Mississippian culture grew in the southern Mississippi River Valley. The Mississippian American Indians were farmers and mound builders, and the culture spread along rivers through modern-day central and eastern North America. Some aspects of Mississippian life grew out of earlier regional cultures, but the Mississippians were also largely influenced by contact with Mayan and Zapotec traders.
Hohokam culture of prehistoric American Indians developed in the Southwest, ca. 600. Hohokam culture grew along the Gila and Salt Rivers, and Hohokam people created irrigation canals that allowed for major agricultural development.
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...
A fast-moving blizzard devastated the northern plains, killing as many as two hundred people and doing major damage to property and livestock in Nebraska.
Congress passed the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allocation Act to limit overproduction by paying farmers to reduce the cultivation of soil-depleting crops.
Laborers from the National Farm Workers Association and the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee initiated the Delano grape strike and boycott. The strike continued into 1966, when the NFWA and AWOC merged to become the United Farmworkers Organizing Committee. The UFOC was led by César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and others. The strike and boycott ended in 1970 when the UFOC secured three-year contracts with grape growers.
Benjamin Banneker (1731–1806) was an influential African American intellectual in early America. Born free in Maryland, Banneker became an accomplished mathematician, astronomer, surveyor, and writer. In 1791, Banneker was selected to be part of team approved by George Washington to survey and plan the new national capital at Washington, DC; a park in the city was eventually named in his honor. Banneker was best known for the almanacs he published from 1791 to 1797; he sent a copy of his first almanac to Thomas Jefferson, challenging the...
Nathaniel Bacon (1647–1676) was a Virginia landowner and planter who instigated an uprising against the royal government of Virginia in 1676. Bacon’s Rebellion broke out over colonists’ anger with the royal government for failing to expel Indians and make way for settlement. Bacon led the rebel forces in attacking Indians and burning the colonial capital of Jamestown. Willian Berkeley, the royal governor, fled and was recalled to England, but the rebellion faded soon after Bacon’s death in 1676.
