World History

Unit 3: The World in Transition

Chapter 13: Africa and the Americas

29. Thu, Dec 12, 2013

The authors seem a bit inclined toward building up mystery in the Americas section. Perhaps, since they have let their own names go unrecorded, they are simply fans of a good puzzle. Less charitably, they once again seem to be trying to hide their own ignorance. However, let us be fair: sometimes historians simply don't know things, and history books are almost inevitably overtaken by more recent scholarship. With few written records and fewer records translated, pre-Columbian American history is almost entirely dependent on archaeology for information. Moreover, this text was published in 2000, and five years later Charles Mann published his book "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus," which could have filled in many of the textbook's gaps.

The authors' treatment of the Maya, however, is almost inexcusable, since there is far more information on them than on most others, including a Mayan history book and extensive translated carvings. The Mayan story is much more complicated than spelled out in our reading. The Maya did not collapse all at once, as the book implies. Moreover, there were many Maya who still lived in the Yucatan by the time the Spanish arrived — fewer than before, and not building huge cities, but still several hundred thousand people who went by that name. Finally, while the factors going into the Maya collapses are numerous, the book does not mention what was and has been the leading theory for quite some year: the Maya were felled in part by a long dry spell, or in other words, localized climate change.

Likewise the Pueblo peoples mentioned in the book were still alive and kicking by the time the Spanish came in — in fact they were strong enough to throw the Spanish (briefly) back out! The ultimate fate of the Anasazi, however, is truly unknown.

The book also does not explain a few critical elements of First Nations history in North America. In particular they overlook the Iroqouis Confederacy, which was a coalition of semi-agricultural tribes in the Northeast which grew quite powerful and, in many ways, served as an immediate model for the United States — though not including the tribes' egalitarianism. Finally, the map on pg. 306 reflects the disposition of the tribes at the time of European contact, not throughout history; the Dakota tribe on the map (also known as the Sioux) migrated into the region shown only a few hundred years before they were in turn overrun by White American arrivals.

• Civilization arose in the Americas independently of its origins in Asia, and as we might expect, they were a bit different. What are some of those differences between Eurasian civilizations and American civilizations? What are some of the commonalities?
• Why did civilization in the Americas not expand and spread in the same way that it did in Asia and Europe? Or, to put it another way: why did Europe conquer the Americas, and not the other way around?
• The map on pg. 306 has some odd discrepancies. The map gives many different names of tribes, but some are the "standard" names while others are the names the tribes use for themselves. The Iroquois Confederation is listed, but the proper name for that collection of tribes is Haudenosaunee; the people listed on the map as "Nez Perce" call themselves Niimpiiu. Likewise, the book refers to the Incas and Aztecs, when the proper names are, respectively, Tawantinsuyu and Mexica (from which the name Mexico is derived). On the other hand, the insulting term "Eskimo" has been updated to the more acceptable Inuit. (Dakota has replaced "Sioux," although the naming of that collection of tribes is complicated.) It's easy to see why the book's authors might have left old names in place: clarity and ease of understanding. On the other hand, the book has a responsibility to educate. On the other other hand, it's hardly limited to indigenous peoples: the book refers to Japan and Germany rather than Nippon and Deutchland, which is what the people of those countries call their home, and the Byzantine Empire is, as we've already noted, split off from the Roman Empire because it's a bit distinct. So: what's in a name? Is it more important to be respectful, or to be understood? Does it even matter?

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