Q Please answer only one question (250 words minimum) and respond to two other posts (50 words minimum for participation point-- 100 to 150 for content points)! Discussion Questions: 1. Compare and contrast three of the Native cultures found in North America prior to European contact. 2. Discuss the landscape in which the Native American inhabitants of the Americas transformed their environments and what outcomes they achieved. 3. Given that Native Americas were populous, complex and diverse – what influences did their societies impart in the centuries following European contact? 4. What factor was most essential in encouraging early modern Europeans to undertake voyages of discovery in exploration? 5. Could the direction of discovery and colonization in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have been reversed—that is, could the Aztecs have discovered and colonized western Europe? 6. To what extent were the English adventurers and the Spanish conquistadors “brothers under the skin?” In what ways were the roles they played similar, from the point of view of the royal governments of England and Spain? 7. Imagine that you were one of the leaders of the English settlement at Jamestown. What could you have done to lessen the hardships or to prevent the tragedies that took place during the first 15 years of settlement? 8. Without tobacco, the Virginia colony would never have survived. Make a case for that thesis, using what you know of the colony’s history. 9. Explain how sugar and tobacco played similar roles in Virginia and in the Caribbean colonies. 10. Discuss and assess the following statement from the textbook: “All that saved white society in the Chesapeake from a renewal of internal crisis [after Bacon’s and Coode’s rebellions] was the growth of black slavery.” 11. One of Virginia’s biggest planters, William Byrd, boasted that, “I am dependent upon no one but Providence.” In what ways were Byrd and other planters like him powerful and independent? In what ways were they more dependent than Byrd realized? 12. Was it inevitable that black slavery emerged as the dominant labor system in the Chesapeake? In South Carolina? Could planters in either colony have adopted alternatives—free white workers? White indentured servants? Indian slaves or servants?