Phillosophy Teaching Essay

At aurora on the morning season of Friday, August 3 1492, an Italian adventurer named Christopher capital of Ohio set sail from Spain to get under ones skin a new way from Europe to Asia. His aim was to open up a sorter trade street between the two continents. In Asia, he intended to load his three small ships with silks, spices and gold, and sail bum to Europe a rich man. Columbus first sailed south to the Canary Islands. Then he glowering west across the unknown waters of the mid-Atlantic Ocean. Ten weeks after leaving Spain, on the morning of October 12, he stepped ashore on the beach of low Sandy Island.He named the island San Salvador Holy Savior. Columbus believed that he had landed in the Indies, a group of Inlands close to the mainland of India. For this reason he called the friendly, brown-skind people who greeted him los Indios Indians. In fact, Columbus was not near India. It was not the edge of Asia that he had reached, but islands off the shores of a new contine nt. Europeans would before long name the new continent America, but for some(prenominal) a(prenominal) geezerhood they went on calling its inhabitants Indians.Only belatedly have these first Americans been described more accurately as Native Americans or Amerindians. There were many different groups of Amerindians. Those north of Mexico, in what is now the United States on Canada, were scattered across the grasslands and forests in straighten out groups called tribes. These tribes followed very different ways of life. Some were hunters, some were furthestmers. Some were peaceful, others warlike. They spoke over three carbon separate languages, some of which were as different from one another as English is from Chinese.Europeans called America the freshly World. precisely it was not new to the Amerindians. Their ancestors had already been living there for maybe 50000 years when Columbus stepped on to the beach in San Salvador. We say maybe because nobody is completely sure. Scientists believe that the distant ancestors of the Amerindians came to America from Asia. This happened, they say, during the domains last ice age, long before people began to cook up written records. At that time a bridge of ice joined Asia to America across what is now the Bering strait.Hunters from Siberia crossed this bridge into Alaska. From Alaska the hunters travel south and east across America, following herds of caribou and buffalo as the animals went from one feeding underfur to the next. Maybe 12000 years ago, descendants of these first Americans were crossing the isthmus of Panama into south America. About 5000 years later their camp fires were burning on the frozen southern tip of the continent, now called Tierra del fuego the Land of fire. For many centuries early Amerindians lived as wandering hunters and gatherers of diet.Then a more colonised way of life began. peck living in highland areas of what is now Mexico found a wild grass with tiny seeds that were unafraid to eat. These people became Americas first farmers. They cultivated the wild grass with great care to make its seeds larger. Eventually it became Indian corn, or maze. Other cultivated plant foods were developed. By 5000 BC Amerindians in Mexico were ontogeny and eating beans, squash and peppers. The Pueblo people of present day Arizona and New Mexico were the best organized of the Amerindians husbandry people.They lived in groups of villages, or in towns which were built for safety on the sides and top of the cliffs. They shared terraced buildings made of adobe ( mud and straw ) bricks, dried in the sun. Some of these buildings contained as many as 800 rooms, crowded unneurotic on top of one another. The Pueblo made clothing and blankets from cotton which grew wild in the surrounding relinquishs. On their feet they wore boot-shaped leather moccasins to protect their legs against the sharp rocks and cactus plants of the desert. For food the grow crops of maize and be ans. Irrigation made them successful as farmers. capacious before Europeans came to America and Pueblo were building networks of canals across the leave to bring water to their field. In one desert valley modern archaeologists have traced canals and ditches which enable the Pueblo to irrigate 250000 acres of farmland. A people called the apache were the neighbors of the Pueblo. The apache never became settled farmers. They wandered the deserts and mountains in small bands, hunting deer and gathering wild plants, nuts and roots. They also obtained food by raiding their Pueblo neighbors and stealing it. The Apache were fierce and warlike, and they were much feared by the Pueblo.The Iroquois were a group of tribes a nation- who lived far away from the Pueblo and the Apache in the thick woods of northeastern North America. Like the Pueblo, they were skilled farmers. In fields cleared from the forest they worked together growing beans, squash and twelve different varieties of maiz. The y were also hunters and fishermen. They used lather bark canoes to carry them swiftly along the rivers and lakes of their forest homeland. The Iroquois lived in permanent villages, in long woody huts with barrel-shaped roofs. These huts were made from a framework of saplings covered by sheets of elm bark.Each family had its own apartment on either side of a central hall. The Iroquois were fierce warriors. They were as feared by their neighbors as the Apache of the western deserts were feared by theirs. Around their huts they build strong wooden stockades to protect their villages from enemies. Eager to win a credit for their tribe and fame and honor for themselves, they often fought one another. From boyhood on, male Iroquois were taught to fear neither pain nor death. Bravery in battle was the surest way for a warrior to win respect and a high position in his tribe. more miles to the west, on the vast plains of grass that stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountai ns, there was another warrior nation. This group called themselves Dakota, which means allies. But they were better known by the name which other Amerindians gave to them Sioux, which means enemies. Te Sioux grew no crops and built no houses. For food, for shelter and for clothing they depended upon the buffalo. Millions of these large, slow- moving animals wandered across the western grasslands in vast herds. When the buffalo moved, the Sioux moved.