During the late 15th and early 16th centuries, eExplorers from Europe had made vast advancements on traveling methods and shipbuilding and had new methods to travel the world. Due to needs for faster trade routes or access to new markets, most powers, starting with Portugal, had started sending Explorers to find different ways to trade and navigate. This would eventually lead them to the New World where they would meet people of different culture. Explorers during this period have many positive and negative effects on the natives. Europeans indirectly killed off native with diseases, enslaved natives with cruel slave methods, and tried to completely erase the native cultures in place of the typical European cultures and religion. As the Europeans found native along the coasts of the New World, they found them easily malleable and able to be used, so they enslaved them and those who fought back were wiped out. Europeans, as well as the Africans, had built up a resistance to many diseases such as smallpox and were therefore not really affected as much by the diseases if they became sick. However, the Native Americans had not had contact with the disease and it quickly spread rapidly and slowly helped the Spanish rid themselves of the natives so they could take control of the land. Geoffrey Cowley offers insight on just how profound the effect of smallpox was when he writes, “ ...When the newcomers arrived carrying mumps, measles, whooping cough, smallpox, cholera, gonorrhea and yellow fever, the Indians were immunologically …show more content…
The Americans continues to push the Native Americans farther away from their homelands and mistreated them even making them walk the Trail of Tears which some call a American Holocaust. Eventually, the Americans tried to remove the Native American culture and just assimilate them into the modern world just like the Europeans in the early