Warpaths And First Peoples: A Commparitive Eassay
When reading the two text books for the course, the first major difference that I noticed is that First Peoples focuses more on the history of the Native Americans such as their agriculture, economy and their interactions with other tribes. It briefly touches on different invasions that happened throughout the different regions of the Americas. Warpaths goes into more delete regarding the different invasions that took place and also gives a lot more background on the people that lead the invasions. Both books touch on the same subjects but they focus more and go into depth on different topics regarding Native American history.
In the past it was always thought that the America’s were scarcely inhabited by a nomadic uncivilized society. The two texts both state that it is now thought that the America’s were already populated with anywhere between 2 million and 18 million natives, though it is hard to give an exact number due to the rise and decline of many tribes and villages prior to Europeans landing there in the 1500s. North America in 1513 is increasingly being seen as a bountiful paradise thought to have given as many as 18 million people a life of health, plenty and peace, (Steele, 3). The population of Native Americans began to decrease due to more and more visitors from Europe bringing foreign diseases that the people had no immunity to. These epidemics killed more Native Americans then war with the Europeans did.
During the end of the 15th Century Europe decided that it was time to expand its Empire overseas and so they did over the next four centuries, to such places as Asia, Africa, Australia and the Americas. These expansions not only lead to the many Native Americans dying and being displaced from their lands, but it also led to large rivalry between different European Countries. In the seventeenth century, Spanish, French, Dutch, Swedish, and English colonizers all contended for a foothold on the American...
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