Europeans and Native Americans In The New World

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Europeans and Native Americans in the New World Disease and Medicine along with war and religion were three ways American history has changed. When the colonists came over from Europe they unknowingly changed the world forever in ways they couldn't have imagined. These effects were present to both Native Americans and Europeans. Some of these changes made life easier for both Native Americans and Europeans but some made relations worse too. And some effects wouldn't show up until it was too late. One of these significant changes was the introduction to new disease to the new world. When the Europeans came over and started to interact with the Native Americans they brought with them new diseases that Native Americans weren't accustomed to. Since Native Americans weren't immune to these diseases like the Europeans diseases spread rapidly and lethally. New Diseases such as smallpox, diphtheria, measles, bubonic and pneumonic plague, cholera, influenza, typhus, dysentery, yellow fever spread through Native American tribes like wild fire. Add these new deadly diseases and with other problems of their own like malnutrition, anemia, and the high rate of fetal and neonatal deaths and infant mortality, parasitic intestinal infections, dental problems, respiratory infections, spina bifida, osteomyelitis, nonpulmonary tuberculosis, syphilis along with bruises arthritis and snakebites and you can see why the Native American populations had a dramatic decrease just by disease. Some tribes experienced up to a 90% loss in population, of course this was not from only disease there were other reasons like war between other tribes and Europeans. Although medicine has come along way especially in recent years, there were medicine men and wom... ... middle of paper ... ...of worship but the Europeans saw it as devil worship. The Europeans never understood the Native American beliefs or understood how religious they actually were. Its like taking your grandparents who have been taught one religion their whole lives and trying to convert them to a different religion when they are 70 years old. The Europeans were just asking for trouble when they tried converting Native Americans to Christianity. Of coarse their were some Native Americans that did convert and believed in Christianity but most did not. No one could have imagined the effects that would happen when the Europeans came to America. When ever there are large groups of people meeting each other for the first time theirs bound to be wars, new diseases and religious conflicts between them. Because of the influences of Europeans and Native Americans America is what it is today.

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