The Columbian Exchange

The Columbian Exchange (1972) by Alfred W. Crosby is among a small number of texts with which every American historian has some familiarity. Although many historians, perhaps even most, have read Crosby's text by extract, few are ignorant of its thesis.*

Crosby expresses the thesis succinctly: "the most important changes brought on by the Columbian voyages were biological in nature" (xiv). He then proceeds to elucidate the impact of disease, the spread of Old World flora and fauna in the Americas, and examines the impact of New World plants on the Old World. He also offers a reconsideration of the origins of syphilis, although others have reconsidered it since the publication of his seminal work.

Efforts to minimize the significance of the Columbian Exchange characterize A Patriot's History of the United States, as I have expanded upon at length in this blog. Michael Allen and Larry Schweikart dispute the significance of disease, while almost wholly ignoring the impact of pigs, cows, wheat, peaches, Russian thistle, and so on. Howard Zinn errs another way. In A People's History of the United States, he uncritically accepts and transmits the crude and almost certainly exaggerated population estimates of Bartolomé de Las Casas (see "Fragments from Bartolomé de Las Casas"). He does little better than Schweikart and Allen on the history of the peach, as well as cows, pigs, wheat, and thistle. Both A People's History and A Patriot's History are driven by politics. One serves the cause of today's conservatives, while the other serves socialist-leaning liberals.

Among the enduring impacts of the Columbian Exchange:

• The peppers in General Tso's chicken
• Tomato sauce on spaghetti
• The Irish Potato
• Kansas Wheat
• Lakota horses, the American rodeo, and everything associated with cowboys
• Mullein along the Spokane River (see photo)

*"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others..." Francis Bacon, "Of Studies" (1597).

Monday Morning

It is the privilege of historians to be wise after the event, and the more foolish the historian the wiser he usually aims to be.
C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins (1963 [1938]), 172.

What is History?

Essential Bibliography

What books and articles belong on a short list of essential readings defining history?

Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft (1953) might make the list. Bloch and Lucien Febvre founded the influential Annales School. Perhaps instead of, or in addition to, The Historian's Craft, the short list should include Peter Burke, ed., A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Lucien Febvre (1973).

I am reasonably certain that the list must exclude Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, 12 vols. (1934-1961). However, perhaps there is merit to M.F. Ashley Montagu, ed., Toynbee and History: Critical Essays and Reviews (1956).

E.H. Carr, What is History? (1961) certainly belongs on any short list. But what about the responses?

Geoffrey Elton, The Practice of History (1967).
Hugh Trevor-Roper, "E.H. Carr's Success Story," Encounter (1962), 69-77.
Michael Fox, ed., E.H. Carr: A Critical Appraisal (2000).
John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History (2004).

There are dozens of others.

Would it be cheating to list the entire print run of the academic journal History and Theory (1960- )?

I am inclined to leave out Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession (1988). This book lacks international scope. But this omission could be an error.

Is there a place on a short list for Herodotus, The Histories (c. 440 BCE)? Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (c.395 BCE)? Tacitus?

The provocative Carl Becker, "Everyman His Own Historian," American Historical Review (1932), 221-236 certainly merits inclusion.

Is there a single text by Leopold von Ranke that would serve to note his contribution to historiography?

Perhaps an important element concerns the practice of history appears with the inclusion of such works as Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts (2001) and Lendol Calder, "Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey," The Journal of American History (March 2006), 1358-1370.

History is as much a way of thinking as an object of study.

My short list of no more than a dozen titles remains to be compiled. Suggestions are welcome.