A little reality check. Every Columbus day it's the same thing. "Racist White European males slaughtered our ancestors, blah blah blah".

bump

Yes, it certainly is awful that the Aztecs are unable to drag defeated enemies and their populations off to their sacrificial altars to have their hearts torn out and the rest of their bodies made into stews. Gee that must have been a wonderful society. If you were a homocidal maniac that is. The truth is that both Europeans and Native Americans took turns slaughtering their fellow men. But Europe did develop Western Civilization which eventually destroyed static civilizations like the Aztecs and others. It's called progress. It was messy, sometimes bloody, and not always fair, but it's superior to what existed in America pre-Columbus.

Bump.

A little reality check. Every Columbus day it's the same thing. "Racist White European males slaughtered our ancestors, blah blah blah". lol y'all forgot,,took all the gold and returned home

Does this mean we don't have to pay "reparations" to South Americans? :)

Of course that was true of all the Americas.
And some diseases native to the Western Hemisphere were likewise introduced to Europe.

The Eurocentric haters are opinionated, ignorant, narrow-minded, controlling and morally smug (all usually go together).
Other than that, their opinion is worth the same as someone who actually knows what he's talking about.

Here's one for the list.

What name did we end up with?

Death toll:
Hitler= 13 Million
Stalin= 40 Million
Invasion of New world north and south=70 million
You can call it Manifest Destiny or what ever else excuse you have but it happened and it wasn't pretty.
Lets say you have some acreage out in the country. It's just sitting there doing nothing but you enjoy going there once in a while.

I come along and say gee no ones using this place I think I'll just take it and build me a Mall. Make something of it. Hey...don't you just love Manifest Destiny. Flame Me now.

If you read "Guns, Germs, and Steel", you might learn that the Europe-to-Siberia continuous land mass was the source of more plants and more animals to be domesticated than the new world or the Pacific islands. And, each time an animal was domesticated, a new disease found its way into the population. And the trade between the cities in this arc transmitted the diseases effectively. This happened for perhaps 9 or 10 thousand years, leading to people who were much more resistant to the diseases than when they were introduced.

When the Europeans arrived in the new world ... these diseases almost wiped out the inhabitants. I would have used the word "decimated", but that is only 1 in 10 - diseases like smallpox, typhus, etc. killed between 60% and 95% of those infected. For example, 10 years after Cortez landed, the population of Mexico shrank from 35 million to less than 5 million.

The moral of the story is ... even if the 16th and 17th century european explorers had 21st century morality .. the then current inhabitants of North and South America were doomed -- as doomed as the inhabitants of the Pacific Islands.

For example, so many Hawaiians were killed by an outbreak of diseases in Hawaii around 1900 that the King of Hawaii recruited people from the Philipines and from Japan to come work the sugar fields, leading to its current ethnic makeup of 1/3 white, 1/3 ethnic Japanese, 1/3 ethnic Philipines, and only a scattering of native Hawaiians.

Good research, but it isn't groundbreaking, except for maybe the author's expectations. We already know the Anasazi lived only into their 30s. Stone ground corn was a big part of their diet, and the stone particles they ate along with the corn wore their teeth down to stubs. Gum disease was a major cause of infection and death. This would be typical among all the agricultural tribes in the whole new world. They didn't know how to set broken bones, so they just fused together, crippling the person.