Reminiscent of John McPhee's eloquence with scientific detail.'īook Description Paperback.

Mann slips in so many fresh, new interpretations of American history that it all adds up to a deeply subversive work.' Our concept of pure wilderness untouched by grubby human hands must now be jettisoned.' Mann has chronicled an important shift in our vision of world development, one out young children could end up studying in their text books when they reach junior high.' A Jared Diamond-like volley that challenges prevailing thinking about global development. Part detective story, part epic and part tragedy.' 'Engagingly written and utterly absorbing. 1491 vividly compels us to re-examine how we teach the ancient history of the Americas and how we live with the environmental consequences of colonization.' 'Mann tells a powerful, provocative and important story. It replaces that fallacy with evidence of a different genesis, exciting and closer to true.' 1491 erases our myth of a wilderness Eden. 'A ripping, man-on-the-ground tour of a world most of us barely intuit. A landmark of a book that drops ingrained images of colonial American into the dustbin, one after the other.' A sweeping portrait of human life in the Americas before the arrival of Columbus.

'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. Challenging and surprising, this a transformative new look at a rich and fascinating world we only thought we knew. Indeed, Indians were not living lightly on the land but were landscaping and manipulating their world in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. Mexican cultures created corn in a specialized breeding process that it has been called man's first feat of genetic engineering. The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city. Mann radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492.Ĭontrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them. In this groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology, Charles C.

1492 charles mann