1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

by Charles C. Mann

Biologically speaking, they were fitter, which is another way of saying that in these places they were—loaded words!—genetically superior.

Slavery was the foundational institution of the modern Americas.

Surrounded in the seventeenth century by an ever-larger population of untrustworthy groups, the elites who had embraced mixed unions in the sixteenth century felt themselves losing control. With this loss of control went their previous tolerance for the populace’s freewheeling ways.

American history is often described in terms of Europeans entering a nearly empty wilderness. For centuries, though, most of the newcomers were African and the land was not empty, but filled with millions of indigenous people.