Kazi Ayaan
Mr. Hackney
World Cultures
9 March 2023
Columbian Exchange DBQ The Columbian Exchange was a historic event, between 1500 - 1750 CE, that quickly transformed the world by bringing together two hemispheres of the world connecting people, plants, animals, and ideas which had never been seen before. Before the Columbian Exchange, Native American societies were prospering, they had an excess of land to grow crops which could not be found elsewhere. The Columbian Exchange which was the result of a trek made by Christopher Columbus, which amalgamated the Old World and the New World together. With the addition of Europeans in the New World, and the decline of Natives due to Old World diseases, labor was intensified and African Americans
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Preliminary to the arrival of the Europeans, Natives began to prosper as demonstrated by two documents pertaining to the prosperous communities in Tenochtitlan (Present Day, Mexico City). But, after the two worlds combined, many Native societies collapsed due to the migration of the Old World intertwining with the New World. An excerpt from a memoir by Bernal Diaz shows how the town Tenochtitlan was prospering and in his own words describes it containing, “beautiful stonewood”, “great rooms”, and even “the appearance lodged us”, the devastating loss of warfare led to the despair of the Tenochtitlan as the city was overthrown and nothing was left standing (Document 2). Another poem made by Cortes shows how the Tenochtitlan’s were overthrown and how the Native society had fallen, the poem also shows how the military of the Native cities were conquered by the Old World. In a poem made by Miguel Leon-Portilla it describes the loss of Native land to Spanish conquistador Cortes, who conquered Native land such as Tenochtitlan and destroyed the presence of the city, the military of the Native were not rigorous enough to win against the highly superior military of the Old World. (Document 3). The destruction of Native American cities which are shown in the two articles is the result of the Columbian Exchange which led to the downfall of the Native American