History of the United States I / Unit 2 USH1 0181 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
The Columbian Exchange
The idea
The Columbian Exchange moved goods both ways. From the Americas came maize, potatoes, tobacco, beans, squash, peppers, cacao, cassava and manioc. To the Americas came rye, wheat, rice, sugar and tea. Columbus brought pigs, horses, cows and chickens on his second voyage, and later explorers reintroduced species that had gone extinct there, particularly horses. Those animals were less vulnerable to disease than humans and thrived both wild and domesticated.
In practice
Sugar, which the anchor says carried the same economic importance then as oil does today.
Where people slip
The exchange also carried syphilis, malaria, smallpox, yellow fever, plague, chickenpox, measles and mumps. Tobacco was unknown in Europe before fourteen ninety-two and first drew a stigma, Spanish explorers reading its smoke as proof of the Devil's sway in the New World. It became the first truly global commodity in the fifteen nineties. The anchor names one further outcome as major: a shift from treating the Bible as the source of all received wisdom to trusting observation.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Builds on
Unlocks
Something wrong in this lesson? Flag it · Sources for History of the United States I