America's Pristine Myth

[NATO AIR]

damn, makes me wish I'd bought this book when I saw at an English book store in Okinawa....

how do you teach this sector of history kathianne?

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0901/p09s02-coop.html

America's pristine myth

By Charles C. Mann

AMHERST, MASS. – Next week my daughter will go back to elementary school, and I will be faced with a choice. At some point the curriculum will cover the environment, and she'll be taught that before Europeans settled the Americas the Indians lived so lightly on the land that for all practical purposes the hemisphere was a wilderness. The forests and plains, the teacher will explain, were crowded with bison, beaver, and deer; the rivers, with fish; flights of passenger pigeons darkened the skies. The continent's few inhabitants walked beneath an endless forest of tall trees that had never been disturbed.
But in recent decades most archaeologists, anthropologists, and geographers have come to believe that this Edenic image isn't true. When Columbus landed, the new research suggests, the Western Hemisphere wasn't filled with scattered bands of ecologically pure hunters and gatherers. Instead, it was a thriving, diverse place; a tumult of languages, trade, and culture; the home to tens of millions of people - more, some researchers believe, than Europe at that time.

Then, the majority of native Americans lived south of the Rio Grande. They were not wanderers with tepees; they built up and lived in some of the world's biggest, most opulent cities. Tenochtitlán, the greatest city in the aggressive military alliance best-known as the Aztec empire, may have had a quarter-million inhabitants - more than London or Paris. It glittered on scores of artificially constructed islands in the middle of a great lake in central Mexico. On first encountering this metropolis, the conquistadors gawped like yokels at the great temples and immense banners and colorful promenades. Hundreds of boats flitted like butterflies around the city's canals and the three grand causeways that linked it to the mainland. Long aqueducts conveyed water from the distant mountains to the city. Perhaps most astounding to the Spaniards, according to their memoirs, were the botanical gardens - at the time, none existed in Europe.

Far from being dependent on big-game hunting, most Indians lived on farms. (Otherwise, the cities wouldn't have survived.)
continue article at link

 

[Annie]

damn, makes me wish I'd bought this book when I saw at an English book store in Okinawa....

how do you teach this sector of history kathianne?

Luckily for me, I had my choice in texts-brand new this year. We do teach the latter! I used to have to supplement with journal articles, which I had to re-write so the kids could understand.

 

[NATO AIR]

Luckily for me, I had my choice in texts-brand new this year. We do teach the latter! I used to have to supplement with journal articles, which I had to re-write so the kids could understand.

sounds like a lot of work. its sad you have to put in so much effort to correct the texts... good you got to choose what you wanted this year. teacher of the year yet?

 

[Annie]

sounds like a lot of work. its sad you have to put in so much effort to correct the texts... good you got to choose what you wanted this year. teacher of the year yet?

I get my share of kudos. I get very angry at revisionist history. :bat: :bat:

 

[Unkotare]

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