Glossary Term – Event
Columbian Exchange
The Columbian Exchange refers to the flow of goods between the Americas, Europe, and Africa that followed Columbus’s widely advertised “discovery” of the New World. People, animals, plants, and microorganisms passed from continent to continent affecting virtually all aspects of the environment in all three. For American Indians, disease was the most significant aspect of the exchange with as many as 90 percent of the Native population dying out during the first century of colonization. For Africans and Europeans the most important items...