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FrançaisAP US History Unit 1: Period 1, 1491–1607
In a single century, the Atlantic stopped being an ocean nobody crossed and became the busiest highway on the planet. Native American societies who had farmed, traded, and governed the continent for thousands of years now contended with European empires, African captives carried in chains, and a flood of new crops, animals, and pathogens. The collisions of Period 1 produced the demographic, economic, and cultural map on which all of North American history would be drawn.
The 7 lessons in order
Contextualizing Period 1
The opening lesson. Frames the century from 1491 to 1607 as one connected Atlantic story and previews the Native, European, and African forces that drive the next six lessons.
Native American Societies Before European Contact
The diversity of Indigenous nations across North America in 1491. Maize agriculture, mobile Plains societies, mixed-economy Eastern Woodlands villages, and resource-rich Pacific coastal communities.
European Exploration in the Americas
Why Europe sailed: gold, God, and rivalry. The motives that drove Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, and English voyages across the Atlantic during the long sixteenth century.
Columbian Exchange, Spanish Exploration, and Conquest
The biological revolution that followed Columbus: maize and potatoes east, horses and smallpox west. Cortes and Pizarro, the fall of Tenochtitlan, and the demographic catastrophe in the Indigenous Americas.
Labor, Slavery, and Caste in the Spanish Colonial System
The encomienda, the hacienda, the mit'a, and the sistema de castas. How the Spanish Empire built a labor regime around Native conscription and enslaved African workers, and how it sorted everyone who lived inside it.
Cultural Interactions Between Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans
Mutual misunderstanding, selective borrowing, armed resistance, and the religious and racial arguments that European thinkers used to justify conquest. The Requerimiento, Las Casas, and the Valladolid debate.
Causation in Period 1
The closing lesson. Synthesis essay, full-period DBQ practice, and a graphic comparison of pre-contact North America with the Atlantic order that had taken shape by the founding of Jamestown.