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It's so strange how history touches on Christopher Columbus and then immediately jumps to the Mayflower even if you take honors-level history courses in High Sc

It's so strange how history touches on Christopher Columbus and then immediately jumps to the Mayflower even if you take honors-level history courses in High School. I incidentally learned more about pre-Colombian NA from an intro art history course and an intro religious studies course I took my senior year of college than I did in my entire education up until that point. It's kind of crazy that most people I know believe that Europeans showed up to an almost entirely empty content, and were like "Oh hey, free land." I learned about Squanto at some point, but I never learned the reason why he spoke English is because he was kidnapped by an English explorer and brought back to Europe. Or that he managed to work his way back to North America and found his tribe had been wiped out by a plague, and that this plague was a huge part of why North America was so sparsely populated. It's pretty frustrating, because teaching the land was just empty and unused is so far from the truth that it is basically propaganda.

aaron-lebo 10y ago
It's propaganda on both sides. You are correct, there are many people who act like the natives weren't practically exterminated. However, on the flip side, there's a sort of revisionist history that ignores that the vast majority of natives were wiped out unintentionally due to disease. Many new frontiers for Europeans were basically empty due to disease preceding them. Additionally, we tend to forget who the natives actually were. The Mississippian culture was forgotten, but so are the Comanches - a tribe that in the 1700s and 1800s had an uncontested empire and were described as the best light cavalry in the world. They had a massive striking range and were infamous for raids on European settlements. In these raids they had no compunction about rape and torture (infants included). It wasn't seen as wrong to them - their enemies the Utes would have done the same to them. History is often much more nuanced than people want to admit. Note, it's also crazy how empty America really was compared to Europe, China, or India at the time. If you look at maps of world population, you've got tens of dozens of cities larger than 1 million in population throughout Eurasia and virtually none in the Americas prior to 1800.
- allemagne 10y ago
  The view that you're trying to correct generally requires a bit more knowledge than the one pushed by an average person's education. Simply teaching, by default, that there was an apocalyptic plague among Native Americans unknowingly caused by Europeans would go a long way towards balancing the narrative.
  - cardiffspaceman 10y ago
    This apocalyptic plague story is well-known in the US if we go by my personal observation. I don't think it even takes much education to have heard this. I found a few links that indicate the idea of a smallpox plague is spun to say that the results or intent of European activity were not genocide.
  - mzw_mzw 10y ago
    Every Columbus Day, Americans are buried under an avalanche of articles and social media posts about how diseases brought by the Europeans wiped out the natives. Trust me, we know. This narrative you worry about was more than balanced decades ago.
- benbreen 10y ago
  Can you show me those maps showing dozens of cities with 1 million plus population prior to 1800? Wikipedia's list of largest cities throughout history [1] is pretty well-sourced and while there are a handful of 1 million+ (Rome, Baghdad, Istanbul, Beijing, Ayutthaya) before the Industrial Revolution, they reach that population asynchronously and don't number in the dozens, even by the most optimistic estimates. Based on what I've read, most of North America was indeed relatively sparsely populated relative to, say, early modern Japan or China, but Mesoamerica and the Andes were comparable to early modern Europe in terms of population density and urbanization. For example, by the time of first contact with Cortes in 1519, Tenochtitlan had a population of 200k to 300k, which was roughly three times larger than the estimated population of London at the same time, as well as bigger than any city in Spain or any of the other Hapsburg lands (which is something that the Spanish themselves noted). Charles Mann's 1491 is a really good read on this general topic by the way, for anyone interested in reading more. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_throughout_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_through...

aaron-lebo 10y ago

It's propaganda on both sides. You are correct, there are many people who act like the natives weren't practically exterminated. However, on the flip side, there's a sort of revisionist history that ignores that the vast majority of natives were wiped out unintentionally due to disease. Many new frontiers for Europeans were basically empty due to disease preceding them. Additionally, we tend to forget who the natives actually were. The Mississippian culture was forgotten, but so are the Comanches - a tribe that in the 1700s and 1800s had an uncontested empire and were described as the best light cavalry in the world. They had a massive striking range and were infamous for raids on European settlements. In these raids they had no compunction about rape and torture (infants included). It wasn't seen as wrong to them - their enemies the Utes would have done the same to them. History is often much more nuanced than people want to admit. Note, it's also crazy how empty America really was compared to Europe, China, or India at the time. If you look at maps of world population, you've got tens of dozens of cities larger than 1 million in population throughout Eurasia and virtually none in the Americas prior to 1800.

allemagne 10y ago
The view that you're trying to correct generally requires a bit more knowledge than the one pushed by an average person's education. Simply teaching, by default, that there was an apocalyptic plague among Native Americans unknowingly caused by Europeans would go a long way towards balancing the narrative.
- cardiffspaceman 10y ago
  This apocalyptic plague story is well-known in the US if we go by my personal observation. I don't think it even takes much education to have heard this. I found a few links that indicate the idea of a smallpox plague is spun to say that the results or intent of European activity were not genocide.
- mzw_mzw 10y ago
  Every Columbus Day, Americans are buried under an avalanche of articles and social media posts about how diseases brought by the Europeans wiped out the natives. Trust me, we know. This narrative you worry about was more than balanced decades ago.
benbreen 10y ago
Can you show me those maps showing dozens of cities with 1 million plus population prior to 1800? Wikipedia's list of largest cities throughout history [1] is pretty well-sourced and while there are a handful of 1 million+ (Rome, Baghdad, Istanbul, Beijing, Ayutthaya) before the Industrial Revolution, they reach that population asynchronously and don't number in the dozens, even by the most optimistic estimates. Based on what I've read, most of North America was indeed relatively sparsely populated relative to, say, early modern Japan or China, but Mesoamerica and the Andes were comparable to early modern Europe in terms of population density and urbanization. For example, by the time of first contact with Cortes in 1519, Tenochtitlan had a population of 200k to 300k, which was roughly three times larger than the estimated population of London at the same time, as well as bigger than any city in Spain or any of the other Hapsburg lands (which is something that the Spanish themselves noted). Charles Mann's 1491 is a really good read on this general topic by the way, for anyone interested in reading more. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_throughout_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_through...