Interdisc US History 1 1

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_video link="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBQtWGsks30"][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text][/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]hello everyone and welcome to your first interdisciplinary uh lecture this is a unit one section one and we're going to call it pre-columbian america uh america before the europeans got there so what do we do in this section uh here we are going to investigate the life of the native peoples before the mass arrival of europeans in the 1400s now technically the first europeans actually arrived in the 1100s but they were uh scandinavian and they didn't hang around very long they basically landed in canada said nope and then they headed back in this section though we will examine how the first peoples arrived in america we're going to compare the differences in life based on geography and we're also going to identify similarities in their lifestyle and also look at their differences so first let's look at migration to the americas it's only america has been here you know the land the rocks and you know the trees have been here for billions of years um however it's only been in the last few thousand years that humans have made it to the americas um the first arrivals to the amer to america were uh nomads uh you'll notice that nomad is uh highlighted it's bolded and underlined that means it's an important term uh so make sure you you uh can define these terms and names that i uh put in bold um nomads are traveling bands of hunter-gatherers basically they followed the herds to america um although how and why and when these first nomads arrived in america is actually still very hotly debated among some people the first theory uh during the last ice age the sea level dropped and that meant that uh russia and alaska were connected by by a piece of land uh over today what is known today as the bering strait back then they called it beringia this land bridge that connected the two um and so some people believe that the first uh native americans uh came over following the herds and went over the bering strait however there's another uh theory that's popped up more recently and that has some archaeological evidence that goes along with it that says that indigenous peoples traveled uh by boat from asia to america and sailed down the west coast of north america until they arrived in central and south america now if theory two is correct they were uh here fifteen thousand years ago maybe uh earlier uh instead of the thirteen thousand to eleven thousand that the landbridge theory says uh by the way you might notice down at the bottom this is a source where i got this information so here are the two possible migration patterns to america the blue one is the the boat theory and the red line is the bering land bridge theory so it's important to remember and this is a big important thing to remember always is that i'm going to be guilty of this we're going to make generalizations we're going to make sort of big broad comparisons however it's important to remember that when we talk about any group especially when we talk about native americans we are talking about hundreds or even thousands of tribes and nations and languages and belief systems one of the hard things is there's no written record there is no written language of the native americans and only a certain amount of archaeological evidence and so scholars disagree on the number of native americans who lived in america before the europeans came over they believe it could be somewhere between 2 and 20 million which is a pretty wide margin the national museum of american indians in of the american indian in washington dc says on their website that there is no single american indian culture or language so what i'm trying to get at here is that we are going to make a lot of big broad statements but it's important to remember that making statements like all native americans believed this or all native americans lived by doing this is not the world's best statement to make it's it's a little too broad so as a way of pointing this out here are just some of the tribes that were in uh america pre-columbian and this is just the big ones there were more and all these tribes had sort of sub-tribes it wasn't like they were one big mass unit they were smaller groups as well they were sort of made up of smaller groups so these different tribes divided themselves into social groups known as tribes or nations some groups remained nomadic they moved from place to place while other nations were able to create agriculture they were able to settle down and build cities two of the greatest empires of the america were in central mexico the aztec and the maya the mayans lived along the east coast of mexico the aztec lived further inland both of these empires had large cities they had temples they had pyramids that rivaled anything that was in europe at the time they did math they you know studied the stars they were astronomers they were not backwards people they were not childish they were they were not savage if you want to use that word which is a very dangerous word to use uh but they they were a smart people and they were powerful so here are the locations of the ma the aztec and the maya civilizations during that time here is an example of their architecture as well this is chichen itza built by the mayans really cool thing is that this temple if you notice along the left-hand side that there's a snake head down at the bottom of the pyramid on certain days uh that have to do with the equinox when the sun is at a certain place uh the sun will hit the pyramid and a shadow will form so that it looks like a snake is slithering down the side of chichen itza it's awesome we also have the mayan calendar uh you know conspiracy theory buffs loved the mayan calendar but it was a calendar it was it showed that they knew how to follow the stars and record time we also have this aztec uh civil uh examples of aztec civilization this is teotihuacan with the temple of the sun in the background there this is an aztec temple and here is the aztec city of tenochtitlan i partially put these here because i like saying their names uh this is the formal former capital of the aztec empire uh modern-day new uh modern-day mexico city is built on its ruins uh we'll get to that in the next section when we talk about uh hernan cortes meeting the aztecs now let's look at several uh geographic areas and see how people lived in those areas we're going to start with the southwest we had several tribes in the southwest mainly they relied on farming um and you know if you know the american southwest a nice chunk of it is desert um and so how did they farm they irrigated they diverted rivers to make sure they could water their crops and a lot of these tribes including a tribe known as the hohokam built homes from adobe brick adobe is this sort of mud that they fashioned into bricks and then the sun they put it out in the sun and the sun dried it and it hardened and it turned into this very strong very durable brick and they built their homes out of it some of these homes had multiple stories other tribes such as the anasazi tribe built their homes into the sides of cliffs so here is one example of uh hohokam ruins built out of adobe this is a casa grande national monument they built this little thing over the top of it to keep it from being hit too hard by the sun and here anasazi cliff dwellings in mesa verde national park in colorado as well just they cut into the rock now let's look at the great plains the nomads of the great plains a lot of tribes of pre-columbian times were required to live differently based on the geography if you live in the desert of the southwest you're going to have to live one way if you live in the great plains you're going to have to live another the great plains are the central region of north america not very if anyone who's ever driven through kansas knows what i'm talking about there aren't a lot of trees it's a lot of sort of rolling hills it's generally very dry it has a lot of grass though that grows there which meant that the buffalo loved the place the buffalo were known to you know be there in the millions uh in the great plains and so the uh tribes of the great plains uh would hunt and gather they followed the herds nomadically um and uh they actually had a a deep sort of spiritual uh connection to the the animals that they hunted uh this would become important later on when a lot of these animals that they hunted disappeared like the buffalo or the bison depending on how you feel like saying it so here this region in red is what we call the great plains and here are some planes hunters sneaking up on buffalo this is an artistic interpretation you'll notice that they're not using horses that's because horses are not there yet horses came over with the europeans now let's look at the mississippians this is important because they're very close to home mississippians lived along the mississippi river which makes sense considering their names and they also lived along the tributaries the smaller rivers that that sort of flow into the mississippi they used the river to water their crops irrigation again the most famous of these groups are the cahokia who lived just east of saint louis they had a large city at cahokia and they farmed but they also traded with other tribes we know this thanks to archaeology they found things that are not from cahokia at cahokia so we know that they traded with other tribes to get that stuff they also built these large mounds out of earth as best we can tell they're either for religious purposes or they were important people buried inside these mounds cahokia was around for about 400 years roughly from about one thousand fourteen hundred in the common era um although no one was certain exactly why it was abandoned a lot of scholars believe it was because they had over farmed they overdid it basically at cahokia and that forced them to eventually leave so here's monks mound it's the largest of the remaining mounds the kokia mounds state historic site and you can still walk up it today although you got to be careful they're trying to limit the number of people because if you walk on it too much it actually lower of monk's mount is getting shorter and shorter over the years because so many people have been marching to the top of it here's just another really cool mound this is serpent mound in ohio if you look at it from above it takes the uh shape of a large snake now let's look at the northeast the iroquois confederacy in northeastern america right around the new york area today upstate new york uh several tribes actually banded together into what we call a confederation this is a confederation is a sort of a a loose uh binding they they are they're they're not one big unit but there are several small units that have combined themselves for their own mutual safety protection [Music] and this is called a confederacy the iroquois confederacy was made up of five big tribes the mohawk the onondaga the kyoga the uh oneida and the seneca uh were the main tribes in what was called the iroquois confederacy this was created in the 1100s some people actually believe it to be the oldest functioning democracy in the world uh greece got there first of course but greece stopped being a democracy there are also many who believe that the iroquois confederacy actually helped to inspire american democracy if you want to look at this more go to pbs how the iroquois great law of peace shaped u.s democracy here is what the iroquois lived in uh they lived in long houses these large wooden structures however they were pretty easy to tear down and build up again so you know they could move if necessary and here's just a quote from the article the iroquois confederacy founded by the great peacemaker in 1142 is the oldest living participatory democracy on earth in 1988 the u.s senate paid tribute with a resolution that said the confederation of the original 13 colonies into one republic was influenced by the political system developed by the iroquois confederacy as were many of the democratic principles which were incorporated into the constitution itself put more simply the congress of the united states said that the iroquois confederacy shaped american democracy which is a pretty cool big statement to make now let's get general here let's look at general similarities uh like i said it's dangerous to speak in generalities but let's live rather dangerously for a moment um pardon me indigenous tribes in general of the americas were smaller uh they were ruled by a leader or a chief now there are uh obviously uh groups that don't fit into this like we talked about the aztec and the maya but if you look at north america these tribes are not giant you know if you look at the cherokee it's not one giant group called the cherokee it's several smaller tribes that all make up the cherokee many of these tribes were spiritualist in their belief meaning they believed all things in nature were inhabited by spirits both animals and other living things and things that were inanimate rocks and trees and things like that and deities would vary depending on the location so for instance if you lived in the american southwest one of the most important gods was the trickster god coyote however if you lived among the tlinkit people in north western alaska crowe the crow was an important god just an example this is one of my favorite pieces of art uh i have family that lives in new mexico and i saw this piece of art in uh the wheel right museum of the american indian in santa fe this is called high rollers eye in the sky by a native american artist named judith lowery in 1999. uh in this painting you see the trickster god coyote at a native american casino dealing cards to shiva jesus buddha and god uh this is uh i really enjoy this piece of art right here that that coyote is dealing the cards in general the men were hunters the men went out to hunt if you were a nomadic tribe meanwhile women stayed closer to the village they were the gatherers they were the the homemakers they took care of the household and they took care of the children however this also meant that women had a lot of power in the house hold uh and in the tribes as well oftentimes they were religious leaders oftentimes they could rise to the level of chief and oftentimes these tribes were matrilineal which meant that power and also the family name uh went down through the mother's side not through the father's side now many of these tribes also used a system of farming that we call three sister farming three sister farming is a combination of three different kinds of crop vegetables uh beans corn and squash uh all three of these vegetables grown together uh helped sort of protect the others uh if you're a biology fan this is what is known as symbiosis the beans were able to climb uh the the tall stalks of corn and the squash kept pests away because they had spiky leaves meanwhile the beans also returned nitrogen to the soil which meant that the soil would not become infertile otherwise the nutrients would just be sucked right out of it again if you want to look at more of this look at the article meet the three sisters who sustain native america so here's an example of three sister farming today if you're an organic farmer this is called companion planting so why is all this important well other than the fact that native american history is just as important as any other part of american history although it has often been overlooked different tribes had different experiences with europeans and we're going to see this you know some tribes interacted with the spanish and some interacted with the french and some interacted with the british and different tribes had different interactions and meetings native americans have also been portrayed by american authors and american historians in a variety of ways uh from you know the savage to what we call the noble savage some people see them as sort of the danger of the frontier they're out there and you know they're they're dangerous but other people say that you know they they're sort of symbolic of uh the the wide open freedoms of america uh if you're looking for an example of this look at why the uh at the boston tea party uh the sons of liberty dressed up as mohawk indians it wasn't because they were trying to fool anybody everybody knew who they were it was a symbol they are saying we are free americans just like the mohawk many parts of native american traditions are also still around today we are going to look at these as well uh native american originated sports for instance native american art philosophy and religion of native americans and also how native americans have been stereotyped as well and we are going to look at these in class<br><!-- wp:image {"id":1776,"sizeSlug":"large","linkDestination":"none"} -->rn<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img class="wp-image-1776" src="https://en.videoencontexto.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Interdisc_US_History_1_1_fBQtWGsks30.jpg" alt="Interdisc US History 1 1" /></figure>rn<!-- /wp:image -->[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]