1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

“Charles Mann’s 1491 is subtitled “New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus”. He pulls together a lot of the new research over the last generation in one place and provides the reader with a helicopter overview of the American hemisphere on the eve of contact. He goes into a great deal of detail and from that a reader gets a very different picture, not just of the Americas in 1491, but also the whole world in 1491. Mann shows that the Americas were not just an empty world waiting for Europeans to arrive and create a greater American nation – but a place where civilisation had risen and fallen, where there were great cities that contained probably as much population as Europe at the time, if not more, where corn agriculture had transformed large areas of the continent, and where Indian people had created changes in the land that left their imprint on the environment. The book provides a huge hemispheric overview.” Read more...

The best books on Native Americans and Colonisers

Colin Calloway, Historian