Charles C. Mann: 1491 & 1493 Before & After Columbus (Mp3+pdf)

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Charles C. Mann - 1491 New Revelations Of The Americas Before Columbus

1491 is not so much the story of a year, as of what that year stands for: the long-debated (and often-dismissed) question of what human civilization in the Americas was like before the Europeans crashed the party. The history books most Americans were (and still are) raised on describe the continents before Columbus as a vast, underused territory, sparsely populated by primitives whose cultures would inevitably bow before the advanced technologies of the Europeans. For decades, though, among the archaeologists, anthropologists, paleolinguists, and others whose discoveries Charles C. Mann brings together in 1491, different stories have been emerging. Among the revelations: the first Americans may not have come over the Bering land bridge around 12,000 B.C. but by boat along the Pacific coast 10 or even 20 thousand years earlier; the Americas were a far more urban, more populated, and more technologically advanced region than generally assumed; and the Indians, rather than living in static harmony with nature, radically engineered the landscape across the continents, to the point that even "timeless" natural features like the Amazon rainforest can be seen as products of human intervention.

Mann is well aware that much of the history he relates is necessarily speculative, the product of pot-shard interpretation and precise scientific measurements that often end up being radically revised in later decades. But the most compelling of his eye-opening revisionist stories are among the best-founded: the stories of early American-European contact. To many of those who were there, the earliest encounters felt more like a meeting of equals than one of natural domination. And those who came later and found an emptied landscape that seemed ripe for the taking, Mann argues convincingly, encountered not the natural and unchanging state of the native American, but the evidence of a sudden calamity: the ravages of what was likely the greatest epidemic in human history, the smallpox and other diseases introduced inadvertently by Europeans to a population without immunity, which swept through the Americas faster than the explorers who brought it, and left behind for their discovery a land that held only a shadow of the thriving cultures that it had sustained for centuries before.

1491: Interview W/ Charles C. Mann

[swf]http://www.youtube.com/v/LZNB5iEKBJY?.swf[/swf]

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Charles C. Mann - 1493 Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

From the author of 1491 - the best-selling study of the pre-Columbian Americas - a deeply engaging new history that explores the most momentous biological event since the death of the dinosaurs. More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed totally different suites of plants and animals. Columbus’s voyages brought them back together - and marked the beginning of an extraordinary exchange of flora and fauna between Eurasia and the Americas. As Charles Mann shows, this global ecological tumult - the “Columbian Exchange” - underlies much of subsequent human history. Presenting the latest generation of research by scientists, Mann shows how the creation of this worldwide network of exchange fostered the rise of Europe, devastated imperial China, convulsed Africa, and for two centuries made Manila and Mexico City - where Asia, Europe, and the new frontier of the Americas dynamically interacted - the center of the world.

In 1493, Charles Mann gives us an eye-opening scientific interpretation of our past, unequaled in its authority and fascination.

http://www.booktv.org/Watch/12812/1493+Uncovering+the+New+World+Columbus...

http://www.amazon.com/1493-Uncovering-World-Columbus-Created/dp/0307265722

[swf]http://www.youtube.com/v/YUUAsgHLLUk?.swf[/swf]

General Information
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Title: 1493 - Uncovering the New Worl
Author: Charles C Mann
Read By: Robertson Dean
Copyright: 2011
Audiobook Copyright: 2011
Genre: History
Publisher: Random House Audio

File Information
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Number of MP3s: 14
Total Duration: 17:45:34
Total MP3 Size: 489.05
Parity Archive: No
Encoded At: CBR 64 kbit/s 44100 Hz Mono
Normalize: None
Noise Reduction: None
ID3 Tags: Set, v1.1, v2.3

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