1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

published	August 9th 2005 by Knopf
binding	Hardcover
isbn	140004006X (isbn13: 9781400040063)
ebook
pages	480
description	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 civiliz...more [close] 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 <p align="center"> *A 1491* Timeline <table cellpadding="4" border="0" width="100%" cellspacing="4"> <tr valign="top" align="left"> <td width="20%">Europe and Asia</td> <td width="10%">Dates</td> <td width="70%">The Americas*</td> </tr> <tr valign="top" align="left"> <td width="20%"></td> <td width="10%">25000-35000 B.C.</td> <td width="70%">Time of paleo-Indian migration to Americas from Siberia, according to genetic evidence. Groups likely traveled across the Pacific in boats.</td> </tr> <tr valign="top" align="left"> <td width="20%">Wheat and barley grown from wild ancestors in Sumer.</td> <td width="10%">6000</td> <td width="70%"></td> </tr> <tr valign="top" align="left"> <td width="20%"></td> <td width="10%">5000</td> <td width="70%">In what many scientists regard as humankind's first and greatest feat of genetic engineering, Indians in southern Mexico systematically breed maize (corn) from dissimilar ancestor species.</td> </tr> <tr valign="top" align="left"> <td width="20%">First cities established in Sumer.</td> <td width="10%">4000</td> <td width="70%"></td> </tr> <tr valign="top" align="left"> <td width="20%"></td> <td width="10%">3000</td> <td width="70%">The Americas' first urban complex, in coastal Peru, of at least 30 closely packed cities, each centered around large pyramid-like structures</td> </tr> <tr valign="top" align="left"> <td width="20%">Great Pyramid at Giza</td> <td width="10%">2650</td> <td width="70%"></td> </tr> <tr valign="top" align="left"> <td width="20%"></td> <td width="10%">32</td> <td width="70%">First clear evidence of Olmec use of zero--an invention, widely described as the most important mathematical discovery ever made, which did not occur in Eurasia until about 600 A.D., in India (zero was not introduced to Europe until the 1200s and not widely used until the 1700s)</td> </tr> <tr valign="top" align="left"> <td width="20%"></td> <td width="10%">800-840 A.D.</td> <td width="70%">Sudden collapse of most central Maya cities in the face of severe drought and lengthy war</td> </tr> <tr valign="top" align="left"> <td width="20%">Vikings briefly establish first European settlements in North America.</td> <td width="10%">1000</td> <td width="70%"><table cellpadding="0" align="left" width="255" cellspacing="0"> <tr><td align="left"> </td> </tr> <tr> <td align="left"> Reconstruction of Cahokia, c. 1250 A.D. </td></tr> </table>Abrupt rise of Cahokia, near modern St. Louis, the largest city north of the Rio Grande. Population estimates vary from at least 15,000 to 100,000.</td> </tr> <tr valign="top" align="left"> <td width="20%">Black Death devastates Europe.</td> <td width="10%">1347-1351</td> <td width="70%"></td> </tr> <tr valign="top" align="left"> <td width="20%"></td> <td width="10%">1398</td> <td width="70%">Birth of Tlacaélel, the brilliant Mexican strategist behind the Triple Alliance (also known as the Aztec empire), which within decades controls central Mexico, then the most densely settled place on Earth.</td> </tr> <tr valign="top" align="left"> <td width="20%">The Encounter: Columbus sails from Europe to the Caribbean.</td> <td width="10%">1492</td> <td width="70%">The Encounter: Columbus sails from Europe to the Caribbean.</td> </tr> <tr valign="top" align="left"> <td width="20%">Syphilis apparently brought to Europe by Columbus's returning crew.</td> <td width="10%">1493</td> <td width="70%"></td> </tr> <tr valign="top" align="left"> <td width="20%">Ferdinand Magellan departs from Spain on around-the-world voyage.</td> <td width="10%">1519</td> <td width="70%"><table cellpadding="0" align="left" width="255" cellspacing="0"> <tr><td align="left"> </td> </tr> <tr> <td align="left"> Sixteenth-century Mexica drawing of the effects of smallpox** </td></tr> </table>Cortes driven from Tenochtitlán, capital of the Triple Alliance, and then gains victory as smallpox, a European disease never before seen in the Americas, kills at least one of three in the empire.</td> </tr> <tr valign="top" align="left"> <td width="20%"></td> <td width="10%">1525-1533</td> <td width="70%">The smallpox epidemic sweeps into Peru, killing as much as half the population of the Inka empire and opening the door to conquest by Spanish forces led by Pizarro.</td> </tr> <tr valign="top" align="left"> <td width="20%"></td> <td width="10%">1617</td> <td width="70%">Huge areas of New England nearly depopulated by epidemic brought by shipwrecked French sailors.</td> </tr> <tr valign="top" align="left"> <td width="20%">English Pilgrims arrive at Patuxet, an Indian village emptied by disease, and survive on stored Indian food, renaming the village Plymouth.</td> <td width="10%">1620</td> <td width="70%"></td> </tr> <tr> </table> <table cellpadding="4" border="0" width="100%" cellspacing="4"> <tr> <td align="left" width="100%"> Courtesy Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, Collinsville, Ill., painting by Michael Hampshire. Courtesy Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe, N.M. (Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España,* 1547-77). </td></tr></table> [close]
date added	03-13-07 edit book

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Douglas rated it:

(review of isbn 1400032059)

07/30/07

Read in July, 2007

recommends it for: readers of history, ethnohistory, First Nations history

As someone who writes professionally in this area (unabashed plug: watch for God's Mercies, Doubleday Canada, in October 07) I have high praise for this title, a long-overdue assessment of native culture and civilization before (and at) contact with Europeans. I'm still reading it, but I've been impressed so far.[I've now finished, see below.:] Anyone who enjoyed it should also consider Elaine Dewar's Bones, which explores the archaeological controversy of how long people have been in the New Wo...more As someone who writes professionally in this area (unabashed plug: watch for God's Mercies, Doubleday Canada, in October 07) I have high praise for this title, a long-overdue assessment of native culture and civilization before (and at) contact with Europeans. I'm still reading it, but I've been impressed so far.[I've now finished, see below.:] Anyone who enjoyed it should also consider Elaine Dewar's Bones, which explores the archaeological controversy of how long people have been in the New World. (She wholeheartedly supports the "a really, really long time" camp.)
My only critique of 1491, and it is minor, is that the author I feel overstates the case that Europeans (mainly English) did not enjoy a military superiority over the natives, that their powder weapons were ineffective. This is a rather generous reading of native military capability. The English army did away with the longbow in 1598, and for all their problems, powder weapons were a clear advantage. Frenchman Samuel de Champlain used just three harquebus to devastating effect against the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) in 1609, and in his trade and colonization monopoly, secured in 1612 under the Prince de Condé, the terms specifically forbid anyone to trade powder weapons with the natives, under penalty of a 10,000 livre fine and corporal punishment. One of the key factors in European inability not to immediately conquer or eradicate native populations by force was the sheer lack of firepower. (They also needed them as trade partners.) These commercial ventures (English and French in particular) didn't have the full might of their states behind them in the early contact period. Had England or France made up their mind to truly "conquer" these shores and their peoples, they would have marched through them much like de Soto did in the southeastern US in the mid 16th century, for good or for ill (pretty well for ill). But an idea the author does well to advance is the fact that coastal nations or tribes that made contact with the newcomers often came to decide that they should secure a strategic advantage and enlist the newcomers' aid in fighting their own enemies. It was a complicated time, and 1491 is a worthy overview.
Having now finished, I'll still recommend it. For those interested in precontact cultures north of 49 (as in half of North America) the lack of material about French Canada is a little disappointing. There's nothing about the much-debated vanishing of the Iroquoian-speaking residents of the St. Lawrence (at Hochelaga and Stadacona) who were there in large numbers in palisade villages when Cartier first visited in the 1530s, but had vanished utterly by the time Champlain showed up in 1603. But that's nitpicky, considering the enormous scope of this work. ...less

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Deborah rated it:

(review of isbn 1400032059)

01/20/08

Read in January, 2008

Full Title: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Overall, 1491 provided a fascinating and fresh perspective on history as a lively, evolving field of knowledge--not the stuff of dry textbooks at all. My primary criticism of the book is that it is difficult to keep a sense of chronology without taking notes; the book is divided into different cultures and the research and theories behind their histories--not a chronological ordering of developments in the continents. Of the ma...more Full Title: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Overall, 1491 provided a fascinating and fresh perspective on history as a lively, evolving field of knowledge--not the stuff of dry textbooks at all. My primary criticism of the book is that it is difficult to keep a sense of chronology without taking notes; the book is divided into different cultures and the research and theories behind their histories--not a chronological ordering of developments in the continents. Of the many useful illustrations, I'm surprised a standard time line was not included.

Having read Charles C. Mann's 1491 and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel back to back, I'm inclined to favor Mann's book over Diamond's. Although it's probably not fair to compare them in this manner, I actually set up a spreadsheet comparing differences in suggested dates for pre-Colombian historical events in the Americas, along with theories to explain them. (I should note that Mann actually cites two of Diamond's books, and not from a position of disparagement. It's just tempting for me to compare these books because of their proximity to one another on my reading list, so indulge me!)

Mann's book has the advantage of being written a decade after that of Diamond, and while some of the "new revelations" are fifty or more years old, some of them are very, very new--having been revealed within the last few years, or in some cases, still in the research stage. This time gap makes Diamond's assertions about the Americas seem more conservative and dated than they probably were at the time of publication. (One exciting revelation became apparent just last year, missing the cutoff for both books--pre-Colombian chicken bones from Polynesian chickens were found in South America, proving that Polynesians arrived in South America before European explorers! While both books referenced the theory that Polynesian watercraft may have reached the Americas, Diamond expressed more skepticism than Mann.)

The other factor which made me favor Mann's book over Diamond's was that the former is written from a journalistic viewpoint, whereas the latter is written with the intent to persuade the reader to believe the author's central theory. That isn't to say that Mann's writing is disinterested or dispassionate; his writing is sprinkled with praise and criticism of the various accounts of pre-Colombian life in the Americas he selected for inclusion in his book. Diamond, on the other hand, tries to weave the histories of all the populated continents into parallel narratives--narratives in which the losers are defeated by the guns, germs, and steel of the winners, and then he explains why he thinks the winners happened upon their tools of victory before the losers could acquire them....less

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Alex rated it:

(review of isbn 1400032059)

06/30/08

What we think of when we think of the pre-Columbian Americas -- a wilderness lightly occupied by primitive tribes -- was in fact only the tiny remnants of a sophisticated and highly evolved society which had been ravaged by European disease, largely before Europeans could ever make contact with them.

That is the provocative thesis of this thoughtful and thorough look at what existed in this hemisphere before 1491, and what happened to it in 1492. While it sounds like a tired politically corre...more What we think of when we think of the pre-Columbian Americas -- a wilderness lightly occupied by primitive tribes -- was in fact only the tiny remnants of a sophisticated and highly evolved society which had been ravaged by European disease, largely before Europeans could ever make contact with them.

That is the provocative thesis of this thoughtful and thorough look at what existed in this hemisphere before 1491, and what happened to it in 1492. While it sounds like a tired politically correct, multi-culturalal revisionism, it isn't -- it's a fascinating and honest search for a clear-eyed history of the continent. It is also a sweeping, well-research chronicle of the macro elements that mold history --- in the spirit of Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel." Not only will it change the way you look at America's history, but it will change your view of how history unfolds.

Aside from the history of the various empires which existed in pre-Columbian America -- Mayans, Azteks, Incans, and many you've never heard of -- Mann also looks at the biology, technology, and anthropology behind the history. Among some interesting points he hits on are the development of corn (the first feat of genetic engineering, he claims), why Indians were so vulnerable to European germs (it's more complicated than you think), and how Indian culture influenced the development of the colonies and, he alleges, American ideas of freedom and democracy.

Mann isn't an academic, and he largely is just collecting information that other scientists have uncovered. The purpose of the book is not to uncover new facts, but to gather them in a way they haven't before to show how the newest available research so vividly contradicts our ingrained ideas about how the Americas were settled.

That said, Mann is sometimes a bit too zealous in pushing his case, occassionally making leaps in logic that aren't backed up with the evidence. He also could have spent more time dealing with some of the reactions non-academics would have reading the book. I had some fairly unsophisticated questions myself -- "Hey, if the Indians were so well-developed, why weren't there any huge cities in the north?" "If they were so technological, why didn't they 'discover' Europe?"

But the bottom line is, this book is a must for anyone interested in the world's history. Highly recommended....less

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Benjamin rated it:

(review of isbn 1400032059)

07/24/08

Read in July, 2008

Excellent collation of research on Indian history that has sparked controversy not only in the discipline of history but sustainable ecology - it trenchantly organizes and presents evidence not completely unknown to myself, but not presented for collective impact on the knowledgeable generalist until now. Viewed as a whole, it cogently elaborates the controversies and agendas driving various parties, Indian and white, archaelologist and environmentalist, seeking to influence not only how people ...more Excellent collation of research on Indian history that has sparked controversy not only in the discipline of history but sustainable ecology - it trenchantly organizes and presents evidence not completely unknown to myself, but not presented for collective impact on the knowledgeable generalist until now. Viewed as a whole, it cogently elaborates the controversies and agendas driving various parties, Indian and white, archaelologist and environmentalist, seeking to influence not only how people view the history of the Americas prior to 1491, but the future, too. Easily the most incendiary critique originates in his presentation of evidence suggesting that, contra to myths of primeval landscapes unblemished by man that originated in the wake of demographic collapse, all of the Americas, including the Amazon, swarmed with peoples that managed and altered the landscape to their desires. This conceit undermines the supposition that a human presence in environments like the Amazon can only prove deleterious - while the evidence suggests that the Amazon, along with other environments, were thrown out kilter in the massive die off of Indian populations that managed them for their own use. The populations encountered in later epochs of intense European settlement, relatively savage and few in number, should not be considered definitive iterations of Indian culture and accomplishment anymore than Rome's medieval squalor in wake of the Empire's collapse should be considered the sum total of Rome's achievement. Mann instead recontextualizes them as the indomitable but traumatized remnnants of cultures and peoples immolated by small pox, typhoid, and other diseases to the point that they could not sustain their former way of life, leading to ecologocal disruption across the Americas and altering a formerly human managed landscape into the "primeval continent of forest" encountered by British colonists so influential in shaping America's image not only of itself, but of its Indian peoples, even as the myth continues to exert influence on America's vigorous environmental movement. This book explores far more of interest than I could ever present, but hopefully this little salvo grants some intimation of what awaits the curious reader....less

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Dan rated it:

(review of isbn 1400032059)

07/05/08

Read in July, 2008

1491 challenged my preconception of American life before it was “discovered” by Columbus. In school I was taught that Indians had minimal impact on the world we know today. The Indians I was told were few in numbers, they were weak as proved by how they were thoroughly conquered by opposing forces a fraction of the population of Indian, they were hunter/gatherers who had no impact on their environment and that as a whole they did not have much of an impact on European society.

The book ch...more 1491 challenged my preconception of American life before it was “discovered” by Columbus. In school I was taught that Indians had minimal impact on the world we know today. The Indians I was told were few in numbers, they were weak as proved by how they were thoroughly conquered by opposing forces a fraction of the population of Indian, they were hunter/gatherers who had no impact on their environment and that as a whole they did not have much of an impact on European society.

The book challenges these misconceptions with current archaeological findings. This book gathers much of contemporary research describing the day-to-day lives, their intellectual progress and the manipulation of the environment. For example, it is now apparent that these societies developed sophisticated farming methods from the tip of South America to the high mountains of the Andes. The Amazon that I have been led to believe is a virgin forest, has actually been manipulated by its inhabitants to grow the type of food that they needed and vast swath of forest were converted to this use. We find that these peoples build complex societies before civilizations began appearing in the Fertile Crescent by the Tigris River.

The contact between the Settlers in North America and the Algonquin Nation may even have contributed to the type of government that the USA has today.

1491 is well written and well sourced. The author knows that some of the conclusions are controversial, and he makes a point to include both the archeological evidence for and against these. Some of the conclusions that are presented by the author are still being challenged by well-respected archeologists. On some conclusions that the author supports more evidence needs to be gathered before they are definitely accepted. But on other theories, such as the reasons for the precipitous decline of the Indian population, the author shows that based on the current evidence the only likely conclusions that one can infer is that the Indians were the victims of waves of epidemic of organisms which the Indians had no defenses.

Good book.

A review can be found here:

http://dir.salon.com/story/boo...

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Kenny rated it:

(review of isbn 1400032059)

07/24/08

Read in July, 2008

recommends it for: amateur historians

As a result of decades of revisionist history (as well as flat-out incorrect but sincere assumptions by scientists), most people have come to see pre-Columbian America as an Edenic wilderness inhabited by pure-hearted indigenous folk living lightly on the land, leaving nary a footprint outside their biodegradable sweatlodges.

Yet Mann shows us a densely populated, fiercely impacted hemisphere where no one was indigenous (they all came from somewhere else), much of the land repeatedly went up ...more As a result of decades of revisionist history (as well as flat-out incorrect but sincere assumptions by scientists), most people have come to see pre-Columbian America as an Edenic wilderness inhabited by pure-hearted indigenous folk living lightly on the land, leaving nary a footprint outside their biodegradable sweatlodges.

Yet Mann shows us a densely populated, fiercely impacted hemisphere where no one was indigenous (they all came from somewhere else), much of the land repeatedly went up in smoke in a slash-and-burn regime designed to remake it for man, plants, and animals alike (a good portion of the Amazon rainforest itself is said to be the result of human intervention, planting, and control over millenia), sculpted in incredibly huge and aggressive ways (terrace farming in Peru, the literal creation of the Great Plains in north America by the "Indians," giant figures carved into the dirt seen in their complete form only from the air in the Andes), with vast, heavy-handed populations (many ancient cities in the Americas were not only contemporaneous with those in Europe, they were larger, cleaner, and better managed).

The result is that Columbus brought steel and smallpox to the Americas, decimating the local populations through war and disease, which perhaps wiped out as much as 90% of the entire human population of the hemisphere in just a few years. Columbus' men received syphillis in return, and cannot be blamed for the smallpox (no one even knew how disease was transmitted back then). They can also be excused from attempting to dominate the local cultures. After all, that is what the Inka, Maya, Olmec, and a score of other civilizations Mann discusses in the book had been doing to each other for nigh onto 10,000 years. The only difference is that we have the history of the conquest (thanks to the Spaniards themselves), not just a few worn sandstone steles covered in vines to place the popular blame on the Euro-conquerors.

What happened in the Americas happened everywhere else in the world by people no different from those they found in the western hemisphere. Thus it has always been and likely thus it will always be.

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Brendan rated it:

(review of isbn 1400032059)

09/28/07

Read in September, 2007

The survey of current thinking on the population of the americas via that Beringia land bridge and the subsequent summary of the evolutions of early american society is interesting.

But the repeated comparisons between american society and eurasian society are really fraught and often belabored. The comparisons between the two hemisphere's agriculture is fine, but the assertion that Aztec (apparently it's more politically correct to call them Mexica) philosophy was as rich as medieval europe...more

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Micah rated it:

(review of isbn 1400032059)

10/09/07

Read in October, 2007

recommends it for: History buffs, and anyone who is really really interested in maize

Here is a fine collection of the modern anthropological, sociological and historical scholarship concerning pre-Columbian America, well presented in one volume.
For about 200 pages. Sadly the book goes on for another 100 or so.
It is very informative, and presented well for those first 200 pages with only a few blips of the author’s agenda. To give him credit, he plays it very close to the middle for most of those pages. There are hints of the stretching to come. For example, he equa...more

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Aili rated it:

(review of isbn 1400032059)

08/27/07

Read in August, 2007

So the major thing to note here is that this is a history of the inhabitants of pre-Columbian Western Hemisphere... written by a feature journalist. It has a lot of straight history, but also a lot of information gleaned from non-standard or new techniques, such as archaeology, forensic science, and linguistics. Oh, and actually talking to folks who identify as indigenous -- who are, lots of them, still around.

A fair amount of the material was familiar to me from taking Colonial Latin Americ...more

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John rated it:

(review of isbn 1400032059)

04/11/08

Read in June, 2007

recommended to John by: no one
recommends it for: History buffs and non-fiction fans

If your American paradigm includes an historical view of European settlers desecrating the "Forest Primeval," guess again! Recent archeological and anthropological discoveries have revealed that the Pre-Columbrian Americas were vastly more populated and civilized than we had previously believed. For example, Spanish explorers of the 1500s discovered a Mississippi River lined with villages trading up and down the river; French explorers of the 1600s, on the other hand, encountered a hea...more

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Mike rated it:

(review of isbn 1400032059)

02/09/08

bookshelves: recently-completed

Read in March, 2008

For anyone who enjoyed "Guns, Germs, and Steel," this is an excellent follow-up. The author is a journalist, not an academic, and that's good for us laymen. What could have been a dry, scholarly treatise on current research into pre-Colombian America is instead a compelling first-person account of his exploration into the field. He explains some of the vicious debates going on over big questions, like when the Indians crossed the Bering land bridge, making sense of all the information ...more

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Tripp rated it:

(review of isbn 1400032059)

02/03/08

Read in January, 2008

recommends it for: Non-specialists

Author Charles Mann's purpose is to debunk three commonly held ideas about the Americas before Columbus: that the continents were sparsely populated, that the social and technical development was limited and that the locals left the environment untouched.

In discussing scholarly debates on these subjects, he convincingly argues that the population, before the decimation of disease, was quite high. The debate is just how many people there were rather than whether the continents were pristine u...more

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Jason rated it:

(review of isbn 1400032059)

08/25/07

Read in June, 2007

recommends it for: everyone

Very well written, a good mixture of factual evidence and narrative. The main take home point here should be known to everyone, especially Americans. There is a reason why there was a period of 128 years between Colombus' landing and a permanent European settlement in North America. Namely, there were millions of Native Americans there who thought Europeans were dirty, amusing creatures who had interesting objects but were not fit for being neighbors. Attempted European settlers were continuousl...more

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Rocklynn rated it:

(review of isbn 1565119789)

04/04/08

I listened to an abridged version of this, and even that was LONG. 1491 goes into great depth about the history of north and south america pre-Columbus. What I enjoyed: I learned a lot about native "history", and also the hows and whys of what is "known"; I was engaged and intrigued with the ideas presented, the comparisons with European culture in the same time frame, and the fact that so much of what has been assumed/presented as fact is highly disputable; and also I rea...more

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John rated it:

(review of isbn 1400032059)

01/19/07

Read in December, 2006

A very interesting look at pre-Conquest America, containing some relatively new (and far from established) academic theories. The main thesis of the book is that pre-Columbian American societies were far more advanced and populous than recorded by European colonists/invaders/priests. The successive waves of epidemics brought by European contact decimated the Americas to such an extent that these societies caved into anarchy and ruin, which was seen as their original condition by the new arriva...more

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Ian rated it:

07/06/07

Read in January, 2006

recommends it for: anyone

Mann is not a historian, but rather is a journalist. And for that reason, this book does read like a history text (like Guns, Germs, and Steel). But it is exceptionally researched and fantastic.

Mann describes North and South America in a way that traditional textbooks and contemporary rhetoric never acknowledges. He combats the old-fashioned and anti-academic beliefs that pervade our Eurocentric version of world history (summed up in what he calls "Holmberg's Mistake," a rea...more

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Nick rated it:

(review of isbn 1400032059)

02/27/08

Confession: I never finished this, leaving about 50 pages (about 15%)on the table. With non-fiction books that are based around a particular theory I feel like as long as I read enough to internalize the argument and really understand some of the evidence I can stop reading when I get bored. If I missed some revelation on page 420 somebody let me know.

The key takeaway here: American societies were almost certainly older, larger, more technically advanced and more com