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• Europeans extended their empires to encompass most of the Americas by the mid-eighteenth century.
• Impoverished nobles and commoners alike found opportunity for gaining wealth and status in the colonies.
• One Spanish conquistador declared: "We came here to serve God and the King, and also to get rich."
• When Native Americans came into contact with Europeans and African diseases, such as smallpox, measles, typhus, influenza, and yellow fever they died causing them to lose 90% of their population.
• The Great Dying reminds us that the climate often plays an important role in the shaping of human history. But it also reminds us that human activity also helps shape the climate.
• The Great Dying and the impact of the Little Ice Age created an acute labor shortage and did not make room for immigrant newcomers.
• Europeans and Africans brought their crops with them. Crops like wheat, rice, sugarcane, grapes and many garden vegetables and fruits. This made the European diet possible in the Americas.
• They also brought their animals with them. Animals like horses, pigs, cattle, goats, and sheep. These animals made ranching economies and cowboy cultures of both the North and West possible.
• Spanish women shared the racial privileges of their husbands, but in terms of gender they were seen as subordinate and in need of male protection.
• For a century (1570-1670), Portuguese planters along the northeastern coast of Brazil dominated the world market for sugar.
• Puritans in Massachusetts and Quakers in Pennsylvania sought to escape aspects of an old European society rather than re-create it.
• By 1720, some 700,000 Russians lived in Siberia, which reduced the native Siberians to 30% of the population.
• The Russian Empire represented the final triumph of an agrarian civilization over the hunting societies of Siberia and over the pastoral peoples of the grasslands.
• Like other colonial powers, the Chinese made active use of notables-Mongol aristocrats, Muslim officials, Buddhist leaders-as they attempted to govern the region as inexpensively as possible.
• Chinese or Qing officials didn't seek to assimilate local people into Chinese culture and showed respect to Mongolian, Tibetan, and Muslim cultures. 
• The Ottoman Empire took over many countries in the Middle East and North and Southeastern Europe.
• Many Christians had welcomed the Ottoman conquest because taxes were lighter and oppression was less pronounced than under former Christian rulers.
• Should we need a motto for world history, consider this one: in world history, nothing stands alone; context is everything.