answered: Midterm Exam There are eight choices below. Write two essays

  

Midterm Exam
There are eight choices below. Write two essays of 1200-1300 words each. Or write one longer essay of 2400-2600 words. You will have two chances to write this exam before the due date. It is recommended you write a rough publish the first time, then go review course material again for your second and final try.
This is a test of course material only. No outside research, citations, or bibliography needed. You may include information learned elsewhere, but do not need anything beyond a brief mention of where, without citations. E.g. “A documentary I watched named…”
You are being graded on how well you construct an argument using evidence from this course. While you should still strive to avoid errors, minor misspellings or grammar mistakes won’t count against you as long as it doesn’t interfere with understanding your essay.
1. Compare and contrast migrations to the Americas, how they have been portrayed, and the reasons they were/are portrayed so. Compare the thousands of Native accounts of multiple migrations by boats from both north and south to European Christian claims of Native origins including the Bering Strait Theory (BST). What specific evidence disproves the BST, and why is this migration theory taught and others not taught in schools? What specific evidence proves migrations by Australian Aboriginals and Polynesians, and why are they not widely taught? What do these multiple migrations do to claims about Native isolation? How does the BST promote the justification, denial, and minimization of genocide?
2. Why is it valuable to know Native history prior to Columbus? Use evidence from lectures, overheads, and readings. Incorporate into your answer ways that:
Native cultures influenced Europeans including technology, medicine, agriculture and food, political philosophies, family structures and gender, and religious mixing and mixed descent people.
European values and institutions that were contrary to Native ones including total war and genocides, political institutions like absolute monarchy, family structures like patriarchy, and differing views on the environment such as “taming the wilderness.”
3. Why and how did Columbus and other European invaders commit genocides? What motivated European invaders? How have genocides affected Natives in terms of land and population loss, and loss of power and cultures? Knowing about Native genocides, how should this affect how Natives are treated today? Include Native survival tactics from military resistance to assimilation and mixing to use of European institutions like Spanish laws and Christian churches. Include non-Natives who opposed genocide such as Catholic priests, monks, and monarchs. How did these genocides finally end? How much are Americans and Latin Americans taught about genocides in Latin America compared to other genocides such as the Holocaust, and why?
4. Compare broadly the cultures and histories of any two indigenous peoples below, their political philosophy and systems, science and technology, and conquest and survival. What explains the successes and failures of each European invasion against these different Native nations or cultural groups? Aztecs, Incas, Mayas, Tainos, Mapuches. Pick two.
5. How is language used to promote biases or distorted views of one group or culture over others, or outright falsehoods that mask atrocities? Discuss these words and phrases: savage and civilized, primitive and advanced, nomadic and settler, warlike and explorer, wilderness and frontier, “discovered America” and “New World.” Why are savage, primitive, nomadic, warlike, and wilderness often applied to Natives, and by who? Why are civilized, advanced, settler, explorer, and frontier often applied to Europeans, and by who? When “discovered America” and “New World” are used, whose POV is it?
6. Why are there over 300 memorials to Columbus, plus a national holiday and over 50 cities named after him in the US? Why are there only two memorials to him and one city named after him in Latin America, and the region instead celebrates Dia de la Raza, Day of the Latino People? What do these monuments and naming state about what is taught to students, its accuracy, and what many North Americans and Latin Americans wish to believe or deny? What would truly accurate monuments, naming, and honest teaching include and discuss?
7. Discuss broadly the history of African peoples in Latin America from the start of the Atlantic slave trade to the period just after independence and the end of slavery. Include cultural influence, language, food, music, religion, marriage/family/gender roles, and mixing of peoples. What motivated slave traders, owners, and defenders of slavery? How did they justify it? How does this, and how should this, affect how Blacks in Latin America and within Latino cultures are treated? Include discussion of successful reparations in Brazil to slave descendants and harmful reparations to slave owners in Haiti and the British Empire.
8. How could pivotal events in Latin American history have turned out differently? Choose one of the following events. Argue for an alternate history of Latin America into the present using evidence from this class combined with analysis. Keep in mind this is an essay, not a fiction story. Avoid any sci fi or fantasy elements. Be sure to answer all the questions in the prompt, but you are not expected to give more than a very broad picture of an alternate history:
A. A leader focused on religious conversion commands the first Spanish expedition and colonization of the Americas. Without forced starvation as a weapon of war, the death toll from epidemics is 20-30%, the same as European ones. How will Latin America be different with voluntarily Christianized Spanish colonies with western technology and much higher Native populations? What conflict will there be with other European powers and colonies?
B. Aztecs defeat Cortez and adopt Spanish weapons technology from captured soldiers. Like the Mapuche, every later Spanish invasion is defeated. Like Japan, they become a developed nation in order to defeat western imperialism and stay independent. What will their relations be with other Native nations and the rest of the world?
C. Incas defeat Pizarro and adopt Spanish weapons technology from captured soldiers. Like the Mapuche, every later Spanish invasion is defeated. Like Japan, they become a developed nation in order to defeat western imperialism and stay independent. What will their relations be with other Native nations and the rest of the world?
D. Bolivar succeeds in uniting a stable Gran Colombia, what is today Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, part of Peru, and Venezuela, with claims on Costa Rica and part of Nicaragua. What would have been needed in order for him to do this? How will Latin America be different with Gran Colombia as a large powerful nation? What will its relations with the US and the rest of the world be?
E. Father Hidalgo’s army crushes Spanish elites in Mexico City, leading to a united stable Mexico with mestizos and Natives represented and as leaders. What would have been needed in order for this stability and representation to happen? How will Latin America be different with Mexico as a large powerful nation? Will the US and Mexico still go to war 25 years later, and if so, who will win?
F. The Prince Regent of Portugal and his court are captured by Napoleon. Brazil has no monarch to later unite the independence effort. Brazil splits into at least three nations, a mostly indigenous Amazon, a mostly Black northeast, and a mostly European immigrant south. What would have been needed in order for this to happen? How will Latin America be different with Brazil split much like Spain’s former colonies?