Evidence for Impact - Helena High...

Name:_____________________________________

DBQ - Describe and Analyze the Impact of the Columbian Exchange Historical Context:

When Christopher Columbus returned to Spain from the Americas in 1493, he brought with him plants and animals he found in the Americas. In late 1493, he returned to the Americas and brought with him a collection of European animals and plants. Through Columbus’ voyages, he initiated a global exchange that drastically affected the world. The animal, plant, and bacterial life of these two worlds began to mix and this mix had a variety of effects. This exchange of plants, animals, humans, bacteria, and technology between the Old World [Europe, Asia and Africa] and the New World [the Americas] is known as the Columbian Exchange. The Columbian Exchange forged a connection between the Old and New Worlds which had never been connected.

Task: Using the information from the documents and your knowledge of global history, answer the questions that follow each document in Part A. Your answers to the questions will help you write the Part B essay in which you will be asked to:

● Describe the negative impacts of the Columbian Exchange ● Describe the positive impacts of the Columbian Exchange ● Argue whether the benefits of the Columbian Exchange

outweigh the costs

In developing your answers to Part III, be sure to keep these general definitions in mind:

(a) describe means “to illustrate something in words or tell about it” (b) argue means to “give reasons or cite evidence in support of an idea, action, or theory, typically with the aim of persuading others to share one's view.”

Orzechowski/WH - Columbian Exchange DBQ 1

Step 1: Deconstruct the Prompt to identify what you are looking for as you read the documents

Our Example Your Turn

Historical Context:

When Christopher Columbus returned to Spain from the Americas in 1493, he brought with him plants and animals he found in the Americas. In late 1493, he returned to the Americas and brought with him a collection of European animals and plants. Through Columbus’ voyages, he initiated a global exchange that would drastically affect the world. The animal, plant, and bacterial life of these two worlds began to mix and this mix had a variety of effects. This exchange of plants, animals, humans, bacteria and technology between the Old World [Europe, Asia and Africa] and the New World [the Americas] is known as the Columbian Exchange. The Columbian Exchange forged a connection between the Old and New Worlds which had never been connected.


● Describe the negative impacts of the Columbian Exchange ● Describe the positive impacts of the Columbian Exchange ● Argue whether the benefits of the Columbian Exchange outweigh

the costs


Step 2: Create a graphic organizer to organize the evidence you collect

Our Example Your Turn

Evidence for

+ Impact

Evidence for

- Impact


Step 3: Read and annotate documents Our Example


Your Turn

Document 1

In the Americas, Europeans found a variety of foods that were new to them, including tomatoes, pumpkins, peppers. They eagerly transported these to Europe. Two of these new foods, corn and potatoes, became important foods in the Old World. Easy to grow and store, potatoes helped feed Europe’s rapidly growing population. Corn spread all across Europe and to Africa and Asia, becoming one of the world’s most important cereal crops. Europeans also carried a wide variety of plants and animals to the Americas, including wheat and grapes from Europe and bananas and sugarcane from Africa and Asia. Cattle, pigs, goats, and chickens, unknown before the European encounter, joined the Native American diet. Horses and donkeys transported people and goods quickly. Horse also provided the nomadic peoples of western North America with a new more effective way to hunt buffalo. The transfer of food crops from continent to continent took time. By the 1700s, however, corn, potatoes, manioc, beans, and tomatoes were contributing to population growth around the world.

Source: World History , Ellis & Esler, p. 491

1. According to document 1, what was one effect of the Columbian Exchange on the lifestyles of Native Americans? _______________________________________

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1a. According to document 1, explain the impact the Columbian Exchange had on population growth. _______________________________________

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Document 2

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. [...] Maize appeared in China in the 16th century and eventually supplied about one-tenth of the grain supply there. [...] 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.

Source: “The Columbian Exchange” J.R. McNeill. http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-twoworlds/1866

2. According to document 2, how did Columbus’ voyage impact the spread of maize? ____________________________________

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2a. According to document 2, how did the Columbian exchange impact food and crops in China? ____________________________________

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Document 3a

Document 3b . . . an epidemic broke out, a sickness of pustules. It began in Tepeilhuitl. Large bumps spread on people; some were entirely covered. . . .[The victims] could no longer walk about, but lay in their dwellings and sleeping places, . . . And when they made a motion, they called out loudly. The pustules that covered people caused great desolation; very many people died of them, and many just starved to death; starvation reigned, and no one took care of others any longer.

Source: Excerpt and illustration from Sahagún, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, c. 1575-1580; ed., tr., James Lockhart, We

People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest Mexico (Univ. of California Press, 1993)

3. According to document 3a and 3b, what was one effect of the Columbian Exchange on the indigenous people [Native Americans]? ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

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Document 4

4. According to document 4, what was one effect of the Columbian Exchange on the population of the indigenous Americans [Native Americans]? __________________________________________________________________________

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Document 5

On the Island Hispaniola was where the Spaniards first landed, as I have said. Here those Christians perpetrated their first ravages and oppressions against the native peoples. This was the first land in the New World to be destroyed and depopulated by the Christians, and here they began their subjection of the women and children, taking them away from the Indians to use them and ill use them, eating the food they provided with their sweat and toil. The Spaniards did not content themselves with what the Indians gave them of their own free will, according to their ability, which was always too little to satisfy enormous appetites, for a Christian eats and consumes in one day an amount of food that would suffice to feed three houses inhabited by ten Indians for one month. And they committed other acts of force and violence and oppression which made the Indians realize that these men had not come from Heaven. And some of the Indians concealed their foods while others concealed their wives and children and still others fled to the mountains to avoid the terrible transactions of the Christians. And the Christians attacked them with buffets and beatings, until finally they laid hands on the nobles of the villages. Then they behaved with such temerity and shamelessness that the most powerful ruler of the islands had to see his own wife raped by a Christian officer. From that time onward the Indians began to seek ways to throw the Christians out of their lands. They took up arms, but their weapons were very weak and of little service in offense and still less in defense. (Because of this, the wars of the Indians against each other are little more than games played by children.) And the Christians, with their horses and swords and pikes began to carry out massacres and strange cruelties against them. They attacked the towns and spared neither the children nor the aged nor pregnant women nor women in childbed, not only stabbing them and dismembering them but cutting them to pieces as if dealing with sheep in the slaughter house. They laid bets as to who, with one stroke of the sword, could split a man in two or could cut off his head or spill out his entrails with a single stroke of the pike. They took infants from their mothers' breasts, snatching them by the legs and pitching them headfirst against the crags or snatched them by the arms and threw them into the rivers, roaring with laughter and saying as the babies fell into the water, "Boil there, you offspring of the devil!"

Source: Bartolome de las Casas, a young priest who participated in the conquest of Cuba and transcribed Columbus’ journal 5. According to document 3a and 3b, what were two impacts of the Columbian Exchange on the indigenous people in the “New World”? ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

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Document 6a

Document 6b

In Spanish Caribbean islands and Portuguese Brazil by the mid 1500s, colonists had turned to the quick and highly profitable cultivation of sugar, a crop that required constant attention and exhausting labor. They tried to recruit native Americans, but many died from diseases brought by Europeans, such as smallpox, diphtheria, and tuberculosis. And the Indians who survived wanted no part of the work, often fleeing to the countryside they knew so well. European colonists found an answer to their pressing labor shortage by importing enslaved workers from Africa. By 1619, more than a century and a half after the Portuguese first traded slaves on the African coast, European ships had brought a million Africans to colonies and plantations in the Americas and force them to labor as slaves. Trade through the West African forts continued for nearly three hundred years. The Europeans made more than 54,000 voyages to trade in human beings and sent at least ten to twelve million Africans to the Americas.

Source: “Europeans Come to Western Africa,” Terrible Transformation.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1narr1.html

6. According to document 6a and 6b, what was one effect of the Columbian Exchange on the African slave trade? ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

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Document 7

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 dengue (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.

Source: David Walbert, “Disease and Catastrophe.”

http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-twoworlds/1689

7. According to document 7, what was one effect of the Columbian Exchange? _____________________________________________________

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Historical Context:

When Christopher Columbus returned to Spain from the Americas in 1493, he brought with him plants and animals he found in the Americas. In late 1493, he returned to the Americas and brought with him a collection of European animals and plants. Through Columbus’ voyages, he initiated a global exchange that drastically affected the world. The animal, plant, and bacterial life of these two worlds began to mix and this mix had a variety of effects. This exchange of plants, animals, humans, bacteria, and technology between the Old World [Europe, Asia and Africa] and the New World [the Americas] is known as the Columbian Exchange. The Columbian Exchange forged a connection between the Old and New Worlds which had never been connected.


● Describe the negative impacts of the Columbian Exchange ● Describe the positive impacts of the Columbian Exchange ● Argue whether the benefits of the Columbian Exchange

outweigh the costs

In developing your answers to Part III, be sure to keep these general definitions in mind:

(a) describe means “to illustrate something in words or tell about it” (b) argue means to “give reasons or cite evidence in support of an idea, action, or theory, typically with the aim of persuading others to share one's view.”


Evidence for Impact - Helena High...

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