Spanish Colonization

Dona Marina, also known as La Malinche, performed which of the following in the service of Hernan Cortés?

• She used her knowledge of local plants to create a treatment for smallpox, which had afflicted the conquistadores.

• She acted as a double-agent, spying for the Aztecs and helping them to repel the Spanish.

• She used her knowledge of the Nahuatl and Mayan languages, as well as her burgeoning command of Spanish, to act as a diplomat between the Conquistadores and the Maya and Aztec peoples.

Bartolomé de las Casas was a Spanish planter and slaveholder on the island of Hispaniola, in what is today the Dominican Republic. How did de las Casas come to feel about the encomienda system?

• He came to oppose and protest the encomienda system as immoral, writing A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies; he would later become a Dominican friar and urge Carlos V to abolish encomiendas

• He was one of its staunchest defenders, writing a book called A Brief History of the Glories of Imperial Spain; he would later be made a hidalgo by Carlos V

• He opposed it, because it interfered with his business; he had a slave-trading business that primarily trafficked in African people

What distinguished the Roanoke colony from other colonies along the Eastern seaboard?

• It was by far the wealthiest and most successful of the Virginia colonies

• George Washington’s grandfather, Lawrence Washington, founded the colony

• It was the first English colony in the New World; the colony dissolved under mysterious circumstances

Francisco Vasquez de Coronado found neither gold nor silver on his expeditions into what is today Mexico and the American Southwest. What wonders did he find, however?

• The Grand Canyon and the Colorado River; members of his expedition were the first Europeans to see either of them

• The great city of Cahokia, where he was given endless gifts of corn

• The Seven Cities of Gold in New Mexico (though he wasn’t allowed to touch them)

When the Spanish colonized the Americas, they utilized the encomienda system, in which colonial settlers

• set themselves up as wards for Native American laborers, extracting labor in exchange for feudal ‘protection’

• hired Native Americans as cooks for expeditions into the interior of the South American continent

• intermarried with Native peoples and converted them to Catholicism

Hernán Cortés was a Spanish explorer and military leader, also known as a

• Conquistador

• Xocolatl

• Cacique

The Incan Empire was a civilization with a powerful federal government, located in

• The Yucatan Peninsula of North America

• The Andean Mountains of South America

• The Rocky Mountains of North America

What was an effect of Hernando de Soto’s expeditions into what is today the Southeastern United States?

• De Soto’s expedition spread Eurasian diseases into the interior of the country, inadvertently killing thousands of Native people

• De Soto’s discovery of the Fountain of Youth led Florida to become a popular place to retire

• De Soto’s expedition convinced the Native American tribes living in the area, including Seminoles and Cherokees, to band together against future European incursions

What was the purpose of the Pueblo uprising?

• The Pueblo people aimed to convert the Spanish to their religion

• The Spanish aimed to take cultural practices and foods from the Pueblo people back to Spain

• The Pueblo people aimed to reclaim their land and cultural practices from the Spanish

How was the relatively small Conquistador army of Hernan Cortés able to conquer the great Aztec imperial city of Tenochtitlàn?

• Cortés leveraged the discontentment felt by the tributary city-states of the Aztec Empire, like the Tlaxcaltecas and the Texcocans, and allied his army with theirs

• The Conquistadores snuck into the city one at a time, inside wicker baskets carried by Tlaxcala vassals

• Cortés killed Emperor Moctezuma II himself, and in so doing, demoralized the Aztec people so badly that they surrendered at once