The Old World encountered tobacco at the dawn of the European Age of Exploration. On the morning of October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus set foot on a small island in the Bahamas. Believing himself to be off the coast of Asia, the Admiral dressed in his best to meet the local inhabitants.
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Why was the tobacco trade from British North America so profitable in Europe? The origin of excitement surrounding tobacco trails back to Italian explorer Christopher Columbus’ first encounter in 1492 with Native American tribes. Tobacco being one of the gifts he received from the Natives, he determined that “dried tobacco leaves are a prized possession among the …
The French became enthusiastic about tobacco, calling it the herbe a tous les maux, the plant against evil, pains and other bad things. By 1565, the plant was known as nicotaine, the basis of its genus name today. By this time, Europeans were discovering recreational uses of tobacco as well as its medicinal ones.
Europe covers about 10.18 million km 2 (3.93 million sq mi), or 2% of the Earth's surface (6.8% of land area), making it the second-smallest continent (using the seven-continent model ). Politically, Europe is divided into about fifty sovereign states, of which Russia is the largest and most populous, spanning 39% of the continent and ...
The descendants of these people were also the first to encounter European explorers and colonists in the sixteenth century. Mississippians were true farmers. They raised maize, squashes and gourds, tobacco, sunflowers, beans, and additional ritual and medicinal plants in fields near permanent homesteads and villages.
The Old World encountered tobacco at the dawn of the European Age of Exploration. On the morning of October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus set foot on a small island in the Bahamas. Believing himself to be off the coast of Asia, the Admiral dressed in his best to meet the local inhabitants.
How Rolfe came by fine Trinadad tobacco seed is not known, but he was growing it experimentally by 1612 in Virginia. Rolfe's agricultural attempt was an unqualified success. By 1614, Ralph Hamor, a secretary of the Colony, reported: . . .
In 1616, Rolfe visited England with his new wife Pocohontas and presented James I with a pamphlet in which the Virginian modestly revealed tobacco as "the principall commoditie the colony for the present yieldeth.". Little did Rolfe guess how important his tobacco crop would become to the economic survival of Virginia.
Yet best known around the world is the blues music of the lower Mississippi River Delta. Developed by people engaged in struggle, infused with spirit and speaking in dialect, the blues are rooted in African music and evolved from field hollars, the work songs of slaves that often carried deeply layered, coded messages.
The gentlewomen of New Orleans reacted violently to the military occupation of their city by Union troops. Many of them displayed their defiance by wearing emblems on their clothing showing support for the Confederacy. Some verbally abused and hurled objects at Union soldiers. Finally, when the contents of a chamber pot were dumped from a balcony and onto the head of Admiral Farragut. Union General Ben Butler issued "Order Number 28," which promised to treat the women "as a woman of the town plying her avocation."
The Delta covers 35,000 square miles from southern Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico, encompassing 219 counties in seven states and approximately 8.3 million people. In northeastern Louisiana, western Mississippi, and southeastern Arkansas, mile after mile of rich, black, alluvial soil stretches before the eye.
In the 1950s Cubans moved to New Orleans and the migration of Vietnamese to southern Louisiana, many of whom became shrimpers, occurred in the 1970s. The bayous of Louisiana and the rich lowland of the lower Mississippi Delta continue to lure immigrants.
The diversity of the lower Mississippi Delta region’s heritage is reflected in the names of cities and towns up and down the river — Ste. Genevieve, Kaskaskia, Altenburg, Wittenburg, Cape Girardeau, Cairo, Hickman, Helena, Memphis, Vicksburg, Natchez, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and Venice.
Also culturally distinctive within the lower Mississippi Delta region is the Creole population of Louisiana. The term Creole refers to a diversity of cultural groups. The white Creoles of colonial Louisiana were born of French and Spanish parents before 1803.
Starting in the 1830s, the introduction of railroads promoted major changes in the way Americans transported products and people, in turn dictating the success or failure of numerous town and cities throughout the Delta region. Several railroads reached the Mississippi River before the Civil War, many more after.
Archaic people favored locations in forests and near streams, but their camps and work sites are found throughout Arkansas in settings like Ozark rock shelters, high promontories overlooking valleys, and alluvial lowlands. Thousands of Archaic sites have been discovered, but few have been studied.
The greatest mound center in Arkansas is the Toltec Site, center of the Plum Bayou culture, situated in Lonoke County in central Arkansas near Little Rock (Pulaski County) and used between 900 and 1,400 years ago.
The pre-European history of Arkansas begins 13,500 years ago in the Pleistocene epoch, when cold weather prevailed over most of North America. Our understanding of life in Arkansas since then will never be complete because many archaeological sites have been lost through erosion, human development, and vandalism, and most ancient fragile and perishable objects have decomposed over the centuries. It is possible, however, to describe the general characteristics of life in Arkansas over the last 12,000 years based on discoveries made here, similar finds made elsewhere in North America, and lifestyles of modern nonindustrial hunters who lived in remote areas of the earth in recent times. Archeologists divide this time into five periods, each having distinctive lifestyles, cultural practices, and artifacts that are found across most of eastern North America.
Woodland Period. About 2,500 years ago, pottery first appeared in Arkansas, marking the beginning of the Woodland Period. Pottery containers represent new dietary practices that probably included the use of seeds, nuts, and other plants that were boiled into stews, soup, and mush.
Mississippian Period. Between 1,000 and 1,200 years ago , profound changes took place among many native societies across eastern North America. The descendants of these people were also the first to encounter European explorers and colonists in the sixteenth century. Mississippians were true farmers.
Another distinctive artifact is a chipped stone adze, a tool probably used for woodworking tasks. Dalton points are found at hundreds of sites in Arkansas.
Oñate ordered one foot cut off every surviving male over age fifteen, and he enslaved the remaining women and children. 2. Santa Fe, the first permanent European settlement in the Southwest, was established in 1610.
The Netherlands , a small maritime nation with great wealth, achieved considerable colonial success. In 1581, the Netherlands had officially broken away from the Hapsburgs and won a reputation as the freest of the new European nations. Dutch women maintained separate legal identities from their husbands and could therefore hold property and inherit full estates.
Spain extended its reach in the Americas after reaping the benefits of its colonies in Mexico, the Caribbean, and South America. Expeditions slowly began combing the continent and bringing Europeans into the modern-day United States in the hopes of establishing religious and economic dominance in a new territory.
New empires would emerge from these tenuous beginnings, and by the end of the seventeenth century, Spain would lose its privileged position to its rivals. An age of colonization had begun and, with it, a great collision of cultures commenced. II. Spanish America.
The Columbian Exchange transformed both sides of the Atlantic, but with dramatically disparate outcomes. New diseases wiped out entire civilizations in the Americas, while newly imported nutrient-rich foodstuffs enabled a European population boom. Spain benefited most immediately as the wealth of the Aztec and Incan Empires strengthened ...
In the 1630s, the mission system extended into the Apalachee district in the Florida panhandle. The Apalachee, one of the most powerful tribes in Florida at the time of contact, claimed the territory from the modern Florida-Georgia border to the Gulf of Mexico.
Traders established Port Royal in Acadia (Nova Scotia) in 1603 and launched trading expeditions that stretched down the Atlantic coast as far as Cape Cod. The needs of the fur trade set the future pattern of French colonization.
John Howard, a pioneer from Virginia, led a party of five— John Peter Salling (a Pennsylvania German), Josiah Howard (John's son), Charles Sinclair, and John Poteet (Vizt) —from the mountains in Virginia to the Mississippi River. The elder Howard had a promised reward of 10,000 acres (4,000 ha) of land for a successful expedition from Virginia's Royal Governor's Council to reinforce British claims in the west. Howard offered equal shares of the 10,000 acres (4,000 ha) to the four other members of his expedition. On March 16, 1742, the party of five started at John Peter Salling's house in August County, and voyaged westwards to Cedar Creek, near the Natural Bridge. Crossing Greenbrier River, and landing at the New River. At New River, the Virginian explorers constructed a large bullboat frame and then covered it with the skin of five buffaloes they killed. The first Englishmen to explore that region then followed the New River over 250 miles (400 km) until the river became too dangerous to navigate, abandoning it at a major falls, traveling overland to the Coal River, then followed the Kanawha River, where they entered the Ohio River, 444 miles (715 km) above the "Great Falls" of present-day Louisville. The five Virginian pioneers traced the northern boundary of Kentucky for five hundred miles (800 km) and finally reached the Mississippi River on June 7. The Virginians were able to descend to just below the mouth of the Arkansas River, where, on July 2, 1742, they were ambushed by a large company of Native Americans, Blacks, and Frenchmen. One or two of Howard's men were killed. The rest were carried them off New Orleans where they were imprisoned as spies. After two years of prison, Salling escaped on October 25, 1744, eventually returning by a southern route to his home in Augusta County, Virginia, in May 1745. John Howard's fate was different than Salling's. After he was arrested and imprisoned, Howard was extradited to France to stand trial. His ship was intercepted by the English, and as a free man, he reported his adventures after landing in London, but his account has not survived. Salling's detailed account of Virginia's adjacent lands was used by Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson's 1751 map. Salling is credited with being the first person to have discovered coal in the United States when he was on the aptly named Coal River.
In the fall of 1673, Jacques Marquette , a French Jesuit missionary, and Louis Jolliet , a French Canadian explorer, passed a small piece of Kentucky by the mouth of the Ohio on their boat trip down the Mississippi River. Later, their boat capsized, and many of their papers were destroyed.
Several factors contributed to the desire of the residents of Kentucky to separate from Virginia. First, traveling to the Virginia state capital from Kentucky was long and dangerous. Second, offensive use of local militia against Indian raids required authorization from the governor of Virginia. Last, Virginia refused to recognize the importance of trade along the Mississippi River to Kentucky's economy. It forbade trade with the Spanish colony of New Orleans, which controlled the mouth of the Mississippi, but the trade was important to Kentucky communities.
The Woodland era represents the "middle" era between the mostly hunter-gatherers of the Archaic era and the agriculturalist Mississippian culture era. The Woodland era is a developmental stage without any massive changes but is constituted by a continuous development in shelter construction, stone and bone tools, textile manufacture, leather crafting, and agricultural cultivation. Archaeologist have identified distinctly separate cultures during the Middle Woodland period. Examples include the Armstrong culture, Copena culture, Crab Orchard culture, Fourche Maline culture, the Goodall Focus, the Havana Hopewell culture, the Kansas City Hopewell, the Marksville culture, and the Swift Creek culture. The remains of two distinct Woodland groups, the Adena (early Woodland) and the Hopewell (middle Woodland), have been found in present-day Louisville, and in the central Bluegrass and northeastern Kentucky areas.
They grew most of their own food, using the corn crop to feed hogs and to distill into whiskey. They obtained their cash from sales of burley tobacco, hemp, horses and mules. The hemp was spun and woven for cotton bale bagging and ropes. Tobacco was labor-intensive to cultivate; planters were attracted to Kentucky from Maryland and Virginia, where their own lands were near exhaustion from tobacco cultivation. Tobacco was a labor-intensive crop, and plantations in the Bluegrass region used slave labor, but on a smaller scale than the cotton plantations of the Deep South.
The origin of the name "Kentucky" is not known with any certainty. One suggestion is that it is derived from an Iroquois name meaning "land of tomorrow". Native America: A State-by-State Historical Encyclopedia states that "Various authors have offered a number of opinions concerning the word's meaning: the Iroquois word "kentake" meaning "meadow land," the Wyandotte (or perhaps Cherokee or Iroquois) word "ken-tah-the" meaning "land of tomorrow," the Algonquian term "kin-athiki" referring to a river bottom, a Shawnee word meaning "at the head of a river," or an Indian word meaning land of "cane and turkeys." There were many variations of the word during early pioneer times, including Kentucke (as in The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke ), Kaintuckee and Cantuckey.
Some citizens enthusiastically supported the war, at least in part because residents believed victory would bring new lands for the expansion of slavery. Others—especially Whigs, who followed Henry Clay, opposed the war and refused to participate. The quest for honor was especially important, as a rising generation sought their self-identity and a link with heroic ancestors. The state easily met its quota of 2500 volunteer troops in 1846 and 1847. Although the war's popularity declined after a year or two, clear majorities supported it throughout.
Tobacco, brought into Spain in the midsixteenth century, became essential to the pleasure of many Europeans. Maize, or Indian corn (in Europe corn refers to cereal grains in general), was imported from the New World and widely cultivated in Spain and Italy.
The African slave trade—begun by the Africans and the Arabs and turned into a profitable seaborne enterprise by the Portuguese, Dutch, and English—is a series of horrors, from the rounding up of the slaves by local chieftains in Africa, through their transportation across the Atlantic, to their sale in the Indies.
Private Robert Frazer was the first member of the Lewis and Clark party to announce publication of an expedition journal. His account never reached print, and the original journal was lost. This manuscript map is the only remnant of that initial publishing attempt. Since Frazer had little or no knowledge of surveying or natural sciences, the map is a strange piece of cartography. He traces the expedition's route, but continues to depict older views of the Rocky Mountains and western rivers. Sometimes ignored, the Frazer map was one of the first to reveal the course of the journey and some of its geographic findings.
Throughout the winter of 1804–1805 at Fort Mandan, William Clark drafted a large map of the West—what he called “a Connection of the country.” That map, recopied several times by Nicholas King, provided the first accurate depiction of the Missouri River to Fort Mandan based on the expedition's astronomical and geographical observations. Drawing on “information of Traders, Indians, & my own observation and idea,” Clark sketched out a conjectural West—one characterized by a narrow chain of mountains and rivers with headwaters close one to the other, still suggesting an easy water passage to the Pacific Coast.
One of the sources for Nicholas King's 1803 map was this sketch of the Great Bend of the Missouri River (north of present-day Bismarck, North Dakota). Copied by Lewis from a survey for the British North West Company by David Thompson, this map provided the exact latitude and longitude of that important segment of the Missouri. Thompson, traveling overland in the dead of winter, spent three weeks at the Mandan and Pawnee villages on the Missouri River, calculating astronomical observations. He also recorded the number of houses, tents, and warriors of the six Indian villages in the area.
Among the Shoshone, Lewis noted that dried roots were stored by being “foalded in as many parchment hides of buffaloe.” Hide bags, like the one on display, were made by cleaning and sizing rawhide so that it had a smooth, paintable surface. This bag is decorated in a distinctive Plateau style.
When Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark into the West, he patterned their mission on the methods of Enlightenment science: to observe, collect, document, and classify. Such strategies were already in place for the epic voyages made by explorers like Cook and Vancouver.
. . in fact every man is a chief.” He set out to change that by “making chiefs.” He passed out medals, certificates, and uniforms to give power to chosen men. By weakening traditional authority, he sought to make it easier for the United States to negotiate with the tribes. Lewis told the Otos that they needed these certificates “In order that the commandant at St. Louis . . . may know . . . that you have opened your ears to your great father's voice.” The certificate on display was left over from the expedition.
Lewis first saw the bird on July 20, 1805, but did not get a specimen until the following spring at Camp Chopunnish on the Clearwater River in Idaho. Lewis's description of the bird's belly is still accurate when examining the specimen today: “a curious mixture of white and blood red which has much the appearance of having been artificially painted or stained of that colour.”