Terms : Hide Images
| 61997759 | Hernan Cortes | led about 450 soldiers to Mexico in 1590; with the help of Doña Maria, he was able to capture the Aztec emperor Motecuzoma and eventually capture the city of Tenochtitlan; he brought down the Aztecs | 0 | |
| 61997760 | Motecuzoma II | Last emperor of the Aztecs who was captured by the Spaniards and held captive until he died in 1520 during a skirmish between Spanish and native forces | 1 | |
| 61997761 | Francisco Pizzaro | Led a Spanish expedition from Central America to Peru in 1530 with 180 soldiers and 600 reinforcements; he arrived at a time of dispute between the Incas; he took over the city of Cuzco around 1533 by killing the Incan emperor Atahualpa | 2 | |
| 61997762 | Atahualpa | Last emperor of the Inca. Under pretext of holding a conference the Spaniards invited the ruling elites together and killed almost all of them except Atahualpa, whom they spared only to ask him for gold. Once he delivered it, he was strangled to death and decapitated | 3 | |
| 61997763 | Cabeza de Vaca | he was a Spanish nobleman who joined an expedition to Florida in 1527; most members of the expedition died however, Cabeza and a few others built rafts to try and make it to New Spain; sadly, disaster struck and the current of the Mississippi pushed their boats into a storm that destroyed the makeshift rafts; they were then stranded near modern Galveston, Texas, were the Native Inhabitants held them as slaves, and for eight years Cabeza was a slave to the inhabitant | 4 | |
| 61997764 | James Cook | lived 1728 to 1779; he led three expeditions to the Pacific, started in 1768, and died in a scuffle with the indigenous people of Hawaii, which he came across in 1778 while searching for the northwest passage; he charted eastern Australia and New Zealand; he added New Caledonia, Vanuatu, and Hawaii to European maps of the Pacific; he traveled in the areas of, spent months and intermingled with the Polynesian peoples, especially in tropical islands like Tahiti, Tonga, and Hawaii | 5 | |
| 61997765 | Doña Marina | originally called Malintzin: her name was bestowed upon her by Spanish forces; born about 1500 in central Mexica with Nahuatl as her native tongue; she became fluent in Maya during her travels, and with her linguistic talents, she helped Hernan Cortes to communicate with the Nahuatl-speaking peoples of central Mexico (Spanish to Maya to Nahuatl and back); in 1522, she gave birth to a son fathered by Cortes and in 1526, she bore a daughter to a Spanish captain that she married, thus learning Spanish; died in 1527 during labor | 6 | |
| 61997766 | Mestizo | individuals of Spanish and native Mexican parentage (like the children of Doña Marina) | 7 | |
| 61997767 | Mita | a system that recruited workers for particularly difficult and dangerous chores that free laborers would not accept; an Inca practice of requisitioning draft labor adapted by Spanish administrators, especially on working in the Mexican mines; some of the jobs of the mita workers were to haul heavy baskets of silver ore up steep mine shafts and others woked with toxic mercury; the death rate of these drafter laborers were high | 8 | |
| 61997768 | Encomienda | an institution where recruitment of labor came through; it gave Spanish settlers (encomenderos) the right to compel Tainos to work in their mines/fields but also the responsibility of looking after their worker's health and welfare and to encourage their conversion to Christianity | 9 | |
| 61997769 | Taino | also known as Arawaks; the most prominent people in the region in the Caribbean; the ancestors of the Tainos sailed in canoes from the Orinoco River valley in South America to the Caribbean islands (late centuries BCE); they cultivated manioc and other crops; they lived in villages under the authority of chiefs; these people were put to work in the mines from the encomienda system | 10 | |
| 61997770 | Conquistadores | means "conquerors"; during the early 16th century, they pressed beyond the Caribbean islands, moving west into Mexico and south into Panama and Peru | 11 | |
| 61997771 | Treaty of Tordesillas | signed by Spain and Portugal in 1494; it divided the world along an imaginary north-south line 370 leagues west of the Azores and Cape Verde Islands; Spain could claim any land, unless it was under Christian rule, west of that line, and Portugal gained the same rights for lands east of the line | 12 | |
| 61997772 | Tupac Amaru Rebellion | occurred in 1780; a force of 60000 native peoples revolted under the name of the last of the Inca rulers (Tupac Amaru - beheaded by Spanish conquistadores in 1572); raged for two years | 13 | |
| 61997773 | Engenho | related to the English word engine; known as the sugar mill; the center of the colonial Brazilian life | 14 | |
| 61997774 | Indentured Labor | servants were recruited from Europe for planters in North America to meet the demand of cheap labor; these servants contained, chronically: unemployed, orphans, political prisoners, and criminals; the indentured labor trade/practice in the Americas continued even into the early 20th century | 15 | |
| 61997775 | Aboriginal Australians | lived in small, mobile communities that undertook seasonal migrations in search of food (from Chapter 6); they ventured over vast stretches of their continent and created networks of trade and exchange between hunting and gathering societies (from Chapter 21); they were nomadic foragers rather than sedentary cultivators; Europeans considered them as wretched savages | 16 | |
| 61997776 | Viceroy | they were the Spanish king's representatives in the Americas; they governed two main centers of authority in the Americas (Mexico and Peru) established by Spanish administrators | 17 | |
| 61997777 | Peninsulares | those who came from the Iberian peninsula; in the Spanish and Portugese colonies, these migrants born in Europe stood at the top of the social hierarchy | 18 | |
| 61997778 | audiencias | courts that were staffed by university-educated lawyers; they heard appeals against the viceroy; they had the right to address their concerns directly to the Spanish king; they also conducted review of viceroys' performance at the end of their terms; in many regions, local administration fell to them or town councils | 19 |
