HistoryNerd94's definitions

Foragers

People who support themselves by hunting wild animals and gathering wild edible plants and insects.

Modern foragers in the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa and the Ituri Forest of Central Africa derive the bulk of their day-to-day nourishment from wild vegetable foods.

by HistoryNerd94 November 8, 2010

Treaty of Tordesillas

Treaty negotiated by the pope in 1494 to resolve the territorial claims of Spain and Portugal.

The Portuguese colonized Brazil under the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas, a 1494 agreement dividing the Americas between Spain and Portugal.

by HistoryNerd94 January 6, 2012

Feudalism

A medieval European social system in which land was divided into hundreds of small holdings.

Europe was characterized by a social system historians have called feudalism.

by HistoryNerd94 December 27, 2011

Reconquista

The long struggle (ending in 1492) during which Spanish Christians reconquered the Iberian peninsula from Muslim occupiers.

Columbus finally sold his plan to Isabel and Ferdinand, the monarchs of Castile and Aragon, who had married and united their kingdoms. In 1492, the couple had succeeded in conquering Grenada, the last Muslim-controlled province in Iberia, ending a centuries-long struggle known as the reconquista.

by HistoryNerd94 January 2, 2012

Civilization

An ambiguous term often used to denote more complex societies but sometimes used by anthropologists to describe any group of people sharing a set of cultural traits.

Scholars agree that political, social, economic, and technological phenomena are indicators of civilization.

by HistoryNerd94 September 26, 2010

Renaissance

The intellectual and artistic flowering in Europe during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries sparked by a revival of interest in classical antiquity.

The Renaissance celebrated human possibility.

by HistoryNerd94 December 30, 2011

Semitic

Family of related languages long spoken across part of western Asia and northern Africa. In antiquity these languages included Hebrew, Aramaic, and Phoenician. The most wide–spread modern member of the Semitic family is Arabic.

As early as 2900 B.C.E., personal names recorded in inscriptions from the northerly cities reveal a non-Sumerian Semitic language.

by HistoryNerd94 December 16, 2010