World History
1491 : New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. I just finished reading this book by Charles C. Mann yesterday. I must say that it was both enjoyable and informative and it really made me think about my perceptions of what pre-1492 America was like.
Clearly, some of the content is speculative. However, there is also some good use of evidence to indicate some of what Mann is writing about is based on a plausible and realistic groundwork. Maybe we can not ever discover what early America was like but it appeared to be more advanced and more densely populated than theorists have been claiming until recently. It also appears as though the Americas have been populated far longer than people have thought.
From an Amazon Review:
1491 is not so much the story of a year, as of what that year stands for: the long-debated (and often-dismissed) question of what human civilization in the Americas was like before the Europeans crashed the party. The history books most Americans were (and still are) raised on describe the continents before Columbus as a vast, underused territory, sparsely populated by primitives whose cultures would inevitably bow before the advanced technologies of the Europeans. For decades, though, among the archaeologists, anthropologists, paleolinguists, and others whose discoveries Charles C. Mann brings together in 1491, different stories have been emerging. Among the revelations: the first Americans may not have come over the Bering land bridge around 12,000 B.C. but by boat along the Pacific coast 10 or even 20 thousand years earlier; the Americas were a far more urban, more populated, and more technologically advanced region than generally assumed; and the Indians, rather than living in static harmony with nature, radically engineered the landscape across the continents, to the point that even "timeless" natural features like the Amazon rainforest can be seen as products of human intervention.
Mann is well aware that much of the history he relates is necessarily speculative, the product of pot-shard interpretation and precise scientific measurements that often end up being radically revised in later decades. But the most compelling of his eye-opening revisionist stories are among the best-founded: the stories of early American-European contact. To many of those who were there, the earliest encounters felt more like a meeting of equals than one of natural domination. And those who came later and found an emptied landscape that seemed ripe for the taking, Mann argues convincingly, encountered not the natural and unchanging state of the native American, but the evidence of a sudden calamity: the ravages of what was likely the greatest epidemic in human history, the smallpox and other diseases introduced inadvertently by Europeans to a population without immunity, which swept through the Americas faster than the explorers who brought it, and left behind for their discovery a land that held only a shadow of the thriving cultures that it had sustained for centuries before. --Tom Nissley
- Epidemics In The Americas
Epidemics in The Americas The European encounter with the Americas after 1491 set in motion a demographic catastrophe among indigenous peoples across the hemisphere, specifically epidemic and pandemic diseases against which native peoples had no biological...
- Did The Welsh Discover America?
I stumbled upon a possible revisionist site today. It is titled Madoc: Where the Welsh the First European Americans? It is by an amateur historian Howard Kimberley. It tells the legend of Welsh prince Madoc colonizing the New World and settling eventually...
- Before The Dawn : Recovering The Lost History Of Our Ancestors
I just finished this excellent book which was written by Nicholas Wade. The author is a science reporter for the New York Times. The book covers a lot but the essence of the book is how the study of the human genome is allowing scientists and historians...
- Teaching About The Voyages Of Columbus
Teaching about the Voyages of Columbus. This is an interesting article which details the history of the Columbus voyages of discovery. It also includes tips on teaching this in the classroom. From the site: The voyage of Columbus in 1492 is a turning...
- Origins Of Earliest Americans: New Skeleton
Divers in the Yucatan discovered a 15 year old girl who is really 12 to 13,000 years old. They call her Naia and in this fascinating Washington Post story, they say "her remains may help determine the origins of the earliest Americans and finally...
World History
1491 : New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
1491 : New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. I just finished reading this book by Charles C. Mann yesterday. I must say that it was both enjoyable and informative and it really made me think about my perceptions of what pre-1492 America was like.Clearly, some of the content is speculative. However, there is also some good use of evidence to indicate some of what Mann is writing about is based on a plausible and realistic groundwork. Maybe we can not ever discover what early America was like but it appeared to be more advanced and more densely populated than theorists have been claiming until recently. It also appears as though the Americas have been populated far longer than people have thought.
From an Amazon Review:
1491 is not so much the story of a year, as of what that year stands for: the long-debated (and often-dismissed) question of what human civilization in the Americas was like before the Europeans crashed the party. The history books most Americans were (and still are) raised on describe the continents before Columbus as a vast, underused territory, sparsely populated by primitives whose cultures would inevitably bow before the advanced technologies of the Europeans. For decades, though, among the archaeologists, anthropologists, paleolinguists, and others whose discoveries Charles C. Mann brings together in 1491, different stories have been emerging. Among the revelations: the first Americans may not have come over the Bering land bridge around 12,000 B.C. but by boat along the Pacific coast 10 or even 20 thousand years earlier; the Americas were a far more urban, more populated, and more technologically advanced region than generally assumed; and the Indians, rather than living in static harmony with nature, radically engineered the landscape across the continents, to the point that even "timeless" natural features like the Amazon rainforest can be seen as products of human intervention.
Mann is well aware that much of the history he relates is necessarily speculative, the product of pot-shard interpretation and precise scientific measurements that often end up being radically revised in later decades. But the most compelling of his eye-opening revisionist stories are among the best-founded: the stories of early American-European contact. To many of those who were there, the earliest encounters felt more like a meeting of equals than one of natural domination. And those who came later and found an emptied landscape that seemed ripe for the taking, Mann argues convincingly, encountered not the natural and unchanging state of the native American, but the evidence of a sudden calamity: the ravages of what was likely the greatest epidemic in human history, the smallpox and other diseases introduced inadvertently by Europeans to a population without immunity, which swept through the Americas faster than the explorers who brought it, and left behind for their discovery a land that held only a shadow of the thriving cultures that it had sustained for centuries before. --Tom Nissley
- Epidemics In The Americas
Epidemics in The Americas The European encounter with the Americas after 1491 set in motion a demographic catastrophe among indigenous peoples across the hemisphere, specifically epidemic and pandemic diseases against which native peoples had no biological...
- Did The Welsh Discover America?
I stumbled upon a possible revisionist site today. It is titled Madoc: Where the Welsh the First European Americans? It is by an amateur historian Howard Kimberley. It tells the legend of Welsh prince Madoc colonizing the New World and settling eventually...
- Before The Dawn : Recovering The Lost History Of Our Ancestors
I just finished this excellent book which was written by Nicholas Wade. The author is a science reporter for the New York Times. The book covers a lot but the essence of the book is how the study of the human genome is allowing scientists and historians...
- Teaching About The Voyages Of Columbus
Teaching about the Voyages of Columbus. This is an interesting article which details the history of the Columbus voyages of discovery. It also includes tips on teaching this in the classroom. From the site: The voyage of Columbus in 1492 is a turning...
- Origins Of Earliest Americans: New Skeleton
Divers in the Yucatan discovered a 15 year old girl who is really 12 to 13,000 years old. They call her Naia and in this fascinating Washington Post story, they say "her remains may help determine the origins of the earliest Americans and finally...