columnist discusses her book, the year of voting dangerously. >> one thing i don't like about the clintons is that when they get in trouble, and donald does this too. they try to blame someone else. so when bill got in trouble with monica, the white house aides would say well, it thomas jefferson -- dead presidents, they are dragging them in. >> tonight at 8:00 eastern on cue and day. history, yale university professor emeritus john day most explores how indians, europeans, and african population converged and exchanged germs, food, and cultural practices. this is about one hour and 20 minutes. john demos: all right.

coming finally to today's lecture -- yesterday, our topic was discovery. today is going to the plantation. there is something else that sort of bridges the two that we should not pass over without comment. the headline fort would be quite simply conquest -- the beginning phases of plantation involved conquest of a particularly intensive sort. bluntly put, the old world progressively and massively conquered the new. the most famous part of this process was the spanish conquest of wide regions of mexico and central and south america, and the destruction along the way of

aztecs and mayas and incas and many other native groupings. historians ever since have wondered how such a small group of invaders could win out so easily and so completely win the numerical odds went so heavily against them. cortez, the spanish leader who conquered most of mexico in the 15 20's, had only a few hundred soldiers, while his chief opponent, the aztec emperor montezuma, had many many thousands. the question this raises is obviously important. the entire history of the americas would probably have been different had the aztecs succeeded in throwing cortez and his men back into the sea. it is also a difficult question to answer.

let's try to take the whole situation apart sort of piece by piece. one piece is pretty clear and straightforward -- the spaniards possessed major advantages in military technology. their weapons, their iron swords and armor, and above all their firearms, guns and canon -- cannon, were much more effective than aztec arrows and spears and war clubs. furthermore, the spaniards had greater mobility, since they were on horseback, while the aztecs were on foot. a second piece also seems clear -- in effect, the spaniards waged on unplanned but utterly devastating kind of bacteriological warfare. i alluded yesterday to native

american vulnerability to european diseases, and i will be saying somewhat more about that shortly. the main point right now is that diseases like smallpox just decimated the aztec armies, reducing that only their numbers, but also their basic morale. a third piece is pretty clear -- the native peoples of mexico were riddled with internal dissension and conflict. the aztecs were dominant. they did rule over a large empire, but many of the smaller subject tribes resented aztec domination, and came to see the spaniards not so much as conquerors, but rather as liberators. cortez was able to full been in as allies to his own forces, and this went part of the way to

evening up the numbers on each side. even so, the question about the spanish conquest remains. even when you take into account the factors of technological advantage and biological advantage, bacteriological advantage, and a willingness of at least some native groups to help cortez. you haven't said enough to explain the complete success of this tiny, ragtag army of invaders operating in very unfamiliar territory -- in fact, right on the enemy's home turf -- with no possibility of outside support, or even of resupply, and up against what was arguably the mightiest empire ever seen up to that point in the western hemisphere. or at least, most historians

think that isn't enough. so they have gone on to other kinds of explanation, which usually involves some type of cultural, or even psychological, factors. 100 years ago, plus or minus, when the history of all of this first began to be written, the historians involved simply assumed that european cultures were greatly superior to native american cultures, mentally superior, morally superior, smarter, stronger, more resource will, and during -- resourceful and daring. historians assumed this cultural superiority would be reflected on the battlefield in addition to -- nowadays, such assumptions seem much too arrogant, and perhaps even racist, and they seem intellectually superficial as

well. so, more recent scholars of the conquest have tried to make a somewhat different case. they still point to cultural factors, but they talk mostly about misunderstandings and failures in communication, and messages that somehow missed their mark. here are a couple examples. as cortez and his army approached the aztec capital, montezuma said out ambassadors to greet him with a lot of fabulous gifts -- gold and silver and other wonderful stuff. cortez interpreted this by his own account as a sign of weakness. in effect, as a kind of bride designed to persuade him to turn around and leave the --

a kind of bribe designed to persuade him to turn around and leave the country. in a way, it had the opposite results -- it whetted his appetite for more. add another point, montezuma tried to terrify the spaniards into leaving by torturing and executing, and i think cannibalizing, some spanish prisoners. this only stiffened their resolve. they now felt honorbound to revenge the death of their fallen comrades. i imagine they also felt that if they did not succeed in their plans of conquest, they too would suffer the same terrible fate. in a sense, these were messages sent by the indians to the spaniards which backfired and completely reversed their intended purpose.

other aztec messages were also be sensually counterproductive. for example, traditionally, aztec armies would give a loud cry -- a loud warcry when going into battle to try to frighten the enemy. cortez tells us that actually, this practice served to reveal aztec positions, and enabled the spanish forces to sort of orient themselves more effectively. in fact, this newer line of cultural explanation goes on even further. it goes on, i think, too much broader and deeper -- to much broader and deeper considerations. if advocates argue that cortez was much more alert and curious and flexible than his aztec enemies, that he was always a for and responsive to new information. supposedly he was able to exploit the conflicts among different groups of indians because he was continually asking about them ahead of time. whereas by contrast, montezuma

supposedly was quite unserious about the spaniards, and therefore -- uncurious about the spaniards, and therefore was on flexible about meeting the challenges they posed. finally, there was the issue of confronting "otherness," something i've already raised in the other lecture. now i want to turn that around and pose that same question about indian attitudes towards european others. there is some evidence, and we should be careful here, some

evidence that the mexican indians viewed europeans as being virtually superhuman. it seemed there was among them a variety of ancient myths and legends about white skinned gods who would one day come as conquerors, and they may have seen the spaniards in something like that way. perhaps, too, they could easily fit certain empirical facts into this picture -- the deadly power of spanish guns, the skills involved in spanish horsemanship , the size and versatility of spanish ships, and maybe most important , the relative advantage of spaniards to resist those epidemic diseases which proved so devastating to indians. all of those are possibly taken

as godlike element. if this was truly the case, if the aztecs did conclude that the spaniards were godlike, it could certainly have undermined their fighting spirit and been at least part of the reason for their ultimate defeat. please notice my use of the word "if" in there, because i'm not completely convinced myself. this whole newer line of cultural explanation for conquest seems, when you get to the bottom of it, to be a kind of updated and perhaps more sophisticated version of the old line. another way, in short, of declaring european cultural superiority. the aztecs didn't get it. they made all the wrong moves. so, quite against the odds, they were beaten.

the gist of the new line. most of the evidence comes from the spaniards. they left records that can be read today. all we see is their understanding of what is going on. every look at the same records very carefully, and if we use a little imagination, we can also see that they did not always get it either. let me go back for one more look to those gifts which montezuma sent to cortez at the outset, and which i said cortez interpreted as a sign of weakness and fear. it is much more likely that they were come up from montezuma's own standpoint, a sign of strength. traditionally, in aztec culture, the leader would express his power through magnificent acts

of giftgiving, as if to say "i am so strong, i have so much here that i can evenly give away some of what i have got to others." there could be a certain confidence, even a kind of put down implied in such generous acts of giftgiving. none of this is entirely clear or certain. the only thing we can be certain about is that the whole situation was fraught with misunderstanding and miscommunication. in fact, there simply had to be a lot of misunderstanding when each side was completely unfamiliar with the cultural practices of the other. both sides made mistakes, and perhaps it was just dumb luck that the spanish mistakes proved in the end to be less costly than those of the indians.

in fact, getting a good fix on this whole topic, it seems to me especially tricky and difficult. how complete was the conquest how complete was the conquest anyway? what was its actual extent, and how lasting was its impact? how did the conquered people of the various indian groups all across the americas respond to it? questions like these make a fascinating and complex area of study, and they made ever be finally double -- finally settled. historians in recent years have become generally quite reluctant to see conquered groups, the

losers, the oppressed, as mere victims who are defeated and helpless to change their fate. instead, many historians nowadays look to ways in which people resisted and limited the terms of their defeat, and even created opportunities to express their own agency. agency is another one of those very trendy terms nowadays in academia, meaning in one way or another the ability of any group, even the most downtrodden route, to act on its own behalf -- downtrodden group, to act on its own behalf. there is no doubt that indian groups could and did resist colonial domination, beginning go most from the moment of battlefield defeat. sometimes their resistance itself took a military form. there were uprisings and rebellions among the mayas and aztecs all to the 16th century. in fact, there were large native rebellions in central america as late as the 19 century. without stretching things too much, you could even look at the guerrilla movements in some parts of latin america in quite

recent times -- el salvador, nicaragua, southern mexico, and colombia, where a treaty was signed last week ending 50 years of conflict -- most of these resistance movements inc. composed mainly of ethnically -- being composed mainly of ethnically indian individuals. there is a five century long history of resistance to external conquest. there's also no doubt that's native people found the 60 -- from the 16th -- the 16th century onward showed a sort of indirect resistance, a cultural resistance. they would continue to practice their old beliefs and customs. for example, their religious beliefs and customs in secret. or they would sort of co-op the practice of christians, and use them in their own way. in fact, if you visit latin america today, you cannot help but notice a pervasive presence, not just of indian peoples, but also of indian cultural traditions. they are everywhere. they definitely suggest some limitations in the conquest

process. still and all, even after acknowledging these limitations, i think we finally must recognize the immense blow, the shock, the trauma, which the conquest became for native peoples, especially it's a major parts of south and central america -- especially in some major parts of south and central america. some symbols of this trauma -- and a great many latin american villages today, people have as

part of their traditional culture rituals and ceremonies in which events from the conquest, now nearly 500 years in the past, are remembered and reenacted. conquest dances, as they are sometimes called. in most cases, these reenactments present the original, girders -- original

conquerors stash the spaniards -- as winning all over again. these rituals, as well is the repetition of the original outcome, suggests a continuing struggle to master the trauma of it all, a struggle that is still incomplete. my second example is an object which i intended to bring to our meeting today, and alas i seem to have left it at home. i will try briefly to describe, and how i came upon it. i was traveling in the western highlands of one of allah a number of years ago -- of guatemala a number of years ago. amazing place. we were in this city, and in the large urban market there, and i notice in one of the market stalls a piece of what looked

like very old clock -- cloth. the problem was the market person who ran the stall was mayan. she didn't even speak any spanish. i really wanted to find out what this cloth was. i think she took me next-door, and her neighbor said it is really old. i kept looking at it trying to figure it out. it is actually, functionally a kind of covering that goes over the neck and shoulders and hands him down on the sides. it is quite small, so i think it was some sort of child's. on one side in front, there is a row of figures woven into the cloth that are just large and

striding forward, and kind of just massively impressive. they have sort of helmets on their heads, and the and -- and the expression on their face is terrifying. there is a group of smaller figures who are essentially reeling back, recoiling as it were, with looks of terror on their faces. i did not get the point right away. finally, again struggling with the language, i asked what it was. the word that came back was "con queta." this textile, this piece

of cloth, is probably no more than 150 years old. that makes it in some ways all the more intriguing -- 350 years after the conquest, that whole theme is still being worked out in a specific way. i promised tomorrow, after i have gone home and come back, i will bring the cloth with a. i'm embarrassed i don't have it here. before i move along, i will stop for a couple minutes and see if

anybody wants to raise any question. >> how many horses did the spanish have? john demos: i don't know the answer, but i would think several dozen. they had to be brought across the ocean. >> what was the medical status of the indians? wasn't that they live in a healthy paradise? john demos: i'm coming to that in a little bit. they want to bring your microphone so your words are for

corded fraternity -- are recorded for eternity. >> you said you had this cloth, and it's a psychology of victimization in america today? [inaudible] john demos: i don't know much about. i know there are a lot of studies along those lines, and i think one does sense it. my quick association to that is a time of -- the only time i've been to south america. i went to bolivia. that is a country that, as it tells its own history, is just defeat after defeat after

defeat. first with the conquest, but that all sorts of other people more recently. we went to the history museum, and it was just an array of concord hearers -- conquered heroes, as it were. i don't want to generalize too much about this, but i think there is something to it. i want to move along now and zero in on plantation, that other word that, together with discovery, has for so long served to sort of an cap too late our understanding of the

opening phase of colonial history. it, too, is a rather big and broad and flexible, one might even say elastic, word, with many different levels of eating -- of meaning. for people directly involved, plantation meant everything having to do with overseas settlement and colonization. the removal, in short, of a certain number of europeans from their original homes on one side of the ocean to new homes on the other side. that meeting works well enough for us, too. we need also to consider this business of plantation in a much broader sense, because overseas settlement was really just one part of a huge process of exchange between the old world and the new, what scholars sometimes call the columbian exchange.

i'm sure some of you have encountered that term before, and maybe you even know the book on which carries that title, and about which the next few minutes are really going to be my own summary of that wonderful book called "the columbian exchange." as i look over my years in the history business, it seems to me that that book is one of maybe a small handful of absolute landmarks where the whole direction of thinking and study about early america was changed. i'd kill to have written a book like that myself. it is now many years instance the book was published, but it is still widely read and widely used, and sometimes still seems remarkably fresh. looking at this history or graphically for a moment, it was part of the vanguard -- in historiographically, it was part of the vanguard between our first two as an environmental history. we know so much more about many things under the umbrella of environmental history. the columbian exchange is possibly the biggest headline of them all in my mind about environmental history.

here is my summary of that situation. it was a process that had many different aspects, and it went both ways, not just east-west, but west east as well. i think we must pause here before we take up settlement in colony founding in the narrower sense to try to at least clips the full -- glimpse the full measure of this exchange.

we see it as primarily having three different levels of dimensions, each one of them representing a significant movement of life forms in one direction or the other, or both together. the first such level, and the one that was in the short run the most decisive, was the exchange of microorganisms, disease, pathogens, everyday germs. i once now to go into it more fully. the native peoples of the americas found themselves on the receiving end of a massive infusion of microbes, of which their bodies simply had no prior experience, and the guests which -- and against which they had no protection. the problem was nothing less than their genes. they did not have innate

biological resistances. i believe the term is "an tigens." in short, they were unprotected against the whole legion of deadly diseases that in europe and in other parts of the world had been built up over many centuries and millennia. they had diseases of their own, and resistances against those diseases, but nothing to protect them against what the so-called planters from europe would rapidly introduced to the new world. this was true for long-standing killers like smallpox. it was also true for diseases like measles, which for most europeans was a relatively mild

and action -- infection, usually experienced in childhood without and lasting consequence is. -- consequences. there is now in occupation, a back elation against it area i had measles. i was no or near death from it, as many indians centuries ago were. the underlying point here is that these two big american continents, bounded as they were by the world's two biggest ocean , had formed a kind of hothouse from a biological point of view. a hothouse in the sense that the inhabitants had lived on unusually isolated and biologically protected

existence. the rest of the world, by contrast, had, for a long time, been much more interconnected and diversified, and the mixing of european and asian, and even african, peoples, had led to a lot of previous exchange of microorganisms, and therefore to a much wider development of various kinds of immunities and inborn resistances. this is not to say that old world peoples could take epidemic disease in their stride . on the contrary, they periodically sickened and died in numbers that we would consider appalling. but if a comparison is made between the old world and a new, between europeans and indians, during the. of the 16th and 17th centuries, -- during the period of the 16th and 17th centuries, the advantage is heavily on the european side. when smallpox broke out, some portion of the population would die. maybe 1/10 or a quarter in some places, but the rest would survive. in america, when smallpox hit an indian community, just about everyone would die. long-established villages would simply disappear within a few weeks or months, and larger groups -- cultures and societies -- could be devastated within just a decade or two. even when some people were scared, there was irreparable damage to the basic fabric of community life -- some people were spared, there was irreparable damage to the basic fabric of community life. crops would be harvested, so there would be famine the next year. survivors were left to face the future without their custom leaders. shamans, traditional priests and medicine men were discredited, because they could not do anything to stop the deadly progress of events.

in short, after biological devastation came massive cultural dk and disorganization -- decay and disorganization. it almost defies comprehension. the only thing i can imagine that might be something like it is in our world were -- god for bid -- overtaken by all out nuclear war. remembering just now appeared --

now a period when there was a whole spate of films made about nuclear devastation. there was one in particular that made a very powerful impression on me, and it remained stuck in my mind, called "the day after," which presented an incredibly bleak portrayal of death and destruction, with a few wretched him and survivors stumbling around helplessly in the midst of a so-called nuclear winter. i remember when i saw that film, i made on imaginary connection to the contact in early american history, specifically to the situation of indian people in the face of utterly devastating, newly introduced epidemic disease. the parallel is obviously not exact, but perhaps there was

something like the same experience of physical helplessness in the face of overwhelming ecological assault, and something like the same collapse of basic life-sustaining or out -- morale. we do not now have a lot of detailed primary source evidence about all this, because many of the indian cultures that were

most severely affected were nonliterate, and did not have written records. not to mention the fact they were sometimes wiped out so fast so as to leave almost no traces of any kind behind. sometimes, the worst of the catastrophe would even occur before any europeans actually arrived on the scene, and could report back about it. the microbes, in short, travel out ahead of the people who originally brought them to the new world, passing with lightning like speed from one indian community to another,

along trade routes or other traditional lines of contact. that is what happened with the famous kingdom of the incas and the peruvian islands, when the spanish conquistador the sorrow -- pisaro, he found that a large part of the native population, including the emperor and his son, had already died within the preceding few years from a massive smallpox epidemic. we do have at least a few contemporary accounts of these horrific events. if we move our focus up north for a moment and come up here to new england, the same process risk -- same process repeated itself essentially a century or so later on. we have a few descriptions. i will present one now. this comes from a reddish traveler in coastal massachusetts -- a british traveler in coastal massachusetts about an epidemic that devastated the indian population. this is just before the arrival of the pilgrims. "they died in heaps as they lay in their houses, and the living that were able to fend for themselves ran away and let them die, and left their carcasses above ground without burial. the stones that the bones around their habitations made such a spectacle after my coming into these parts, that as i traveled in the forest of massachusetts, it seems to me a newfound goal got the -- newfound golgotha." this is from a book -- this is

from mexico, from a kind of chronicle kept by some maya indians. the maya are the source of the best writing we have run any pre-contact culture. "great was the stench of the dead. after our fathers and grandfathers succumbed, after the people fled to the fields, the dogs and vultures devoured the bodies. the mortality was terrible. our grandfathers died, and with

them died the set of the king and his brothers and kinsman. so it was that we became orphans. oh my son, so we became when we were yet young. we were born to die." well, did the transfer of microbes also go the other way? was it, in short, truly an

exchange? there is one apparent instance of microbial transfer going from west to east, from america back to europe. it is important -- it is kind of notorious in its own right. venereal syphilis has long been thought to have originated in the new world, and then been taken to europe in return voyages from the first discovers , perhaps even with the crew of columbus himself. please note that i say on apparent transfer -- an apparent transfer. this is open to a lot of controversy among historians of medicine. it is still far from being settled. syphilis has always been a disease that everyone prefers to

blame on someone else. [applause] john demos: in the 16th century's, the italians, the french disease, or as the french call it the italian disease. the british: either the french or spanish disease.

the polls called it the russian disease. the germans call that the russian disease. middle east is called at the european disease. the japanese call that the chinese disease, and so on. maybe it should have really been called the native american disease. but as i say, the case is not really settled. we do know that american indians had it in pre-columbian times. that much is clear from the analysis of ancient skeletal remains found in gravesites in central america, remains where syphilitic regions left lasting traces on the bones of their victims. we also know that deadly outbreaks of syphilis did spread across europe starting around the year 1500. right at the time, in short, of the first new world contact.

for sure, syphilis remained prevalent in europe for centuries after. the trouble is, you can find other possible ways to explain all of this without going to the idea that the disease was brought into europe by sailors who had previously got it from sleeping around with indian women. some medical historians think, for instance, that syphilis did exist in europe from ancient times, but only in a very mild form. what happened at the start of the 16th century was a kind of spontaneous mutation, an evolutionary change in microorganism itself so as to make syphilitic illness suddenly a lot more serious and deadly than before. microorganisms do, i guess, sometimes behave like that. they have their own histories apart from the history of their human hosts. i believe that is at least one hypothesis about the aids virus today is that it may have existed in milder or even a benign form for years, and then just recently has turned deadly. we have to leave this as a kind of question. it may be that the europeans were, in fact, sort of paid back for all of the diseases they unwittingly brought to indians by catching syphilis from the indians. then again, there could be a different story altogether. enough on this whole dismal topic of microbial exchange. i want to move now to plant life , where there are also some massive and sweeping trends to consider, and where the exchange itself was more narrowly evened up. the discovers, the planters, all the european folks involved here wanted to bring with them to the new world their favorite foods and other kinds of staple crops. and the long run, i think i'm going to have to say they succeeded in much of what they aim for along those lines. the three most important parts

of the diet of spaniards and other mediterranean peoples in the 16th century, were wheat for making bread and grapes for making wine and olives for making cooking oils and dressings. these foods could not be cultivated in all parts of spanish america. great finds idolatries did not do well in mexico -- grape viensnes and olive trees did not do well in mexico, and wheat cultivation was impossible in the caribbean. eventually, the spanish congress found the right sort of environment for almost every staple food they had known and cared about in the old world. for instance, peru offered an

excellent setting for growing wheat, so it became a kind of bread basket for that part of the spanish empire. chile produced wines of high quality. chile was quite similar in climate and topography to spain itself. it is not surprising the transfer of old world agriculture went smoothly there. in the more exotic, and

especially tropic combinations, such as the caribbean and also the coastal low lands of central and south america, other annotations were made -- other adaptations were made. this is where areas of intense cultivation of one or another cash crop. the crops involved were sometimes native to the americas -- tobacco and cotton, for instance. sometimes, they too were transplants from the old world, such as rice and sugar and coffee. in fact, the list of these transplants becomes very long -- bananas and citrus fruits and garden vegetables of many sorts, cabbage and lettuce, cauliflower and melons, all of them previously unknown to the western hemisphere, but cultivated across broad swatches of the americas after the early 1500s. as important as all this was,

the transfer of plant life that went the other way, from america back to europe, was probably more important. the variety and the number of platforms traveling -- plant forms traveling in that direction was less, but the ones that went made a truly massive, long-term difference for world history.

the big three, so to speak, were potatoes and maize and beans. each of these plants has proved remarkably hearty and adaptable to a wide variety of different in time -- different and garments. each can be grown very efficiently in terms of food to land ratios, and each provides important nutrients for human. potatoes became an time the most important single food across large parts of europe, especially for peasants and other poor folks who did not have enough land or technological expertise to grow much else. in fact, potatoes are directly linked with one of the biggest

demographic turning points in all of european history. the population of europe, which seems to have remained relatively stable before about 1600, began a remarkable expansion soon thereafter. to put a few figures on the outline sheet, you can see that the numbers increase by about 250% between 1650 and 1850, and has continued to rise at nearly the same rate ever since. one of the key causes for this increase, especially in its early phases, was an expansion of the food base, especially for

potato cultivation. it was not only europe that these changes were felt. africa, too, became a major participant in the columbian exchange. i want to put a little extra emphasis on the african case, because we tend to overlook it, preoccupied as we usually are with the dramatic story of early contact between europe and america. the fact is that plant forms from the america were transferred to africa even more widely and rapidly than was the case with europe. corn, first of all, then manioc and yams and sweet potatoes and peanuts and beans and tomatoes and cocoa and squashes of many different kinds. in fact, these have long since become the major food sources for vast areas of equatorial africa. one more thing here -- from the start, the transfer of these food crops to africa was all mixed up with the slave trade. slave dealers had to start their

shifts with enough food to keep their human cargo alive for a lengthy ocean voyage, and foods like maize and yams, when you drive them out, will keep for a very long time, and therefore food that can be precisely useful in that regard. therefore, as early as the middle of the 16th century, fields of corn, yams, and manioc to be found growing all around the major trading station along the african coast. this points to yet another side of the columbian exchange -- the

coercive transfer of millions of human beings from one setting to the other under conditions of lifetime bondage. slay the -- slavery, too, belongs under the heading of the columbian exchange. even asia joined in on this process as time moved along. allow me to mention a small personal experience. a number of years ago, i visited nepal with an anthropologist friend of mine, and we toured a number of different villages, sometimes stopping for

refreshment in local teahouses, or even in private homes. what turns out to be the favorite offering of food to guests in appalling pesticide -- in nepali countryside? it is popcorn. not exactly like the stuff we buy in plastic bags in the supermarkets, but popcorn all the same, made by heating fresh corn over an open fire. i feel, incidentally, i'm not doing justice to this is a -- to corn as a factor in modern history. it is amazingly important and wonderful plant. if somehow the world's corn supply were to be taken from us, the international economy would go bust. there would be famine in many countries, and so on. it all started with indian people here in the americas figuring out a few thousand years ago how to domesticate corn that was already growing naturally in the wild. that process of domestication was, in itself, a huge and lastingly important achievement. animals make up still another part of the larger story of the columbian exchange. with them just as with microbes, the traffic was mostly one-way -- from europe to the americas. pigs and cows and horses were probably the most important parts of this traffic. indians had no domestic animals

to speak of before the. of discovery -- before the period of discovery. over time, they would adapt each of these european animals to their traditional lifeways. whole cultures were rearranged around cold -- around horses and horsemanship, for example among our own plains indians of the old west. there is an intriguing comparative contrast here,

because even while indians were accepting ending corporate in the -- accepting and incorporating the animals from the old world, they were by and large resisting and rejecting platforms -- plant forms from the same source. they could see the benefits that could be gained from using cattle and horses, but they did not see much in a fit in cultivating eggs like wheat or sugar or citrus fruits. sheep and chickens must also be added to the list here of european transfers to america. finally, some unintended and unwelcome passengers in the early settler ships such as the rat. no rats on this side of the ocean before 1492. against all this, the americans seem to have given back to

europe and the rest of the world only the turkey. i cannot resist inserting another small personal memory here. many years ago, i was a volunteer in west africa, living in a fairly remote village, feeling kind of homesick and wondering what could be done to express, or at least symbolically express, my homeland. a solution was suggested by an african friend. he said "why not get a turkey which can be bought in the local village market, and take it home and fasten it up with the next thanksgiving? " so he got a turkey, a live turkey, and kept it to hide our house for several months. we named it sam for uncle sam. by the time thanksgiving came, sam the turkey was more like a pet than a main course, and i too was spoiled by remembering the food on our plates had up until then sort of been gobbling away in the backyard. i think we felt a bit like cannibals. for one whole summer, there was this turkey living with us out in the west african rain forest, and you could even see it as a small reminder of this whole columbian exchange. it remains only to add one obvious last element here, namely the humans.

the people involved in the exchange. broadly speaking, this meant europeans coming -- some involuntarily, some eagerly -- to america. it also meant africans coming involuntarily. in fact, one of the most extreme forms of compulsion. we should acknowledge, if only in passing, that hardly any people went the other way. it is true that at least a few indians were captured and forcibly taken back to europe, and some others were controlled -- cajoled or bribed into going. i think usually for purposes of display, like a freak show deal, or perhaps even part of a traveling circus. the overall number of these individuals, these indian individuals, their total number was miniscule. i want to conclude this discussion by trying for a kind of overview of the whole exchange business, and to grope

for its larger significance and meaning. in the largest possible sense, as i commented earlier, the consequences for the european history, the transfer of valuable food crops and the possible link to a huge upward spike in population, loomed very large indeed. and remember, as well, indirect consequences, which -- of which i spoke yesterday, the weakening of traditional attitudes and preconceptions, and their replacement with what we might call a more modern mindset.

on the american side, by contrast, the most immediately striking consequences were tragic ones. the reduction, and in some cases, complete elimination of native peoples and their cultures. also, on the american side, we see a truly massive ecological transformation, the arrival and spread of previously unknown plant and animal forms, in many different combinations. in fact, these two kinds of change were profoundly interrelated. in some parts of the americas, indians and animals were pitted against each other in a kind of biological competition. colonists would take over huge tracts of land for grazing their

own animals, land that had formerly been used by indians for farming and hunting. and at the same time, the animals involved would break into indian fields, eating the plants that were growing there, or trampling them down. and generally, disrupting the basic agricultural rhythms.

or, by the same token, destroying the habitat in which wildlife that the indians hunted had once thrived. in fact, if we could somehow have been perched up high in the sky in some kind of spacecraft, circling the earth, and say about the year 1600, looking down on the whole process of change then underway in the americas, and assuming that we didn't know what was going on, we might have concluded that the very purpose of discovery and plantation was to replace millions of indian people with millions of pig then cows and horses. certainly, we would have seen that just as the human population, the indian part of the human population, went

precipitously down, the animal population was going rapidly up, and often, in precisely the same places. but the largest significance of the columbian exchange goes even beyond these things, beyond the specific consequences for the old world on one side, and the new world on the other. because during these last five plus centuries, 14 92-2016, the whole planet has been in the process of becoming progressively more homogeneous, its parts have been growing more

and more alike. this process has the aspect of biological homogeneity, and the aspect of cultural homogeneity. this is nothing we might have seen from our imaginary spacecraft circling the globe back in the 16th century. environments becoming more and more alike, people becoming more and more alike in their physical characteristics, cultures becoming more and more alike in terms of attitudes and values and even in more superficial matters, like fashion and taste. i sometimes like to think of blue jeans as a latter-day token

of this process. go to any of -- corner of the world and you will find people in blue jeans. we may approve of this, or we may regret it, but put it all together, and you can argue, i think, that no other trend in modern history is quite so important. and why has it come about this way? well, the reasons are many, and are sure, there -- they are also complex. in the middle of things, you would have to put down 1492 as a key date, perhaps the key date, and you would have to see what followed thereafter by way of discovery and plantation as a uniquely dynamic process leading towards worldwide homogenization. i will stop there, and i think we can take a few minutes before the break for comments and questions from you. yes. >> how aware do you think europeans were that they were spreading these diseases initially? did they realize what they were doing? or did they eventually figure it

out? >> i think it took a while. but they did realize after a while. they didn't mind very much, as far as one can tell. i think individuals, some missionaries, i know some missionaries in canada, french probably just -- jesuits, were upset by what they observed and tried to think in terms of isolating people who were ill, to prevent contagion. so far as i am aware, there was never any big line of comment about this. then we come up to the era of the revolution, and you have patriot generals like jeffrey amherst sending smallpox-infected blankets to indians. it was used in a conscious and purposeful way. have any of you seen the movie "black robe? " it is a vivid presentation, the end of the movie, of the way, what disease did, not just biologically but culturally, to the huron people, who are at the center of the movie. great movie, by the way. it is old now, but i am sure it is available. i recommend it. i think it is the best, it looks ahead to tomorrow but i think it

is the best presentation of indians that i have ever seen. the trick, it seems to me, with trying to capture indians in roughly the era, is on one hand, to express their strangeness from the european point of view, and the reverse was true, as well. at the same time, to really represent their humanness. it is hard to strike that balance. the movie, and may be more than that, the book, the wonderful novel on which the movie is based, also called "lack robe," achieves the balance better than i can -- anything i can think of. >> i wanted to mention, when i

was in france, they didn't know what maple syrup, cranberries, blueberries, lobsters were totally, so some of them, some of those things we still keep. blueberries, cranberries, we still hold those -- >> you are right. i know this is true in new england, because i have read sources, most astonished and pleased, or the berries. strawberries, blueberries. i don't know whether it was impossible to take those things back to europe. i never heard anything about that. as far as i know, it didn't happen. but they were certainly enthusiastic. i have seen whole paragraphs about the wonder of the berries that this or that settlor person picked up around new england.

thank you. any other comments and questions? yes. cracks more of a comment. >> i guess they should get there with the microphone. sorry. >> thank you. this is more of a comment than a question. you brought up a lot of things about the machines, the plants, animals, germs, disease. in addition to crosby's exchange, i would recommend ecological appearance. it really develops the idea of the exchange between the plants, the animals, and the diseases,

and looks at the livestock as carriers of these different pathogens as a way to exacerbate the threat of disease. it is a suggestion to the group. in addition, i recommend another book by jared diamond. it is pretty famous, it has been around for a long time. lastly, a book i just finished reading, a guy named kenneth pomerantz called -- that looks at the different commodities and how they were used to facilitate not only the transatlantic trade, but also, exploring the underpinnings as to why they turned west in the first place, particularly looking at 1463 and the ottomans and the need and desire to find an alternative route once the ottomans blocked the land cask. >> i don't know the last book you mentioned. >> it is called "the world they created," it has been around for a couple decades. >> shortly -- surely, the book

"apple -- ecological imperialism" is important. the columbian exchange came out first. that is the one that exploded like dynamite. it not only introduced the whole idea, the field of environmental history, it also points the way, i think, to what is the most kind of broad gauge trend in early american historical studies ever since, which is to expand the horizon. we went through a whole phase, some of you know the outlines, a whole phase in this 1980's, 1990's and to thousands of what was called atlantic history, reversing what certainly was the pattern of my own early life in history, where the focus was on small communities and how isolated they were.

we now have to completely reoriented. the world was much more in touch among its parts then we knew. from atlantic history, this is a side current, pacific history is the same idea. world history is really, the way to go. i worry sometimes that this could go too far. i sometimes imagine, let me say, my first book, called "a little commonwealth," about the plymouth colony, and the emphasis was how kind of contained within itself, how insulated, the lives of the plymouth pilgrims, as we know them, how insulated their lives were. i wonder if we stopped them on the street to interview them, and tried to draw them out about their -- about the rest of the

world, with a know much? would they know much? with a know anything -- would they know anything about the rest of europe or africa or asia? i'm not sure. maybe that is not the right way to ask the question. because surely, they were affected by things that were going on in other parts of the world, even if they didn't know it. it depends on your point of view. i guess we need another microphone. bring it down this way. >> in an earlier discussion we had two days ago now, the first source you gave us talked about native americans who had sort of , i guess, asked the very man --

the ferry man to trade with the dutch in the new england area. i am kind of wondering if you could comment on the differences between latin american colonization and the establishment of the encomienda send -- system, versus the colonization in the european colonies and the relationships between local tribes in the political -- clearly, the aspects had a role among their tribal neighbors, whether the difference is in the new england colonies versus the latin american colonies, and how is this sort of process of conflict and resolution, how did it lead to different institutions in the americas and early colonial period versus latin america. >> in ballpark terms, what happened in new england was the so-called settlers. that word is increasingly problematic, i think, for historians. the so-called settlers push the indians aside and killed them

and enslave them and in some cases, whereas in latin america, the encomienda is and so on, it was more using the indians for their own purpose. i live long enough, which i -- probably won't, i would love to do a project on colonial latin america about, does the name poto si mean anything to you? quite a few years ago, i went to bolivia, i mentioned that in some other context. i went in order to climb mountains. i'm a longtime mountain nut. i went, we went off into the andes for a couple weeks, and we had three bad luck with the

weather -- very bad luck with the weather. one blizzard after another. our guide was a history buff. for some reason, he brought along a number of, a small library of latin american history books on the back of the llamas carrying our stuff. lying in the tent, day after day because we couldn't go out with the snow falling, he found out i was a history guy and started feeding me history books about let. i kept reading about this amazing place that i had never heard of, i think i had heard the name in the headline. it was, what shall i say? maybe the greatest single silver mine in the history of the world.

the whole mountain behind the city that quickly developed, was solid silver. spaniards got there in, they began rapidly to mine the silver and refine it. within a few decades, there were tens of thousands of people, europeans, on hand. it became an utterly astonishing place, by far the largest human community in the western hemisphere for many, many decades. it was on the scale of london and paris by the end of the 17th century, and it is astonishing how little has really entered our historical consciousness. not only was it large, immensely important, in the development of the economy's all over the world. in a sense, the coming of capitalism to early modern europe owed a lot to the silver that came out of those minds -- those mines at potosi.

there was a cultural declaration -- affloration that happened there. the reason it came to mind was that, as time went along, the way the silver was mind was by bringing indians from all over the central part of south america to work the minds. -- work the mines. the system meant that every indian village for miles around had to send 1/7 of the adult male population, they had to go for one year to work the mines. it was forced labor. then they could go home and another 1/7 would come. a massive exploitation of indian labor, which was not, nothing

like the same extent in north america. that would be one of the biggest differences. i have to bring back my spanish, which is pretty moribund, to move forward on the project. but i would love to write about it. i think it is very strange, that there is no big book on potosi. there is fine monographic work by scholars who focus on the mining techniques are labor system or whatever, but it is a fantastic topic, and as i sat there in my tent reading about this amazing place, i thought, my god, i have in spending my career reading about tiny system or whatever, but it is a fantastic topic, and as i sat villages in new england. isn't there something out of proportion here?

what really mattered back then, in fact, if i come back in another life, i think i might be a colonial latin americanist. other comments and questions? we are out of time. what really mattered back then, in fact, if i come back in another life, i think i might be a colonial latin americanist. [applause] thank you. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2016] >> you're watching american history tv all we can every weekend's and three. like us on facebook at c-span history. >> the smithsonian museum of african american culture opens. judge robert luden's discusses his book long road to hard truth. he talked about the early effort create a memorial for african-american civil war soldiers and a nut and bolt into