69 pages • 2 hours read
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
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During Reading
Reading Questions & Paired Texts
Reading Check and Short Answer Questions on key points are designed for guided reading assignments, in-class review, formative assessment, quizzes, and more.
INTRODUCTION-PART 1
Reading Check
1. By what name was Christopher Columbus known at the time of his historical exploratory voyage?
2. What invertebrate species did John Rolfe introduce into North America?
2. What plant species did John Rolfe bring from the Caribbean to mainland North America?
3. What disease acquired the nickname “Yellow Jack”?
4. What disease played a role in the decision to enslave African people and import them to North America?
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. What does Mann use the Faro a Colón and the statue of Miguel López de Legazpi and Andrés Ochoa de Urdaneta y Cerain to represent?
2. What thesis of Mann’s is represented by the term “Homogenocene”?
3. What common misrepresentation of Indigenous society and the North American landscape does Mann try to correct?
4. How did John Smith’s return to England to seek medical treatment inadvertently lead to starvation among the European colonists in the Virginia Company’s colony?
5. What two forces contributed to the loss of indentured servants in Carolina and Virginia?
Paired Resource
- This Business Insider article details the results of research into the climate impact of the deaths of Indigenous peoples in the era following Columbus’s arrival in North America.
- This resource relates to the themes of The Widespread Impacts of the Columbian Exchange and The Humanitarian Cost of Expansion.
- Which of Mann’s arguments does this research help support? How does it help support a thematic motif that Mann is also developing?
“These 5 Ancient Cities Once Ruled North America—What Happened to Them?”
- This National Geographic article explores the characteristics of five great pre-Columbian North American cities and offers insight into possible reasons for their decline.
- This resource relates to the themes of The Widespread Impacts of the Columbian Exchange and The Humanitarian Cost of Expansion.
- Which of Mann’s arguments does this article help support? Which of these cities were likely depopulated as a result of European colonization? How does this information help support one of 1493’s thematic motifs?
PART 2
Reading Check
1. What did the Ming dynasty ban for 50 years?
2. What innovation did the Chinese huizi represent?
3. To what Spanish-occupied territory in the South Seas did many Chinese people immigrate?
4. What Portuguese-imported crop from the Americas quickly became an important part of Chinese culture?
5. What was Zheng Chenggong’s profession?
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. How did the instability of Chinese coins lead to trade being opened with Spain?
2. How did trade with China impact the artisans and tradespeople of Spain?
3. How did the seizure of Spanish silver lead to the displacement of the Hakka and other mountain-dwelling peoples?
4. What theory did Hong Liangji introduce as a result of American crops being introduced into Pacific nations?
5. How did tobacco farming in China lead to ecological problems?
Paired Resource
“Long View: The 16th-Century Trade Route That Brought China to Mexico”
- This article from Americas Quarterly briefly explains how Chinese people and culture impacted Mexico due to the silver trade.
- This resource relates to the theme of The Widespread Impacts of the Columbian Exchange.
- How does this article complement Mann’s discussion of the impact that China and Spain had on one another? Were you surprised to learn how Mexico has been influenced by China and Chinese immigrants?
“China’s Big Mexican Coin Sculpture”
- This article from the Numismatic Bibliomania Society explains a giant replica of a Mexican coin in Jinggangshan, China. (Please note that the article is followed by some discussion by Society members; students do not need to read the discussion in order to understand the main ideas of the article.)
- This resource relates to the theme of The Widespread Impacts of the Columbian Exchange.
- How does this article help demonstrate the long-range impact of the silver trade that Mann covers in Part 2 of the book?
PART 3
Reading Check
1. What shortened the growing season in Europe?
2. Which Andean crop helped alleviate famines in Europe?
3. What unfortunate characteristic of the rubber tree forests in China did Mann particularly notice on his visit there?
4. Where did the Spanish first encounter rubber?
5. What did Henry Alexander Wickham smuggle from Brazil to England?
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. What evidence does Mann present to demonstrate how sophisticated the Indigenous farmers of the Andes were at the time of Spanish contact?
2. How did European farming practices create a need for an unusual resource from the Chincha Islands?
3. How did P. infestans cause a famine in Ireland?
4. What contribution did Charles Goodyear make to the commercial development of rubber?
5. What was unsustainable about the way rubber was harvested?
Paired Resource
“Locating the Transatlantic Seed Trade in James Madison’s Garden”
- This article from the American Philosophical Society discusses how James Madison’s garden reflects the importance of the importation of European seeds into North America.
- This resource relates to the themes of The Widespread Impacts of the Columbian Exchange and A New Evolutionary Era: The Homogenocene.
- Which of Mann’s arguments does this article help support? How does the article’s emphasis compare to the examples that Mann offers in support of his argument?
PART 4
Reading Check
1. What task did Joaõ Garrido perform on slave ships?
2. What city did Joaõ Garrido help to build?
3. Who were the maroons?
4. Who was Aqualtune?
5. What invasive species threatens the rice terraces of the Philippines?
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. Why did the Spanish find it so difficult to establish sugar plantations around São Tomé?
2. What argument does Mann make about racism and slavery when he cautions his audience against “presentism”?
3. What point does Mann make about Africa’s role in the slave trade?
4. In what way has Brazil’s recent treatment of its maroon communities differed from its own and other nations’ historical approach to these communities?
5. In the book’s final chapter, what role does Mann acknowledge playing in the Homogenocene himself?
Recommended Next Reads
The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 by Alfred W. Crosby
- Crosby’s book on the Columbian Exchange has long been considered a seminal text for understanding this aspect of history.
- Shared themes include The Widespread Impacts of the Columbian Exchange, A New Evolutionary Era: The Homogenocene, and The Humanitarian Cost of Expansion.
- Shared topics include Columbus, colonialism, slavery, global trade, the spread of diseases and microorganisms, and the global redistribution of plants and animals.
- The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 on SuperSummary
Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization by Iain Gately
- In contrast to the sweeping scope of Mann’s 1493, Gately’s text focuses on tobacco’s history and influence as a way to explore many of the same ideas Mann explores.
- Shared themes include The Widespread Impacts of the Columbian Exchange, A New Evolutionary Era: The Homogenocene, and The Humanitarian Cost of Expansion.
- Shared topics include colonialism, slavery, global trade, the spread of diseases and microorganisms, and the global redistribution of plants and animals.
Reading Questions Answer Key
INTRODUCTION-PART 1
Reading Check
1. Cristóbal Colón (Chapter 1)
2. Earthworms (Chapter 2)
3. Tobacco (Chapter 2)
4. Yellow fever (Chapter 3)
5. Malaria (Chapter 3)
Short Answer
1. Mann discusses these statues as representations of how significantly the Columbian Exchange changed global cultures, economies, and ecologies. For example, he points out their impact on the landscape due to global trade routes and travel. (Chapter 1)
2. Mann believes that Columbus’s voyage sparked changes so significant that they marked a new era in human history—an era of greater homogeneity he calls the “Homogenocene.” (Chapter 1)
3. Mann points out that the common portrayal of the North American landscape as a thinly populated, vast, undeveloped wilderness is incorrect. In reality, when European colonists began arriving in the early 1600s, North America was home to large, rapidly developing, and sophisticated societies. (Chapter 2)
4. Powhatan was instrumental in feeding the European colonists who were not adept at farming on North American land. John Smith was the European most able to negotiate with Powhatan; after he returned to England, the relationship between the local Indigenous people and the European colonists deteriorated, leading the Europeans to attack the Tsenacomoco and Powhatan to cut off the colonists’ food supply. (Chapter 2)
5. After working a set number of years to pay off the debt incurred during their passage to North America, indentured servants generally left service. The regular loss of indentured servants in this way was compounded by the malaria epidemics in Virginia and Carolina, as many indentured servants died of the disease. (Chapter 3)
PART 2
Reading Check
1. Private sea trade (Chapter 4)
2. It was the first successful paper money. (Chapter 4)
3. The Philippines (Chapter 4)
4. Tobacco (Chapter 5)
5. Pirate (Chapter 5)
Short Answer
1. The instability of Chinese coins led to silver being used as currency, depleting Chinese silver mines. Because Spain had plenty of silver imported from its South American colonies, Spain became a Chinese trading partner. (Chapter 4)
2. Chinese imported goods became cheaper than the goods produced by Spanish artisans and tradespeople, leading to the decline of production in Spain. (Chapter 4)
3. After Japanese pirates seized Spanish silver, Spain retaliated against the Chinese. This led coastal Chinese people to flee into the mountains, displacing the people already living there. (Chapter 5)
4. As American crops were introduced and allowed Chinese farmers to increase yields, the population grew dramatically. This caused Hong Liangji to speculate that eventually increased availability of food would cause unsustainable population growth. (Chapter 5)
5. Tobacco is a crop that heavily depletes the soil it is grown in. Thus, farmers growing it needed to constantly move onto new lands, and eventually they began farming in the mountains, which caused erosion and massive flooding. (Chapter 5)
PART 3
Reading Check
1. The Little Ice Age (Chapter 6)
2. Potatoes (Chapter 6)
3. The lack of biodiversity (Chapter 7)
4. The Amazon (Chapter 7)
5. Rubber-tree seeds (Chapter 7)
Short Answer
1. The Andean farmers gradually domesticated a number of wild foods into domestic crops, and they used advanced agricultural techniques such as raised and terraced fields. (Chapter 6)
2. European farming practices exhausted the land quickly and created a need for fertilizer. The Chincha Islands had a large supply of bat guano, which Europeans learned to use as fertilizer from Indigenous peoples. (Chapter 6)
3. P. infestans causes potato blight, and once this microorganism was inadvertently imported along with goods from Peru, much of the Irish potato crop had to be destroyed, leading to widespread starvation. (Chapter 6)
4. Latex, the sap that rubber is made from, is highly susceptible to temperature changes. Goodyear developed a process for creating temperature-resistant rubber. (Chapter 7)
5. Rubber trees were cut down in order to get the maximum amount of sap from each tree; this practice meant that more and more land was required to plant new trees. (Chapter 7)
PART 4
Reading Check
1. Interpreter (Chapter 8)
2. Mexico City (Chapter 8)
3. Escaped formerly enslaved people living in the Brazilian rainforest (Chapter 9)
4. The leader of a large quilombo/community of the formerly enslaved (Chapter 9)
5. Giant earthworms (Chapter 10)
Short Answer
1. Escaped enslaved people lived in small communities in the forest around São Tomé, and they made it a mission to destroy the sugar mills. (Chapter 8)
2. Mann’s contention is that slavery in Africa was considered normal and accepted at this time, not a moral problem, and that racism did not really exist as we understand it today. (Chapter 8)
3. Mann argues that Africans were not simply helpless victims of the slave trade but active and influential participants. (Chapter 9)
4. Although many nations refused to recognize maroon communities or their land claims, even after slavery was legally abolished, Brazil recently officially recognized both. (Chapter 9)
5. Mann reflects on the many non-indigenous plants he himself cultivates in his home garden. (Chapter 10)
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