Week 1 — Measuring the Contact Era: Years, Sources, and Two Directions — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 1 of the term — measure the contact era with its pinned years, read its first document the historian's way, and explain what happened in 1492 to someone new to history.

This week you learned how historians tell primary sources from secondary ones, the four moves of historical thinking, the difference between contact and conquest, and the Columbian Exchange. In this assignment you work four short problems on the contact-era chronology and the exchange set, interpret each one, and explain 1492 to someone who has never studied it. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Primary Source Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles.

The task

Your shared data is the course's contact-era chronology, six years in order:

• 1492 — Columbus's first voyage
• 1494 — the Treaty of Tordesillas
• 1519 — Cortés's landing in Mexico
• 1521 — the fall of Tenochtitlán
• 1565 — the founding of St. Augustine
• 1607 — the founding of Jamestown

Beside it sits the course's Columbian Exchange set. From the Old World to the Americas: horses, cattle, pigs, wheat, sugarcane, smallpox, and measles. From the Americas to the Old World: maize, potatoes, tomatoes, cacao, and tobacco.

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic and citing your evidence:

1. The contact-era chronology begins with Columbus's first voyage in 1492 and ends with the founding of Jamestown in 1607. How many years does it span?
2. Cortés landed in Mexico in 1519, and Tenochtitlán fell in 1521. How many years passed from the landing to the fall?
3. St. Augustine was founded in 1565 and Jamestown in 1607. By how many years is St. Augustine older?
4. In the course's Columbian Exchange set, 7 items crossed from the Old World to the Americas and 5 crossed from the Americas to the Old World. How many items does the set hold?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation:

• Problem 1: source the royal grant that opened the voyage (who made it, when, what type of document it is, which host keeps it, and whether you are reading a translation), then name what the before-1607 frame leaves out about the Americas.
• Problem 2: use the course's definitions to say which year marks contact and which marks conquest, and state plainly what destroyed Tenochtitlán.
• Problem 3: correct the common belief that Jamestown is the oldest European settlement in the continental United States, and name the source the course relies on for that comparison.
• Problem 4: explain why the exchange ran in two directions, name at least one item for each direction, and say in words what Old World diseases did to Indigenous populations, with no death figure.

Explain it to a non-expert

A coworker says, "Columbus discovered an empty America in 1492 and landed in Florida." Write a 3–5 sentence message that corrects both parts of that claim in everyday words, using this week's evidence about the Americas before 1492 and where Columbus reached, and names one limit of what you can say after one week (for example, that the week's three documents were all written by Europeans). Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a friend asking whether a historical novel about a sea voyage "tells you what really happened." Model answer: "A novel can make a voyage feel real, but its author wrote it long afterward and may have invented scenes and people. That makes it a secondary source at best, and some of it is not evidence at all. To check a detail, I would look for a source made at the time, such as a ship's log or a letter, and compare the two. Read side by side, the novel shows how someone imagined the voyage, and the log shows what one person on board recorded."

Use that pattern for your message to the coworker, with your own wording and evidence.

Show your arithmetic and cite your evidence. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report, and check every date and quoted word against Chapter 1, without guessing which values, steps, or sources you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single report containing:

• the four answers, each with the arithmetic shown and the brief interpretation the task names for that problem;
• your message to the coworker, correcting both parts of the claim in everyday words and naming one limit; and
• a one-line restatement of the values you used (the years of the contact-era chronology and the two counts of the exchange set), so your results are reproducible.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled timeline sketch that places the six years and the exchange's two directions, with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the computations, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. Take every date and every quoted word from Chapter 1, and quote only the pinned fragment of the royal grant. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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