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How Did Christopher Columbus Cause The Spread Of America In 1492

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Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” of America in 1492 caused a rush of European countries to travel to the New World in search of new land to conquer. The Europeans’ arrival drastically changed the land and the Natives’ lives in a matter of centuries. Europeans brought both good and bad things with them, they brought law and religion but also death, disease and, destruction. Interactions between colonists and Natives helped spread disease and sometimes war. DISEASE: Native American population decreased drastically from European diseases such as smallpox, yellow fever, malaria, measles and, typhus. European diseases were fatal to the Natives because they no longer had the biological resistance to fight the diseases from the Old World due to their isolation (Kennedy and Cohen 15). The colonizers’ breath, blood, sweat, lice, and their livestock in 1492 unknowingly began the spread of these diseases throughout the New World (Taylor 42). Although minor illness to the colonizers, infections …show more content…

Smallpox was spread through the air on moisture droplets or dust, easily infecting many Natives throughout the country (Taylor 43). When the Spanish first arrived in Hispaniola there was about one million Taino natives, fifty years after their arrival the native population went down to only about 200 people because of the sicknesses the Spanish had unknowingly brought with them (Kennedy and Cohen 15). The same year Cortés laid siege to the city of Tenochtitlán in 1521, a smallpox epidemic broke out in the Valley of Mexico; the combination of Cortés’s conquest and the spread of disease caused the population to decrease from 20 million natives to 2 million in less than a century (Kennedy and Cohen 17). In the 1620s a colonist in New England observed that the Natives “died on heapes...and the

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