A Genoese mariner spent years seeking backing for a westward crossing to reach the spice markets of Asia. He finally sailed in August 1492 and made landfall in the Caribbean that October. Whose crown paid for that voyage?

Under a charter from Henry VII, a Venetian mariner sailed west from Bristol in 1497 aboard the Matthew, reached the North Atlantic coast of North America, and claimed it for England. Who was he?

In 1534 Francis I sent Jacques Cartier west to look for gold and a passage through North America to Asia. Cartier found no passage, but he entered and mapped a great waterway and claimed the land around it for France. Which waterway was it?

In 1609 Henry Hudson was hired by the Dutch East India Company to find a passage to Asia. Blocked by ice in the north, he turned west and sailed far up a river on the North American coast. What followed from that voyage?

Ferdinand Magellan left Spain in 1519 with five ships to reach the Spice Islands by sailing west. Magellan was killed in the Philippines in 1521, but one ship came home in 1522 under Juan Sebastian Elcano. What had that ship done?

Between 1540 and 1542 Francisco Vazquez de Coronado led a large expedition north from New Spain into what is now the American Southwest. What was he sent to find?

Horses escaped from and traded out of Spanish settlements spread onto the Great Plains, and by the 1700s nations such as the Comanche and the Lakota hunted bison from horseback. Which crossing does this describe?

Within a century of 1492, smallpox, measles and influenza swept through Native communities that had never met them, and the Native population of the Americas fell by a very large share. What part of the Columbian Exchange is this?

Sugarcane was an Old World crop, and Europeans planted it on Caribbean and Brazilian estates that needed enormous, year-round gangs of workers. What did that demand for labor lead to?

Cassava and maize, unknown in Africa before 1500, were planted widely in West and Central Africa in the following centuries and became staple foods there. Which movement does this describe?

Tobacco was grown by Native peoples long before contact. After 1612 Virginia planters raised it in quantity and shipped it to England, where demand grew fast. Which movement does this describe?

From the 1540s, Spanish America shipped huge quantities of silver from mines such as Potosi back to Spain and on into European and Asian trade. What did that flood of silver do in Europe?

European governments held that a nation grew rich by exporting more than it imported and keeping the gold and silver at home, and they built colonies to serve that end. What was this economic thinking called?

The Virginia Company sold shares to hundreds of investors, pooled the money to outfit ships and settlers, and promised each investor a portion of any profit. Why did English colonization use this arrangement?

After Dominican friars, Bartolome de las Casas among them, reported to Madrid on the treatment of Native people in the colonies, Charles V issued the New Laws in 1542. What did those laws do?

From 1618 the Virginia Company promised 50 acres of land to anyone who paid his own passage to the colony, and another 50 for every additional person whose passage he paid. What did this headright policy encourage?

A poor English laborer signed a contract binding him to work for a Chesapeake planter for four to seven years, and in return his Atlantic passage was paid. What did this system give the tobacco colonies?

The 1494 line through the Atlantic put everything west of it in Spain's sphere and everything east in Portugal's. When Pedro Alvares Cabral reached the coast of South America in 1500, what did the line mean for that territory?

On its northern frontier in Florida and New Mexico, Spain planted mission compounds staffed by friars and backed by small garrison forts rather than large settler towns. What was Spain trying to accomplish there?

In 1584 Richard Hakluyt wrote A Discourse Concerning Western Planting and presented it privately to Elizabeth I, setting out in twenty-one chapters what England stood to gain from American colonies. What was he trying to achieve?

Thomas Harriot went to Roanoke with the 1585 expedition and in 1588 published A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, cataloguing the region's marketable goods, soils and peoples. What was the report for?

Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, treasurer of the Narvaez expedition, was shipwrecked in 1528 and spent eight years crossing the Gulf coast and the Southwest before reaching Mexico. His La Relacion of 1542 addressed the king. Why did he write it?

The Dutch West India Company built New Netherland around a port at the mouth of the Hudson, where furs were collected for shipment and merchants and sailors of many nationalities did business. What kind of colony was it?

In its sixteenth-century American empire, Spain worked silver mines with drafted Native labor, granted colonists the right to demand labor and tribute, and sent friars to convert the people already living there. What was that empire built on?

In 1700 New France held about 15,000 colonists and depended on Native alliances for its trade, while the English mainland colonies held more than 250,000 settlers farming land they held as property. What was the basic difference?