Christopher Columbus And His Voyages

Christopher Columbus - one of the greatest and most mentioned figures in American history. Why? One can simply say because his voyages mark the beginning of European efforts to explore and colonize the Americas. Although he was always judged to be, motivated, desirous of wealth, and hardnosed, historians viewed his voyages as opening the New World to Western civilization and saw them as a representation of the more brutal aspects of European colonization and the beginning of the destruction of Native American peoples and culture.

Upon the arrival of Columbus to North America in 1492 the geography of Europe would go through an interchange of native life forms, known as the Columbian Exchange. Diverse things took place transforming the global ecosystem between the Old World and the New. Europeans encountered plant foods вЂ" potatoes, squash, and corn - cultured by Native Americans. These plants were carried back to Europe so enhanced that they enthused population explosions. Europeans also brought a number of animals to the New World, including horses, pigs, sheep, and poultry, producing mixed results for the These animals served as valuable sources of food, clothing, and energy. Diseases like measles and small pox egress a new dimension of the Columbian Exchange. Many Europeans passed from the microbe and of syphilis. From the Columbian Exchange came an outbreak of diseases that initiated the European economic era.

An unstable economic climate contributed to famine. Sewage pits and graves were breeding grounds for disease, and most of the population neither washed nor kept clean. Wars, riots, and crime also killed tens of thousands in Europe. These ill factors arose a great increase in commerce вЂ" the Commercial Revolution. Here nations were looking for new trade routes, they sought new sources of wealth, and they also had the desire for increased world power. Europe in the Middle Ages also received stimulus from the voyages of Columbus. Several more things associated with it was the appearance of the chartered company, and the creation of the money economy. The Commercial Revolution also helped set the stage for the Industrial Evolution. Thousands of miles away, the Americas were also going through geographical and economical.

Any unity among the diverse original groups came from their shared state of isolation from the rest of humanity. In the Old World, people, disease strains and technologies had been passed back and forth over the East for centuries. New World peoples had no such contact and this resulted in population losses due to a lack of resistance to the incoming Old World diseases. Another way in which these groups were similar is that none had iron and steel. The Europeans knew how to manufacture and use steel weapons and this knowledge gave them military superiority. This paragraph is an amalgamation of past and future geographical results