Essay
Iberian Roots of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1640
In its broadest sense, African American history predates the history of the United...
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Showing results 1 – 9 of 9
Essay
The US and Spanish American Revolutions
If one says “American Revolution” in the United States today, it is assumed that what is being referred to is the North American liberation struggles against the British Empire in...
Glossary Term – Event
Treaty of Tordesillas
The Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 moved the boundary between Spanish and Portuguese lands in the New World. The line of demarcation established a year earlier by the pope’s papal bull Inter Caetera shifted 1,000 miles westward, with the result that Brazil (when it was discovered) came under Portuguese control.
Glossary Term – Person
Amerigo Vespucci
Though born in the Republic of Florence (Italy), like many others from the trading city-states on the Mediterranean, Vespucci (1451–1512) became a mariner and explorer for another country. While in the employ of the Medici family of bankers, he was sent to work in the family’s bank in Spain. While there he came to the attention of King Manuel I of Portugal, who hired him to be an observer on several voyages to explore the portion of the Americas acquired through the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. Several published accounts of these voyages...
Teaching Resource
The Treaty of Tordesillas: Resolving “a Certain Controversy” over Land in the Americas
Background
Imperial rivalries have often been resolved through war; however, the Treaty of Tordesillas is an important example of a rivalry that was resolved without hostilities through the demarcation of areas of influence by the Catholic Church. The Treaty of Tordesillas successfully arbitrated which lands could be ruled by Spain and which could be ruled by Portugal by creating a boundary “three hundred and seventy leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands.” This line ran from the North to South Poles....
Teaching Resource
American Slavery in Comparative Perspective
Of the 10 to 16 million Africans who survived the voyage to the New World, over one-third landed in Brazil and between 60 and 70 percent ended up in Brazil or the sugar colonies of the Caribbean. Only 6 percent arrived in what is now the United States. Yet by 1860, approximately two thirds of all New World slaves lived in the American South.
For a long time it was widely assumed that southern slavery was harsher and crueler than slavery in Latin America, where the Catholic church insisted that slaves had a right to marry, to seek...