1.1 Introduction
The term “yawp” roughly translates to a loud yell or whine. This is what the American story is and why your primary text during this course is called The American Yawp. This is the story of America, and it’s not always a quiet one.
Module 1: First Peoples, European Colonization and Colonial Era
Historians typically work with written sources. This puts us at a disadvantage when studying the history of Native Americas, because there are few written records of the pre-Columbian period. What we know is based on archeological evidence, investigation of American Indian languages and stories, extrapolation from written records of a later period, and even genomic research, which among other things includes research into DNA. Which tells us the origins of modern populations.
It was once thought that the Native Americans of North and South America originated from one place – Asians who traveled across the Bering Strait perhaps even more than 20,000 years ago. We now know that they came from many places including Japan, Australia, Polynesia, and perhaps even Africa and Europe, and may have arrived here as long as 12,500 years ago.
The New World
Europeans called the Americas “the New World.” But for the millions of Native Americans they encountered, it was anything but. Humans have lived in the Americas for over ten thousand years. Dynamic and diverse, they spoke hundreds of languages and created thousands of distinct cultures. Native Americans practiced agriculture, built cities, and maintained smaller communities. They followed seasonal migration patterns, maintained peace through alliances and warred with their neighbors, and developed self-sufficient economies and maintained vast trade networks. They cultivated distinct art forms and spiritual values. Kinship ties knit their communities together. But the arrival of Europeans and the resulting global exchange of people, animals, plants, and microbes—what scholars benignly call the Columbian Exchange—bridged more than ten thousand years of geographic separation, inaugurated centuries of violence, unleashed the greatest biological terror the world had ever seen, and revolutionized the history of the world. It began one of the most consequential developments in all of human history and the first chapter in the long American yawp.
The First Peoples
While the first European cultures connected to more modern European identifies spent a shorter period in the New World in what is now Canada, in the years after Columbus sailed in 1492 the Spanish created the most ambitious empire seen in the western world since the fall of the Roman Empire more than a thousand years before. The Spanish moved quickly spurred on by the three Gs: God, Glory, and Gold. By 1607, when the English established their first permanent colony in North America, the Spanish Empire ran from what are now the southern United States all the way to the tip of South America.
As Europeans traveled to and from the Americas, they opened up trade across the Atlantic Ocean. This results in what is known as the Columbian Exchange. Under this exchange, plants for the New World revolutionized the food supply in Europe (the Old World), where crops such as potatoes, corn, and peppers made it possible to grow more food, cheaper to feed a larger population. At the same time crops from the Old World including Europe and Africa, such as coffee and sugar, became a source of wealth in the Americas, but also required huge supplies of manpower. Perhaps more important than agricultural exchanges, were the exchanges of diseases, particularly Old World contagions that, exacerbated by the effects of conquest, colonization, brutality, and slavery, killed millions in the Americas. The new crops and deaths of Native Americans, in turn, fueled a trade in slaves in order to provide needed labor for the expanding crops. But the yawp begins with the peoples who resided in the Americas before Christopher Columbus sailed the vast blue seas.
