Reddit reviews 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
We found 19 Reddit comments about 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Used Book in Good Condition
I'm a big fan of the books 1491 and 1493 by Charles C. Mann regarding the history of the Americas before and after Colombus and all of the misconceptions about it and the most up to date analysis of the american cultures.
Were you reading 1493? My dad's recommended this book but I haven't got around to it yet.
Read 1491: https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059
And: https://www.amazon.com/1493-Uncovering-World-Columbus-Created/dp/0307278247
And: https://www.amazon.com/Columbus-Quest-Jerusalem-Religion-Voyages/dp/1439102376
uuugh - distant mirror was aaaaaawful. tuchman is so dry and boring. she drills down into more minutae than you can possibly handle. she did the same thing to ww1 in the guns of august. books like that make even a history buff like me cringe.
Leopolds ghost was good, but just watch the movie- I think seeing the severed hands and jungles visually makes a stronger impact.
Best book I have read lately is EASILY 1493.
http://www.amazon.com/1493-Uncovering-World-Columbus-Created/dp/0307278247
This 1 hour video by the author gives you a great start to what it is about. If you find the video interesting, the book is GREAT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bghLhJ-c8os
Its so good, I have PAID my relatives to read it because its not typically the type of book in their reading wheelhouse. They loved it. SUUUUPER interesting and very relevant to understanding our world to this very day.
THIS book is the best book oof any kind that I have ever read in my life. AMAZING, but quite long. It covers the whooooole of history from millions of years ago till 1900. That book changed my life. Watson has written some extrordinary books. Great, sophisticated writer.
http://www.amazon.com/Ideas-History-Thought-Invention-Freud/dp/0060935642
Both of these are more general history covering a longer period rather than more specifc as above
edit: guns germs and steel is good, but has a thesis that can be grasped easily with just a wiki article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel
the story, backround and color and other info in 1493 kinda overlaps guns germs, and treats it in a bit more of an interesting fashion. They are both kind of "why things are the way they are" books, which IMO is a super interesting topic
All these are my opinion, so take them with a grain of salt
Relevant book:
https://www.amazon.com/1493-Uncovering-World-Columbus-Created/dp/0307278247/
>So where are they or their civilizations today?
Lehite successor states were ground to pieces by a combination of disease epidemic, climate change, and European aggression like the rest of America's endemic nations.
If you haven't read them, I highly recommend 1491 and 1493.
>Where were they when they were at their peak?
That's a great question that is not answered by modern revelation. John Clark thinks Joseph Smith believed that Book of Mormon events occurred around the Yucatan peninsula. I agree with him but I'm happy to cede ground if future evidences don't support that.
> Based on DNA and archaeology, it's a tough case, no?
Not really. This is an article you may (or may not) enjoy:
https://www.lds.org/topics/book-of-mormon-and-dna-studies?lang=eng
I found that its cautions were very prescient.
> Peru. I want to learn more about the history of that place, and visit machu pichu. Very interested.
I've read and recommend:
Given your interests, I would suggest looking at the popular books of Charles Mann, especially _1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created_. Mann does an impressive job of covering a lot of ground in the book, and it's entirely readable.
It looks at what happened in the immediate years after the "Old" and "New" worlds started to have "exchange." It is very wide-ranging — it has lots of information on the obvious stuff (Spanish conquests in South and Central America, for example) but also plenty of unexpected things.
It also includes some pirates, some falling nations, some technological history, and even some local American history. I think it's too early for Lewis and Clark but there are plenty of explorers and other folk in there.
The way I think about learning history is this: you need to develop a "skeleton" understanding of the major trends and events, and really grok those. Once you have that sensibility, it is easy to drape additional details, sub-stories, and narratives onto that skeleton, and you start to see how everything is connected, everything fits together. A book like Mann's is a fun way to develop that skeleton for the late-15th through even the 19th- and some 20th-century topics, and once you have that, it'll be easier to figure out what the next step should be.
(Plus, it's a fun read!)
1493: Uncovering the World Columbus Created is a great text on the effects that colonialism had on global economics, politics, and environmental changes. And it's well written.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0307278247?pc_redir=1404825718&robot_redir=1
Also, almost every single thing we know of was modified by man for his own purposes. Cats, dogs, cows, pigs, chickens, apples, oranges, corn, bananas...do you think those things existed in the "wild" 1000's of years ago? No, man selectively bred them all to meet his needs.
A great book to read is 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. It will blow your mind. Almost everything we consider "natural" is really just something that man transported (intentionally or unintentionally) from one place to another and proceeded to modify.
It's on my to-read list. I'm wondering if you have read 1493 by Charles Mann, and if there is much overlap between them. Thanks
An easy geopolitical read? Hmmm. I always go to history books that have a geopolitical element to them when recommending pop-geopolitics. Try Charles C. Mann's 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created or David Abernathy's The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires, 1415-1980.
Charles C Mann's 1493 covers the issue pretty in depth and is a great read.
> white men couldn't do field work in hotter regions.
No - at least in the American South, it was malaria resistance. Africans had it, whites didn't. Source: 1493.
A good book that would probably answer a lot of your questions.
https://www.amazon.com/1493-Uncovering-World-Columbus-Created/dp/0307278247
The trend is that crops that could not grow in certain latitudes due to colder climates can now tolerate the slightly warmer temperatures. A good example of this is french grapes that traditionally could not grow in England can now do so.
So we can reasonably expect any plant that used to only grow in, say, Southern California or Texas to now tolerate Oregon and Iowa. In the future, this may move even further north.
I should also mention that the same effect is occurring in the southern hemisphere, so weather patterns typical in the northern parts of Argentina are shifting south toward the higher latitudes.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the recent IPCC report stated that we have already experienced 1 full degree of warming since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Somewhere between 2030 and 2050 we will gain another half degree of warming. There's a chance that we might be able to hold it there if we go 100% carbon neutral by 2050, but otherwise the world will continue to warm to 2C by 2100.
My point is that the "5*C world" will not happen in our lifetimes. That's not to say we shouldn't care about the future, but rather we can't make a reasonable prediction about what the world will be 500 years from now.
Coming back to your question, where will agriculture be possible with 2 degree of warming? I believe that agriculture will continue to be possible in most places, as long as we do not exhaust the soil of nutrients or ruin it with poor irrigation practices. The crops we plant might change though - corn uses a tremendous amount of nutrients despite only producing a couple of cobs. A more calorie/nutrient dense crop might be beans, rice, etc. but that's depends on politics and economics more than anything else. There's a reason why Iowa is known for it's endless fields of corn instead of wheat or lettuce.
Likewise, modern Americans eats an enormous amount of meat without really paying for the environmental cost of it. I'm not advocating for veganism, but having a hulking chunk of steak every night isn't sustainable across billions of people.
I recommend you read a couple of books about sustainable agriculture - it's a fascinating subject and it may answer a lot of your questions. Some of my favorites include:
What's your source?
Here's mine: http://www.amazon.com/1493-Uncovering-World-Columbus-Created/dp/0307278247
It's a pretty good survey of the current state of knowledge on the subject and is intended for the non-technical reader.
>And all that were conquistadores acted as Spanish in behalf of the Spanish crown. No Basque conquest of any place or people attested histotically.
I would have thought this went without saying.
Have you read 1491 and 1493?
A lot of good stuff on the latest archaelogical findings and theories. There is new evidence that Amazonian Indians weren't all hunter gatherers, that they actual practiced a tree based agriculture and left behind mounds and other physical evidence of some kind of civilization.
Charles Mann, the author, is just summing up and/or popularizing current trends in archaelogical thought, but I learned some stunning things that went against what is taught in the schools.
You make excellent points. In-group boundaries can indeed align with cultural experience, and we cannot discount the importance of past experiences - especially for groups that have been the victims of persecution, for example.
However, I think it is a testament to the larger project of human civilization that we can transcend our own personal experiences and use a more abstract form of compassion and empathy to inform policy, law, planning, and our collective efforts to structure and govern society. For example, even in the aftermath of the Holocaust following World War II, the international Jewish community made extraordinary contributions to the advancement of the humanist project worldwide. If ever there were a time when an in-group might have justification to demonize out-groups as "the enemy" that was it. And yet a broader, more abstract compassion arose as a guiding ideal. So I don't agree that hardship and persecution necessarily lends itself to a cynical view of "foolish empathy" as you phrased it.
Having said that, there is undoubtedly a tension among values like self-preservation and magnanimity, and I would never suggest that simply expanding one's sphere of empathy and the broadening of how an individual defines his or her self-interest flatly negates the reality of these types of tension. But these finer details are not an area for speculation or conjecture. Instead, this is a place where science can get to work trying to reveal what is actually going on. Jonathan Heidt has done some interesting cross-cultural research on political orientation, and so I would start by looking at his work.
As for the question of how cultures change with shifting economic, environmental, and geopolitical circumstances, there is a large and growing scientific literature that is trying to us give some answers. The disciplines where I have seen the most work along these lines are cultural anthropology and geography. There are some wonderful popular books on these topics, and I would recommend Charles C. Mann's 1491 and 1493 in particular.