Quotes About History

By the twentieth century biologists were stoutly denying its existence. The "open, park-like woods" seen by early settlers, Harvard naturalist Hugh Raup asserted in 1937, were not caused by fire; they "have been, from time immemorial, characteristic of vast areas in North America.

To visitors today it seems obvious that Cahokia and the many other mound sites in the Midwest and Southeast are the remains of Indian settlements. It did not seem so clear in the past.

As the Yale historian Paul Sabin has written, the oil shock "seemingly confirmed the thesis of The Limits to Growth.

The earliest known examples appeared in northeastern Lousiana about 5,400 years ago, well before the advent of agriculture

Beginning in 1616, the pestilence took at least three years to exhaust itself and killed as much as 90 percent of the people in coastal New England.

The Hopewell, too, built mounds, and like the Adena seem to have spoken an Algonkian language.

Not until the 1440s did they learn that the island's warm climate was better suited to another, more profitable crop: sugarcane.

Cahokia, biggest of all, was preeminent from about 950 to about 1250 A.D. It was an anomaly: the greatest city north of the Río Grande, it was also the only city north of the Río Grande.

Far from being the timeless, million-year-old wilderness portrayed on calendars, these scientists say, today's forest is the product of a historical interaction between the environment and human beings—human beings in the form of the populous, long-lasting Indian societies described by Carvajal.

but it was not a history-maker" like smallpox. Treponema pallidum, awful as it was and is, did not help topple empires or push whole peoples to extinction.

The final result covered almost fifteen acres and was the largest earthen structure in the Western Hemisphere; though built out of unsuitable material in a floodplain, it has stood for a thousand years.

Beginning in about 1200 A.D., according to Woods, Cahokia's maize fields repeatedly flooded, destroying the harvests.

Because I am interested in Colón, I bought a copy of the translation when I spotted it in a used-book store. Part of a series the Italian

Half of the 102 people on the Mayflower made it through the first winter, which to me seemed amazing. How did they survive? In his history of Plymouth colony, Governor Bradford himself provides one answer: robbing Indian houses and graves.

The viruses that cause smallpox, influenza, hepatitis, measles, encephalitis, and viral pneumonia; the bacteria that cause tuberculosis, diphtheria, cholera, typhus, scarlet fever, and bacterial meningitis—by a quirk of evolutionary history, all were unknown in the Western Hemisphere.

Trying to build up the colonial population, the monarchy ordered that female African slaves be awarded to every new male European arrival, along with exhortations to breed.

Far from being dependent on big-game hunting, most Indians lived on farms.

In any case these people—Roosevelt called them the Paituna culture, after a nearby village—had ceramic bowls, red- to gray-brown. Found at Painted Rock Cave and other places in the area, it is the oldest known pottery in the Americas.

According to Cieza de León, Wayna Qhapaq, Atawallpa's father, died when "a great plague of smallpox broke out [in 1524 or 1525], so severe that more than 200,000 died of it, for it spread to all parts of the kingdom.

The Mi'kmaq in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia scoffed at the notion of European superiority. If Christian civilization was so wonderful, why were its inhabitants all trying to settle somewhere else?

In all of history, humankind has been able to domesticate only twenty-five mammals, a dozen or so birds, and, possibly, a lizard.

According to Peter Stahl, an anthropologist at the State University of New York in Binghamton, "lots" of researchers believe that "what the eco-imagery would like to picture as a pristine, untouched Urwelt [primeval world] in fact has been managed by people for millennia.

After Cortés, the population of the entire region collapsed. By 1620–25, it was 730,000, "approximately 3 percent of its size at the time that he first landed." Cook and Borah calculated that the area did not recover its fifteenth-century population until the late 1960s.

In the long run, Fenn says, the consequential finding of the new scholarship is not that many people died, but that many people *lived.*