Before Columbus - The World That Was
Essay 1 of 100: The Real History of the Americas
In 1491, the Americas were home to somewhere between 50 and 100 million people.
Let that number gel for a moment. Fifty to one hundred million human beings living in cities, farming land, building roads, governing themselves, trading across thousands of miles, practicing medicine, recording history, building astronomical observatories, and doing every other thing that human beings do when they have been living somewhere long enough to figure out how it works.
Europe, at the same moment in history, had roughly 60 to 80 million people.
I wasn’t taught this in school. Like you, I got the conqueror’s whitewashed version. The story we were taught — the one with the pilgrims and the empty wilderness and the providential hand of God guiding Christian civilization to an unclaimed continent — is a lie constructed after the fact to justify what had already been done. The Americas were not empty. They were not wilderness. They were not a savage land w…
