What part of the Columbian Exchange had the biggest impact on the world?
Data Scavenger Hunt
Find answers to the following questions using the visual above:
The Columbian Exchange refers to the exchange of diseases, ideas, food crops, and populations between the New World and the Old World that began as a result of Columbus’s 1492 voyage from Europe to the Americans. What ocean did Columbus cross on his four round trip journeys?
Identify three animals introduced to the Americas by Columbus’s voyages.
Identify three crops (foods) introduced to Europe by Columbus’s voyages.
What diseases did the Europeans bring with them to the Americas?
What domesticated animals did the Europeans bring with them to the Americas?
Big Brain Questions
Answer these questions by yourself using your brain and the links below:
Why do you think the Columbian exchange went from Europe to the Americas instead of the other way around?
A new study finds a probable Indigenous population of 60 million in 1492 before the arrival of Europeans to the Americas. The Europeans brought with them diseases such as measles, smallpox, influenza and the bubonic plague, from which the study estimates a death toll of 56 million by 1600 — 90 percent of the pre-Columbian Indigenous population and around 10 percent of the global population at the time. This makes the “Great Dying” the largest human mortality event in proportion to the global population. Explain how the great dying impacted slavery and colonization?
The human tragedy of the Great Dying meant that there were simply not enough workers left to manage the fields and forests. Without human intervention, previously managed landscapes returned to their natural states, thereby absorbing carbon from the atmosphere. The extent of this regrowth of the natural habitat was so vast that it removed enough CO₂ to cool the planet. The cooling happened with a sharp and abrupt onset of cold starting in 1570 and lasting for about a hundred and ten years - an epoch, known as the Little Ice Age, where temperatures dropped by as much as two degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. If temperatures dropped that dramatically today how would it impact the planet?
In general, do you agree or disagree with the following quote from the historian Alfred Crosby? “The Columbian Exchange has included man, and he has changed the Old and New Worlds sometimes inadvertently, sometimes intentionally, often brutally. It is possible that he and the plants and animals he brings with him have caused the extinction of more species of life forms in the last four hundred years than the usual processes of evolution might kill off in a million. . . . The Columbian Exchange has left us with not a richer but a more impoverished genetic pool. We, all of the life on this planet, are the less for Columbus, and the impoverishment will increase.” - Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492
In what way has the Columbian Exchange had the biggest impact on your life?
Write and Discuss
Take ten minutes to write about the question at the top of the page and then discuss with your classmates.
Act on your Learning
Columbus Day is an officially recognized Federal holiday in the United States, observed on the second Monday in October. Do you think Columbus Day should be celebrated by the federal government. Contact your Congressional Representatives and Senators and let them know what you think.
Get Creative
Was the Columbian Exchange the most important event in the history of the world? Make a list of any historical events that you believe rival the Columbian Exchange.
Learning Extension
Read about how Columbus’s voyages led to the Great Dying and the Great Cooling in this story from The World.
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