Mann is well aware that much of the history he relates isnecessarily speculative, the product of pot-shard interpretationand precise scientific measurements that often end up beingradically revised in later decades. But the most compelling of hiseye-opening revisionist stories are among the best-founded: thestories of early American-European contact. To many of those whowere there, the earliest encounters felt more like a meeting ofequals than one of natural domination. And those who came later andfound an emptied landscape that seemed ripe for the taking, Mannargues convincingly, encountered not the natural and unchangingstate of the native American, but the evidence of a suddencalamity: the ravages of what was likely the greatest epidemic inhuman history, the smallpox and other diseases introducedinadvertently by Europeans to a population without immunity, whichswept through the Americas faster than the explorers who broughtit, and left behind for their discovery a land that held only ashadow of the thriving cultures that it had sustained for centuriesbefore. --Tom Nissley
【作者简介】
Charles C. Mann is a correspondent for Science andThe Atlantic Monthly, and has co-written four previous booksincluding Noah’s Choice: The Future of Endangered Speciesand The Second Creation. A three-time National MagazineAward finalist, he has won awards from the American BarAssociation, the Margaret Sanger Foundation, the American Instituteof Physics, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, among others. Hiswriting was twice selected for both The Best American ScienceWriting and The Best American Science and NatureWriting. He lives with his wife and their children in Amherst,Massachusetts.
【目录】
List of Maps
Preface
INTRODUCTION / Holmberg’s Mistake
1. A View from Above
PART ONE / Numbers from Nowhere?
2. Why Billington Survived
3. In the Land of Four Quarters
4. Frequently Asked Questions
PART TWO / Very Old Bones
5. Pleistocene Wars
6. Cotton (or Anchovies) and Maize (Tales of Two Civilizations,Part I)
7. Writing, Wheels, and Bucket Brigades (Tales of TwoCivilizations, Part II)
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