User:Diddle05

I am Sara Jones a sophomore at Western Kentucky University. My goal through this Wiki account is to make useful and thoughtful edits to historical documents and articles related to my History 463 class. The class focuses on Atlantic History and the impacts that new knowledge and discoveries had on the explorers. Some main focuses are the social, cultural, and developmental progress made by the explorers through the 13th to 18th centuries. articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_Exchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_chocolate_in_Spain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_epidemics

In the article I'm choosing to edit, I will be cleaning up grammatical errors as well as informational errors. Off the bat I noticed that there were simple misspellings such as the word citizens was spelled citisens. The article also mentioned that chocolate was immediately adopted by the Europeans which is very false. From reading the article "Conquests of Chocolate" by Marcy Norton, I knew that it took a while for Europeans to finally adopt any foreign foods from the New World including chocolate.

Here is the first draft of my into to the Wikipedia article I will be writing. I decided to focus on the Columbian Exchange since that has also been the topic of my research paper: Introduction: The Columbian Exchange was a global movement that resulted in the “trade” of plants/crops, animals, populations, and disease in the 15th through 16th centuries. The beginning of this exchange started in 1492 when Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas which was fueled mostly by the desire to find riches. It proved to be the most beneficial to the Europeans because they obtained the new resources that they needed as well as trading their own with the natives. These resources not only increased the European population, it formed a new and improved economy. However, the Americans were less fortunate in these aspects. The Native Americans gained little from the Europeans, and were severely impacted by the spread of European diseases, leading their population to squander. The Europeans gained a variety of information and goods, as well as a new insight to the societies created by the Native Americans. Prior to the exchange,  Europe and the Americas were vastly different and had created completely different societies away from each other. Europeans viewed anyone other than themselves as barbaric, which had a significant influence on the way they interacted with the Native Americans. Before the start of the Columbian Exchange, Europeans had gained most of their worldly power by conquering areas in the Atlantic Basin, the Atlantic Islands, and the western coast of Africa then came the Americas. The Columbian Exchange made a made a huge impact both positive and negative on both the American and European cultures through the introduction to new societal practices, disease, animals, and crops.