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Man. I just vividly remembered an argument I had with one of my elementary school teachers. We had to memorize the state bird, flower, animal, etc. She told us it was illegal to pick Bluebonnets and I thought that was silly. That didn't go over well.
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http://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/va.../smallpox.html |
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Not exactly a ringing endorsement for multiculturalism, is it? |
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1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles Mann is a good book on the subject. |
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I think I mentioned this in a thread a while back, but the thing I don't get is why this was a one-way deal. Europeans show up and cough, and 90 million Native Americans start dying. But why didn't the Native Americans cough and kill all of the arriving Europeans? And presumably no diseases went back to Europe with Columbus and John Smith and Verrazano and all those guys. Why not? Why didn't Europe take the same disease beatdown that the Native Americans took? Was it just sheer luck? Did the Viking expeditions somehow inoculate Europeans? And why didn't the Vikings start the North American plague? Or is it possible that something like the Black Plague was carried from America with the Vikings and nailed the white folk 200 years earlier? |
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Sorry for the shoddy explanation. It was in the book that I mentioned above but it's been awhile since I've read that part and I don't remember the exact reasoning. |
Ah, nice answers. Thanks.
So essentially the Native Americans died because they had healthy country lifestyles in fresh air and they didn't score with Asian and African chicks. |
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It's the same problem that a lot of our endangered animal species face (cheetahs specifically). New genes in the pool is never a bad thing. |
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One thing that the ancient civilizations were good at was wiping out the indigenous people when they took over a place. It made continued resistance a non-issue. It apparently happened more accidentally in the New World, but it still happened, and the Europeans ended up with an easier conquest as a result. The Romans appear to be a big exception to that rule, though, which says that you can take over a place and not have to kill everyone who was there before. But I think the Romans brought a lot of benefits with them and gave full citizenship to the conquered people, so maybe that quelled resistance as much as killing would've. It makes one wonder if we offered American citizenship to Iraq and let them be the 52nd state (after Puerto Rico, apparently), would that place settle down? I'm only half joking on this. |
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