Introduction Of 1491 Part 1 Mann

In the introduction of 1491 by Charles Mann, he tries to disprove that Native Americans came across the Bering Strait 25,000 years ago and had little to no effect on their environment that after years of living there the land remained mostly wilderness. Mann uses recent re-assessments of views about the pre-Columbian world, based on new findings in demography, climatology, economics, botany, genetics, biochemistry, and soil science to support his ideas. In Part One Mann says that the scientists are currently acknowledging population levels in the Native Americans were probably higher than they were first believed. Part One continues with Mann talking about how humans most likely arrived in the Americas earlier than people previously thought.

Finally in part three it is said that The New World was not a wilderness when Europeans came. It is said that it was an environment where the indigenous peoples had changed for years using fire for their benefit. Manns point of view was different than the typical and more well known thoughts that Native Americans had no effect on their environment and that their land was mostly wilderness. In the Preface Mann talks about he first started wondering what America was like before Columbus while he was writing an article about a NASA program where he ended up in Chichen Itza. “The seeds of this book date back, at least in part, to 1983... I knew nothing about Mesoamerican culture—I may not even have been familiar with the term “Mesoamerica” (Preface.) Later Mann picked up an article by William Denevan that started to address what America was like before Columbus. Years went by and he started to learn more about the topic and was waiting for someone to write a book on this so this new information could be widely known. Mann then decided that he would write the book on what he thinks the main ideas of the new findings were so other people could become educated on what America was really like before Columbus. Mann’s point of view came from him first

In this time period in AP World History, Columbus was coming from Spain searching for a route for India but instead came across America. Columbus failed at finding a new route to India but people who followed Columbus from Spain started the colonization of the Americas and for empires of other European nations, this resulted in growing a new major trading network of of foods and indigenous cultures. However because of the international trade networks disease was also spread which killed many people in North America. During the 1400s in APWH a major theme is exploration and with the Europeans spreading to America they brought diseases like smallpox which Mann uses his and scientist research and investigations to show that around 90% of America's population was killed when Europeans settled in America. The APWH curriculum also includes a lot of information on the Aztecs pre Columbus. The Aztecs rose to power after the fall of the Toltec Empire. The Aztecs were both valued and feared for their intelligence anf fighting abilities. They founded Tenochtitlan around 1325 and it became the center of Aztec power and controlled most of central Mesoamerica. In 1491 Mann goes into detail on how Tenochtitlan had running water and clean streets. In 1491 Mann He also makes the point that it was larger