the fungus-like organism, native to
Peru, that causes the potato disease known as late blight. First appearing in Flanders in June 1845, it was carried by winds to potato farms around Paris in
August. Weeks later it wiped out fields in the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and England. Blight appeared in Ireland on Sept. 13.
The Irish were more dependent on potatoes than any other Western nation. Within two years, more than a million died. Millions more fled. The nation never
regained its footing. Today Ireland has the melancholy distinction of being the only nation in Europe, and perhaps the world, to have fewer people within the
same boundaries than it did more than 150 years ago.
The Columbian Exchange continues to this day. The Pará rubber tree, originally from Brazil, now occupies huge swathes of southeast Asia, providing the
latex necessary to make the tires, belts, O-rings and gaskets that invisibly maintain industrial civilization. (Synthetic rubber of equal quality still cannot be
practicably manufactured.)
Asian rubber plantations owe their existence to a British swashbuckler named Henry Wickham, who in 1876 smuggled 70,000 rubber seeds from Brazil to
London's Kew Gardens. Rubber-tree plantations are next to impossible in the tree's Amazonian home, because they are wiped out by an aggressive native
fungus, Microcyclus ulei. Much as the potato blight crossed the Atlantic, M. ulei will surely make its way across the Pacific one day, with consequences as
disastrous as they are predictable.
Species have always moved around, taking advantage of happenstance or favorable circumstances. But the Columbian Exchange, like a biological Internet,
has put every part of the natural world in contact with every other, refashioning it, for better or worse, at a staggering rate.
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Getty Images
In Southeast Asia, rubber trees now occupy huge swathes of land; plantations are nearly impossible in the tree's Amazonian home because of a native fungus. A rubber tapper extracts latex in
Brazil, above.
The consequences are as hard to predict as those of globalization itself. Even as plantations of Brazilian rubber take over tropical forests in Southeast Asia,
plantations of soybeans, a Chinese legume, are replacing almost 80,000 square miles of the southern Amazon, an area almost the size of Britain. In dry
northeastern Brazil, Australian eucalyptus covers more than 15,000 square miles. Returning the favor, entrepreneurs in Australia are now attempting to
establish plantations of açaí, a Brazilian palm tree whose fruit has been endorsed by celebrities as being super-healthful.
All of these developments will yield positive economic results—soy exports, for instance, are making Brazil into an agricultural powerhouse, lifting the
fortunes of countless poor farmers in remote places. But the downside of the ongoing Columbian Exchange is equally stark. Forests in the U.S. are being
devastated by a host of foreign pests, including sudden oak death, a cousin of potato blight that is probably from southern China; the emerald ash borer, an
insect from northern China that probably arrived in ship pallets; and white pine blister rust, a native of Siberia first seen in the Pacific Northwest in 1920.
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Forests full of dead trees are prone to catastrophic fires, a convulsive agent of change. New species will rush in to replace those that are lost, with effects that
cannot be known in advance. We will simply have to wait to see what kind of landscape our children will inherit.
Today our news is dominated by stories of debt deals and novel computer applications and strife in the Middle East. But centuries from now, historians may
well see our own era as we have started to see the rise of the modern West: as yet another chapter in the unfolding tumult of the Columbian Exchange.
—Mr. Mann is the author of "1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created," which will be published next week.
Corrections & Amplifications
The emerald ash borer probably arrived in the U.S. in ship pallets from China. An earlier version of this article misspelled pallets as palettes.
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The Columbian Exchange at a glance
Countless animals, plants, and microorganisms crossed the Atlantic Ocean with European explorers and colonists in the sixteenth,
seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. This chart lists some of the organisms that had the greatest impact on human society worldwide.
Old World → New World


Domestic

Animals


New World → Old World
Horses
cattle
pigs
sheep
goats
chickens




turkeys
llamas
alpacas
guinea pigs





Crops 




rice
wheat
barley
oats
coffee
sugar cane
citrus fruits
bananas
melons
Kentucky bluegrass















maize (corn)
potatoes
sweet potatoes
cassava
peanuts
tobacco
squash
peppers
tomatoes
pumpkins
cacao (the source of chocolate)
sunflowers
pineapples
avocados
vanilla





Diseases




smallpox
measles
mumps
malaria
yellow fever
influenza
whooping cough
typhus
chicken pox
the common cold

syphilis (possibly)
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Columbian Exchange Map Activity
Students are to create a map which includes the following items:
- Europe
- North America
- South America
-Africa
- Products and ideas which were exchanged among the continents 4 for each
- Colorful pictures for each of each products or ideas.
Note: The Columbian Exchange is the exchange of goods and ideas involving the Old and New Worlds. In other words, several items
went from Europe and Africa to the settlements in America. In exchange, other products returned either to Europe or to Africa. The main
tool used for this exchange were the Triangular Trade routes.
Listed below are pictures and web site links which explain and list products and ideas exchanged using the Columbian Exchange.
Your map should look something like this:
NOTE: This picture does not contain product pictures.
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Amanda Jacobs
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Map activity grading Rubric
points
4 pointes
3 points
2 points
Has drawn and
Has drawn
Has drawn the Has drawn the
Has not drawn
colored Europe,
all stated
stated
stated countries
the stated
North America,
countries but
countries
inaccurately, but
countries and
South America,
not colored
inaccurately,
not colored
colored them
and Africa
them fully
and colored
completely and
1 point
0 points
them
colored them
fully
Has 4correct
Has correct
Has 2 correct
Has 1 correct
Has 0 correct
products and
product and
products and
product and
products and
ideas for Old
ideas for Old
ideas for Old
ideas for Old
ideas for Old
World
World
World
World
World
connection with connection
connection
connection with
connection with
pictures
with pictures
with pictures
pictures
pictures
Has 4correct
Has correct
Has 2 correct
Has 1 correct
Has 0 correct
products and
product and
products and
product and
products and
ideas for New
ideas for
ideas for New
ideas for New
ideas for New
World
New World
World
World
World
connection
connection with
connection with
connection with connection
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pictures
with pictures
with pictures
pictures
pictures
Has 4correct
Has 3correct
Has 2correct
Has 1correct
Has 0 correct
products and
products and
products and
products and
products and
ideas for
ideas for
ideas for
ideas for Africa
ideas for Africa
Africa
Africa
Africa
connection with
connection with
connection with connection
connection
pictures
pictures
pictures
with pictures
with pictures
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Resource List
Bingo cards-blank. (n.d.). Retrieved from:http://www.billybear4kids.com/BINGO/Games/BLANK.shtml
Blum, J. (2010, July 04). What is a primary source?. Retrieved from: http://knowledgecenter.unr.edu/help/using/primary.aspx
Crouthamel, S. (2003). Columbian exchange. Retrieved from: http://daphne.palomar.edu/scrout/colexc.htm
Columbian exchange. (2008). [Print Photo]. Retrieved from: http://www.slideshare.net/dmcdowell/columbian-exchange
Columbian exchange lesson. (n.d.). Retrieved from: http://schools.ldisd.net/docs/3-01.9thlessonsiop_000.pdf
Columbian exchange power point. (2011). [Web Graphic]. Retrieved from:
http://www.slideshare.net/HeatherP/columbian-exchange-powerpoint-3138285
Historical thinking standard 3. (n.d.). Retrieved from:
http://nchs.ucla.edu/Standards/historical-thinking-standards-1/3.-historical-analysis-and-interpretation
Flemin, T. (Photographer). (201o). Nez perce warrior.. [Print Photo]. Retrieved from
http://dogoodanddowell.blogspot.com/2010/11/presidential-proclamation-national.html
Johnson, P. (2010). Understanding the columbian exchange. Retrieved from http://www.learnnc.org/lp/pages/2652
Lesson european impact. (2011). Retrieved from: http://www.studyzone.org/testprep/ss5/c/impactl.cfm
Merriam-webster incorporated. (2011). Retrieved from: http://www.wordcentral.com/cgi-bin/student?book=Student
Native americans don't dream, we have visions. (2011). [Print Photo].
Retrieved from:
http://nacwr.blogspot.com/2011/08/native- americans-dont-dream-we-have.html
Native american genealogy. (2008, July 27). Retrieved from:
http://www.ancestor.com/dna/native-american-genealogy-dna-testing-for-native-american-heritage/
Photo index. (2010). [Print Photo]. Retrieved from: http://www.firstpeople.us/FP-Html-Pictures/native-american-photographs-01.html
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Stephenson, S. (n.d.). Columbian exchange map acticity. Retrieved from http://home.earthlink.net/~mrstephenson_history/Unit02/ColumbianExchangeMapActivity.html
Tallent, H. (1998, December 12). The columbian biological exchange. Retrieved from:
http://spider.georgetowncollege.edu/htallant/courses/his111/columb.htm
Vocabulary bingo. (2010). Retrieved from: http://novelinks.org/uploads/Novels/ParadiseLost/Vocab 2 Bingo.pdf
Zike, D. (2003). Dinah zike's big book of social studies elementary k-6.