ABSTRACT
In North America there were no great indigenous empires, as the great urban center of Cahokia on the Mississippi River had collapsed shortly before the arrival of Europeans. As a result, the circumstances of the encounter between Native Americans and European settlers in North America were quite different than the encounter between Europeans and the societies of Latin America, East Asia, or the Ottoman Empire. Since the indigenous peoples of North America were gathered in relatively small communities, diversity reigned: there were dozens of different states, 500 different languages were spoken, and each community practiced their own cultural forms.
