Atlas of Hispanic-American History

of the Southwest culture area. In California, Native Americans at the time of the Spanish conquest subsisted on hunting, gatheri ...

competing states. The empire of Mali, in what is now the Republic of Mali, then became the dominant power. It had emerged in the ...

Gabon, Angola, the Republic of Congo, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire). (Africa’s two nations known as Cong ...

states, such as Benin, Dahomey, and Oyo, that collected slaves from the inte- rior and traded them for European goods at the coa ...

holdout: slavery was not fully abolished on that Spanish island colony until 1886. THREE WORLDS COLLIDE Christopher Columbus’s d ...

Americans who lacked immunity to them. War, forced labor, and the brutality of their European conquerors killed off more. In the ...

Africans, life was torment—including branding, whipping, and other forms of torture. Nonetheless, Africans on the Spanish planta ...

F or more than 300 years, from the late 15th to the early 19th century, much of the Americas belonged to Spain. Spanish ships we ...

and the caravels Pinta and Niña, each probably less than 70 feet long. Columbus himself commanded the Santa Maria, while two Spa ...

did any signs of advanced civilization. Worse, on Christmas Day 1492, the flag- ship Santa Maria broke up on a coral reef off Hi ...

had not yet been found, nor the rich civ- ilizations of China and Japan. Even so, the Spanish sovereigns sent him out on two mor ...

On the fourth voyage, which began in May 1502 and ended in November 1504, Columbus concentrated on trying to find a westward pas ...

otro mundo, or “other world.” Even so he died still convinced that the New World he had landed in was very close to or per- haps ...

upheld despite the fact that he had been beaten to Brazil in January 1500 by the Spanish explorer Vicente Yáñez Pinzón (ca. 1460 ...

Hispaniola The early history of Spain’s first American colony, Hispaniola, was marked principally by the genocide of the indige- ...

conflict of interest that sometimes put him on the side of brutality: he wanted to use Native Americans to produce the gold he f ...

commission or grant—which would spread throughout Spanish America. It originated in the 1490s with informal repartimientos, or a ...

royal control. Since many encomenderos died without heirs, and since their encomiendas then reverted to the crown, the royal tre ...

easily defeated the people of Champotón in battle, and then traded successfully for gold. In doing so, he learned of an even mig ...

tress to the married Cortés, bearing him a son. She was loyal and devoted to him, serving him not only as an intepreter but as a ...