Here's an interesting book about America:
1491: Before it became the New World, the Western Hemisphere was vastly more populous and sophisticated than has been thought.
With a little more here:1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus is a 2005 non-fiction book by American author and science writer Charles C. Mann about the pre-Columbian Americas. It was the 2006 winner of the National Academies Communication Award for best creative work that helps the public understanding of topics in science, engineering or medicine. The book presents recent research findings in different fields that suggest human populations in the Western Hemisphere—that is, the Indigenous peoples of the Americas—were more numerous, had arrived earlier, were more sophisticated culturally, and controlled and shaped the natural landscape to a greater extent than scholars had previously thought. The author notes that, according to these findings, two of the first six independent centers of civilization arose in the Americas: the first, Norte Chico or Caral-Supe, in present-day northern Peru; and that of Formative-era Mesoamerica in what is now southern Mexico.
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Wikipedia
It's been made into a TV series:
1491: The Untold Story of the Americas Before Columbus is a crash-course in First Nations history that should be taught and broadcast in Canadian schools. I took history all through high school and didn’t learn anything close to what was revealed to me in the first hour of this new series. 1491 boasts 20 dramatic scenes and an Indigenous cast that provide context and blows away long-held theories that prior to European contact, Indigenous peoples were largely nomadic, did not alter the natural landscape and were not as advanced as other civilizations in the world at the time.APTN’s 1491: The Untold Story of the Americas Before Columbus is must-see TV | TV, eh?
Here's another theory which blows away a few theories:
The authors suggest Native ideas helped trigger the Enlightenment in politically backward Europe, teaching French philosophers like Rousseau and Voltaire that their own societies could be less cruel and more equal. New book 'Dawn of Everything' upends assumptions about how societies developThe ‘Age of Reason’ was an age of debate. The Enlightenment was rooted in conversation; it took place largely in cafés and salons. Many classic Enlightenment texts took the form of dialogues; most cultivated an easy, transparent, conversational style clearly inspired by the salon. (It was the Germans, back then, who tended to write in the obscure style for which French intellectuals have since become famous.) Appeal to ‘reason’ was above all a style of argument. The ideals of the French Revolution – liberty, equality and fraternity – took the form they did in the course of just such a long series of debates and conversations. All we’re going to suggest here is that those conversations stretched back further than Enlightenment historians assume. Forget ‘Liberté’ – 17th-Century Indigenous Americans Knew a Lot More About Freedom Than Their French Colonisers | Novara Media
Here's a further look:
What is the Native Critique (of the Enlightenment)? - YouTube
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