Pandemic History: The Bibliography

"[T]here remains the simple fact that the Black Death was, indeed, the greatest and most sustained demographic disaster in the history of the world."
John Aberth 

"Before that worldwide [influenza] pandemic faded away in 1920, it would kill more people than any other outbreak of disease in human history."
John M. Barry 

"[T]he disaster to Amerindian populations assumed a scale that is hard for us to imagine, living as we do in an age when epidemic disease hardly matters. Ratios of 20:1 or even 25:1 between pre-Columbian populations and the bottoming-out point in Amerindian population curves seem more or less correct, despite wide local variations."
William H. McNeill

"Variola was the deadliest killer in a terrible onslaught of alien microorganisms that, by some historical estimates, may have decimated as much as 90 percent of the precontact population of the Americas."
Michael Willrich

As I noted in Pandemic History, the books in this list were not selected by a rigorous criteria of historical relevance. Rather, these are the books that I have have on shelves in my home (or as ebooks on my iPad). I am still reading some of these books, some I finished recently, one I have yet to start, and some were consumed more than thirty years ago. These books vary in quality, cost, and relevance.

Today, the number of people worldwide confirmed to be infected with COVID-19 crossed two million. A minuscule portion of the population has been tested. The number of confirmed deaths is closing in on 130,000. The pandemic still seems to be on a steep upward climb. The most serious global impact, however, will be economic, rather than demographic. Advances in medicine and understanding of the possible consequences of epidemic disease protect us in immeasurable ways even as globalization has sped the process of epidemics becoming pandemics.

Screenshot form the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center

The Bibliography

Aberth, John. The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348-1350, A Brief History with Documents, 2nd ed. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2017.

This book is a text designed for college classes. As such, it has limited, but highly focused analysis, a good summary of the state of the research, and consists mostly of extracts from primary sources. Aberth also has authored a scholarly monograph concerned with the Black Death, another general book on plagues throughout history, and several works on the European Middle Ages.

Arnold, Catherine. Pandemic 1918: Eyewitness Accounts from the Greatest Medical Holocaust in Modern History. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2018.

Technically, this book is not shelved in my house, but rather on my electronic devices as an ebook. I started it in late March, but others keep getting in the way of my progress. It is well-written, but somewhat disappointing. The phrase "eyewitness accounts" in the title led me to expect more in the way of excerpts from primary sources (see "Reflective Thinking, Teaching and Learning" [2009]). The author quotes many sources at length, but the book is her narrative. Arnold offers a compelling account of the lives of people who struggled to survive a devastating pandemic. She draws on some of the best secondary works by historians, such as Alfred Crosby, America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 (2003) and John Barry (see below), and she draws from a range of primary sources that include works of fiction written by survivors. Nonetheless, as I am reading the book I am marking a few passages that I intend to return to with more attention because I have a hunch they contain some gross inaccuracies.

Barry, John M. The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. New York: Viking Penguin, 2004.

My bookmark reveals that I had read just over one-third of this book before it gathered dust on my shelf for a decade. I started it anew in early March as COVID-19 could no longer be ignored. I finished it last week. About 20 March 2020, I saw that it had risen to a number one bestseller in several categories tracked by Amazon, including history of medicine. Barry narrates stories of the physicians who battled the pandemic in the context of a history of science. He asserts that the 1918 eruption of influenza "was the first great collision between nature and modern science" (5). The Great Influenza concentrates on the work of Paul Lewis, Simon Flexner, William Crawford Gorgas, William Henry Welch, and a host of others who built medical institutions and who struggled to find both cure and cause of influenza.

Brown, Jeremy. Influenza: The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018.

Jeremy Brown is a medical doctor with decades of experience in emergency rooms. This book, which I read on my iPad the week I was also finishing Barry's The Great Influenza, does an excellent job of presenting the medical history of influenza. Brown then builds on the medical history to discuss both the strengths and weaknesses of how the US government stockpiles medicines and other resources for combating pandemics. He shows how political influence of certain pharmaceutical companies tilt some of these preparations towards medicines of little to no value. Reading this book while under partial-quarantine is a chilling reminder of the failures of political leadership in a nation with a hostile relationship to science and expertise.

Crosby, Alfred. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Company, 1972.

I have characterized this book as among a small number that every historian of America knows, whether by reading or by the references made to it by others. If Crosby and this book did not introduce the term "Columbian Exchange" into the vocabulary of historians, then he is at least responsible for promoting it. His thesis asserts the significance of disease in facilitating the European conquest of the Americas, but also highlights the role of flora, fauna, and ideologies. The exchange went both directions--Europeans acquired tobacco, tomatoes, and quinine, among many other things. The Columbian Exchange enriched the world, while impoverishing indigenous Americans. The core ideas from this book are expanded to global history in Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Also, Crosby's "Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America," William and Mary Quarterly 33 (April 1976): 289-299 was, the last time that I checked, the most cited article in American history writing. Crosby is essential reading.

See also "The Columbian Exchange" (2014).

__________. America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918, 2nd. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

This book just arrived. I am looking forward to reading it.

Crosby, Molly Caldwell. The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic that Shaped our History. New York: Berkley Books, 2006.

The Yellow Fever epidemic that struck Memphis, Tennessee in 1878 was not the first outbreak of the disease in American history. The 1793 epidemic in Philadelphia is better known. A graduate school colleague wrote his dissertation on the topic (Arthur Robinson, "The Third Horseman of the Apocalypse: a Multi-disciplinary Social History of the 1793 Yellow Fever Epidemic in Philadelphia," 1993). Caldwell Crosby starts with a compelling story of Memphis as the disease kills nearly everyone she introduces (some readers have found the narrative difficult on this account), and then follows Yellow Fever to Cuba two decades later. There Walter Reed identified the mosquito that transmits the virus. Caldwell Crosby is a journalist who writes well, but there have been some critical concerns raised with respect to her accuracy.

Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.

I read this book at the end of the twentieth century after it came out in paperback. When I mentioned it as a guest lecturer in spring 2000, the professor and a few students had heard of it. When I mention it in college classes today, a few students have seen the PBS documentary based on the book (2005). Jared Diamond's work synthesizes and popularizes the work of others with his own meta-narrative. His answer to the question of why Eurasia, and more particularly Europe, became dominant in global affairs begins with the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution. Most of the virulent epidemic diseases that have tilted the balance of world history emerged from human associations with domesticated livestock. Long association with these diseases led to relative immunity for Eurasians that conferred an advantage over virgin populations in the Americas. Central to his argument is the east-west axis of the geography of Eurasia and the north-south axis of the Americas. The east-west axis facilitated the spread of crops, animals, diseases, and technologies. However, his extension of this contrast to Eurasia's advantage over Africa is less convincing. Africa is nearly as wide east to west, as it is long north to south. See the YouTube video, "African History Disproves 'Guns, Germs, and Steel' by Jared Diamond" (2019).

Dobyns, Henry F. Their Numbers Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983.

This book is groundbreaking and controversial. Henry Dobyns' research is broad and deep, his inquiry imaginative, and his importance to the historiography of disease in the Americas undeniable. Dobyns has led the way in revising estimates of the pre-Columbian populations of the Americas upward. Few scholars agree with him, but the opposite extreme embraced by American conservatives from Rush Limbaugh to the authors of A Patriot's History of the United States is vastly less credible. Dobyns deserves credit for raising the critical questions, even if his answers are disputable. I recall that his efforts to assess carrying capacity of the land reshaped some of my thinking about history in fundamental ways, but also that several of us in the graduate seminar found his estimates a little too generous, as it seemed that a sense of ecological balance was missing.

Reconsideration of what should now be considered thoroughly discredited estimates begins with Dobyns, “Estimating Aboriginal American Population: An Appraisal of Techniques with a New Hemispheric Estimate,” Current Anthropology 7 (1966): 395-416. See also "Indian Population 1492: John D. Daniels", where I assess some of the flaws of the most comprehensive overview of the topic.

Fenn, Elizabeth A. Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001.

Fenn's Pox Americana highlights the significance of smallpox to the American Revolution, controversies over early efforts to inoculate against it, and carries the story into the allegations of biological warfare (the notorious "orders" of Sir Jeffrey Amherst [88-89]), and the long-term impacts as smallpox spread across the continent, devastating native communities. Unfortunately, I can say little about this book. I started it while proctoring a final exam in American History: A Survey--reading that was frequently interrupted by students telling me how much they enjoyed the course (a job hazard). By the time I finished grading those exams, I had moved on to reading several other books (a hazard of my reading habits). I recall that I read the first few chapters with great enthusiasm for the quality of Fenn's research and analysis, and also that the book is well-written.

Johnson, Steven. The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. New York: Riverhead Books, 2006.

John Snow was a physician before he became one of the heroes of Game of Thrones. He believed that cholera spread through contaminated water, not through foul air (the miasma theory of disease that was orthodox science at the time). Snow, thus, stands as an important figure in the development of the germ theory disease that would be articulated with solid evidence later in the nineteenth century by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. Snow appears to have understood the germ theory, argued it through the 1850s, and later produced a map of London's epidemic that helps to demonstrate the source of the tainted water and the spread of the disease. Johnson writes well.

Lapham, Lewis H., ed. "Medicine". Lapham's Quarterly, vol. II, no. 4, Fall 2009.

Lewis Lapham compiled and organized into this issue of his quarterly an astounding range of excerpts from ancient times to the present. All excerpts concern the quest for health amid sickness, the arts of healing, the nature of medicine across ages and cultures. Writers range from Emily Dickinson, Marcel Proust, and Ken Kesey to Hippocrates, Plato, Oliver Sacks, Louis Pasteur, and the unknown writer of The Plum in the Golden Vase from the late Ming Dynasty. The issue is absorbing, surprising, and insightful. Lapham's sequencing is well considered. The issue was published against the backdrop of Barack Obama's presidency and the promise of what became the Affordable Care Act.

McNeill, William H. Plagues and Peoples. New York: Anchor Books, [1976] 1998.

This book was vital in the process of bringing disease epidemiology into the consciousness of members of the history profession. William McNeill is concerned with the whole of human history from the evolutionary success of homo sapiens to global dominance by a few large bureaucratic states in the modern world. Diseases spread by invisible microparasites affect human societies in much the same way as macroparasites--humans preying upon other humans. Parasites survive by reaching equilibrium with their host populations just as governments built upon exploitation of subject peoples must protect them from more virulent threats (72). In the astounding success of European expansion in the wake of Columbus that largely set the structure of the modern world, "bacteriology was at least as important as technology" (235). This book sat on my shelf nearly untouched for more than a decade. Then I started examining it with the expectation that it would offer a quick and broad overview of the state of disease history half a century ago. Instead, I found a provocative approach to the subject as fresh as it was when first published. See also "Only a Quote" 2020.

Parker, Samuel. Journal of an Exploring Tour Beyond the Rocky Mountains. Ithaca, N.Y.: Self-Published, 1838.

This book is a primary source with minimal information useful to the study of disease. Nonetheless, it is a text that I often refer to it while lecturing on the topic of disease. Samuel Parker was a missionary with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions--the American West was foreign territory when he traveled there 1835-1837. Prior to his journey, he acquainted himself with the writings of explorers and fur traders who had been in the region. During his travels, he learned what he could from observation and through conversations with others. He observed the population of Native villages along the lower Columbia, noted that the number of people was substantially below what had been reported by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, and discussed the matter with John McLoughlin, Chief Factor of the Hudson's Bay Company. Parker reports his estimate that 7/8 of the Chinook had perished, and mentions McLoughlin's estimate of 9/10. Many scholars have suggested that the epidemic that ravished the Chinook 1829-1832 was malaria. Others are less certain of the identity of the disease. Parker, and others of his time uses the term, "fever and ague" (178). Whatever the disease, the Chinook had controlled trade between the Pacific Coast and the interior before the epidemic, and effectively ceased as viable communities after.

Rosen, William. Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe. New York: Penguin Viking, 2007.

William Rosen seeks connections between and among microbiology, ecology, geography, military history, architecture, and other areas. His concern is for the large questions, such as whether the fall of the Roman Empire was a consequence of a flea-borne plague. The answer is nuanced. He asserts that the pandemic changed history, but labors to avoid overstating the case. Rosen seems to spurn a linear narrative. Those who grow frustrated with an author's extensive pursuit of what seems tangential to the central narrative should look elsewhere.

The author has a website with excerpts from the book, reviews (including a negative one), maps, errata.

Welch, James. Fools Crow. New York: Penguin, 1986.

Fools Crow was Blackfeet writer James Welch's third novel. It is a coming of age novel focused on a year in the life of a Piegan teenager. Welch makes him part of the Lone Eaters Band, a fictional group grounded in history. The fiction is set against the backdrop of a smallpox epidemic and the Marias River Massacre. As Welch noted in several interviews, after the massacre, the Blackfeet never lifted arms against the United States again. Welch stated that he read what historians wrote about this era, and also drew from Blackfeet oral tradition. My dissertation, "Spring Wind Rising: The American Indian Novel and the Problem of History", has a chapter that examines the interplay of Welch's first four novels with history. I suggested that this novel inscribes history that is more accurate than government sources, but was insufficiently clear that it contains fewer errors than the most popular secondary histories on the topic as well.

Willrich, Michael. Pox: An American History. New York: Penguin, 2011.

The smallpox epidemic that struck parts of the United States at the end of the nineteenth century was notable for its lack of severity. Even so, it came on the heels of a transformation of medicine, was met with widespread efforts to vaccinate large populations, and had a tremendous impact. I'm 10% into the Kindle version of this text and may revise this annotation at a later date.

Pandemic History

Epidemic disease has been a decisive factor in many of history's turning points. The "black death" (bubonic plague) has been credited with stimulating the end of the Middle Ages and ushering in the Renaissance.* Smallpox and other epidemic diseases infecting "virgin soil populations" was the decisive factor in the European conquest of the Americas.

In the present, the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) that causes COVID-19 provoked American universities to move most instruction online in the course of a few weeks in late February and early March 2020.** Further measures developed day-by-day as I was writing this post over the course of two weeks in late March while finishing winter quarter grading and beginning to record my spring quarter lectures. On 23 March 2020, Governor Inslee (Washington) ordered "stay-at-home" effective 48 hours later, closing all but essential businesses for two weeks, with the possibility that the partial quarantine could be extended. It has now been extended into May.

COVID-19 may also prove to be the defining moment in the Presidency of Donald J. Trump. Initially, Trump dismissed the epidemic as "under control", but as matters developed his views appeared to shift.*** Predictable partisan dissension made it impossible from the midst of the crisis to understand how well the United States was prepared, and whether actions had been taken, or not taken, that exacerbated or slowed the spread.

The number of confirmed cases globally topped half a million 27 March, while it had been under 200,000 the weekend before Saint Patrick's Day.  Confirmed cases topped one million 2 April, and the number of deaths passed the 50,000 mark that day also. The accuracy of the numbers are open to question as testing protocols vary. There are also suspicions that some countries might deliberately report inaccurate numbers. For up-to-date information on the COVID-19 pandemic, I recommend Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.

Some of my Disease History Books

Disease in history long has been a personal interest--sometimes it is my main focus, sometimes it sits in the back of my mind while I pursue other questions. Emphases often shift in the life of a historian. These days, my central concerns are the global history of science and technology. This focus brings me back to the impact of bubonic plague, a topic I have neglected. My Amazon order of John Aberth, The Black Death, the Great Mortality of 1348-1350: A Brief History with Documents (2016) will arrive about four weeks from the date of the order because I chose to pay for faster shipping. Amazon is backed up due to the pandemic, and has prioritized shipment of medical supplies.

As someone who focused on American Indian history and culture in graduate school, I could not avoid the study of disease epidemiology (see "depopulation" in the index). Moreover, the origins of Patriots and Peoples (this site) stem from a challenge in A Patriot's History of the United States (2004) to generally accepted understanding of the impact of disease on indigenous populations (see "Patriots' and Peoples' Histories" [2007]). The authors of A Patriot's History favor the lowest estimates of pre-Columbian indigenous populations and dismiss claims that disease epidemics were a significant factor. In the course of their arguments, they violate nearly every standard of honest scholarship.

This post continues with "Pandemic History: The Bibliography", published nearly two weeks later. It offers short annotations to a list of books on the history of disease that were selected on the whimsical base that I can find them on the shelves in my home within a few minutes.

My Journey

My introduction to the topic of disease in history began spring 1988 as both a teaching assistant for American Indian History, where the professor assigned Francis Jennings, Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (1976) as one of the texts, and in a graduate seminar, "Ethnohistory and the New Social History" with the same professor. Jennings' book (not annotated in the companion post) offers:

Not even the most brutally depraved of the conquistadors was able to purposely slaughter Indians on the scale that the gentle priest unwittingly accomplished by going from his sickbed ministrations to lay his hands in blessing on his Indian converts. As the invaders were descendants of the toughened survivors of the Middle Ages, so the Indians of today descend from those who could live through the trauma of a European handshake.
Jennings, Invasion of America, 22.

In the seminar, the one dozen assigned books began with Their Numbers Become Thinned (1983) by Henry F. Dobyns. That seminar concluded with a social gathering that included dinner with William R. Swagerty, Dobyns' co-author for the longest chapter in the book. It was a good introduction to some of the controversies in efforts to estimate in impact of disease in the Americas.

In that seminar, we each selected one of the books and led that week's discussion, created and distributed an annotated bibliography that put the book in context, and then wrote a paper. My text was James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (1985). Four years later when I started teaching the upper-division American Indian History course for which I had been a TA in 1988, I assigned it as one of the texts. Axtell's book focused on Christian missions to indigenous Americans. Disease epidemics proved vital to the topic. His thesis concerning the sources of indigenous perceptions of European power identifies two principle factors: Europeans, especially priests, were akin to "the Indians' own shamans and conjurers" because they seemed to be "purveyors or preventers of disease" (10). Then he claims, European technological superiority was more vital.

Since reading The Invasion Within early in graduate school, I have frequently revisited Axtell's assertion. I have expanded and developed my agreement of the central significance of disease, while qualifying and critiquing his assumptions of technological superiority. A thesis statement I wrote for an encyclopedia article twenty years ago appears several times on Patriots and Peoples.

Epidemic disease was the decisive factor in the European conquest. Epidemics not only eliminated entire communities, but the resulting sociocultural disruption created conditions that made Native peoples more receptive to European trade items and religious ideas.
James Stripes, "Native Americans: An Overview," Encyclopedia of American Studies, vol. 3 (2001), 198.

In fall 1989, I worked up a twenty minute lecture on the impact of epidemic disease on Native populations as part of my responsibility as a teaching assistant. Twenty minutes exhausted most of what I knew at that point. By 2004, this kernel had grown into a three hour PowerPoint presentation. I use Axtell's title, The Invasion Within, as my lecture title. In the course of the presentation I venture into Dobyns' work and some of the views of his many critics. Often while presenting this lecture, I struggled to focus on the prepared material because I sensed that the whole three hours merely brushed the surface. I developed an extended version of this presentation for American Indian History (a course I created at Whitworth University) and a shorter version for Pacific Northwest History. For a course in Atlantic History, I created a Prezi presentation that qualified somewhat my assertion in Encyclopedia of American Studies (See "The Decisive Factor" [updated 17 August 2017]).

For Technology in World Civilization, a course that is now my teaching focus, I cut this lecture down to ten minutes to expand and critique assertions in chapter four of Arnold Pacey, Technology in World Civilization (1991), one of the two texts. Pacey also has a section on the impact of bubonic plague. The other current text, Society and Technological Change, 8th ed. (2017) by Rudi Volti, has a section concerned with medical technologies and in my lectures I find it apropos to highlight success in the battle with infectious diseases. Moving this course online during the current pandemic causes the medium and the message to intertwine in ways that Marshall McLuhan anticipated.

In short, my study of epidemic disease and histories of pandemics has been broad, sometimes deep, and has occupied a fair portion of the past four decades. Nonetheless, I am a mere dabbler compared to those who have specialized in this area. In the past few weeks, I have been dabbling with greater attention, reading quite a bit about the Influenza Pandemic that struck in 1918.


*See Samuel Kline Cohn, "Plague and its Consequences," Oxford Bibliographies (updated 10 May 2010), www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195399301/obo-9780195399301-0062.xml

**World Health Organization, "Naming the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) and the Virus that Causes it," WHO.int (accessed 3 April 2020), https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/technical-guidance/naming-the-coronavirus-disease-(covid-2019)-and-the-virus-that-causes-it?

***"CNBC Transcript: President Donald Trump Sits Down with CNBC's Joe Kernan at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland," CNBC.com (22 January 2020), www.cnbc.com/2020/01/22/cnbc-transcript-president-donald-trump-sits-down-with-cnbcs-joe-kernen-at-the-world-economic-forum-in-davos-switzerland.html

Only a Quote

Sometimes a book that I have not read will validate something I have been saying for many years. Of course, this can be predictable, especially when the book in question was vital to the establishment of a field of inquiry in which I have done substantial reading. That is the case with William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (1976). It is a book that I should have read in graduate school, or even undergraduate. I bought a copy in 2008, but it has been sitting on the shelf unread.

I have been working the past couple of weeks on one of my very long posts for Patriots and Peoples, "Pandemic History" and "Pandemic History: The Bibliography" (planned as one, it became two). The bibliography includes annotations of a number of books. I read some of these books a long time ago, some recently, while others have been languishing unread on the shelf, or partially read. My intention yesterday was to race through Plagues and Peoples in a couple of hours--long enough to produce a competent annotation.

I failed. The book has pulled me in. McNeill's vision is broad and interesting. He suggests some provocative metaphors--humans as macroparasites, for instance. I am reading the whole book. This morning's brief passage took me back to something I wrote.

In my post, "Origins of Malaria" (2008), I summed up a point I had been making in college lectures for two decades:

Civilization made us sick, but it also made us more numerous so we could impose our will on those otherwise more fortunate. The maladies that afflicted Europeans contributed in significant measure to their global expansion.

Then, this morning I read in Plagues and Peoples:

When civilized societies learned to live with the "childhood diseases" that can only persist among large human populations, they acquired a very potent biological weapon. It came into play whenever new contacts with previously isolated, smaller human groups occurred.

I agree with McNeill. Maybe he's the one who suggested the idea to me in the first place through the filter of works by other scholars whose work followed his seminal contribution to the subject.

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).

Misplaced Emphasis

The book table at Costco proves an irresistible lure, but the barbs there leave my jaw aching. Increasingly since the historic election of 2008, there have been stacks of right-wing diatribes by authors with little regard for accuracy of facts or analysis. But good books remain among the chaff. I'll be sorely tempted by Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol 1 (2011) on the next trip because I've found that the Kindle edition is not well suited for this sort of scholarly text and the price at Costco is $1.02 less than at Amazon. I nearly bought Life (2010) by Keith Richards, and may yet when the paperback comes out in a few months if they carry it. I've bought and read two books on the Battle of Little Big Horn--both were disappointing histories.

Off and on over the past week, I've been trying to labor through a book that I thought would be a quick and interesting read. I bought Richard Kluger, The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek (2011) from Costco in February with plans to read it during spring break. Last Monday I started. The Forward appalled me for its abysmal failure to mention tribal sovereignty while pretending to lay out the critical historical framework at the heart of the Medicine Creek Treaty of 1854. Reading further has been slogging through questionable factual assertions (I need to do some fact checking on several points) and episodes in misplaced emphasis.

This morning I came upon this sentence:

Scholars have estimated that by 1850, the aboriginal population in North America--besieged by the invaders' explosive weaponry, wondrous technology, contemptuous cruelty, and irresistible pathogens, as well as the Indians' own ever-deepening despair--was just one-tenth of what it had been when Columbus first ventured ashore. (57)

Kluger gets the demography correct, but fails to explain it well. Beginning with weapons and technology demonstrates that he has read neither my "Superior European Technology" nor Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (2005)--another text that I found at Costco. He also reveals his failure to comprehend the significance of ecological damage, easily rectified for starters by reading William Cronon, Changes in the Land (1983). Most egregious is the way that he seems to put disease behind conscious imperialism and technology in his explanation of traumatic demographic change.

Kluger sets up the reader to expect that he would comprehend the significance of ecological changes on the previous page:

Essential to this metamorphosis would be correcting the red race's attitude toward the land, which they shrank from actively cultivating but regarded as a hallowed preserve ... Such footloose practices were deemed unsuitable for a civilized society. Instead, the Indians needed to buckle down within far less expansive territory, where they would work the soil as the Scriptures directed (see Genesis 9:1) and make it flourish. (56)

The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek concerns peoples and events in the southern Puget Sound Basin, so the failure of a historical gloss to recognize the cultivation of corn, beans, and squash by everyone from the Pueblos of New Mexico to the Seneca of New York might be forgivable. The Neolithic Revolution emerged in Meso-America and southern China approximately the same time that it emerged in the Fertile Crescent. Even so, the U.S. Supreme Court encoded this common stereotype of Indian hunters and gatherers with respect to those indigenous to the Ohio River Valley in Johnson v. McIntosh (1823) and with respect to the plantation owning Cherokee in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1832). As a description of Anglo-American attitudes, if not American Indian realities, Kluger's gloss serves its purpose.

Ten years ago I revealed my own understanding of the role of disease in the European conquest:

Epidemic disease was the decisive factor in the European conquest. Epidemics not only eliminated entire communities, but the resulting sociocultural disruption created conditions that made Native peoples more receptive to European trade items and religious ideas.
James Stripes, "Native Americans: An Overview," Encyclopedia of American Studies, vol. 3 (2001), 198.

One of my first entries for this blog, "Practicing Objectivity," quoted that tertiary source. This morning I am reminded how easily historians searching for a new writing topic without adequate grounding in the scholarship will easily miss the critical significance and fall into popularly believed errors--technology conferred minimal advantages to Europeans, and when it did it was swords and cannons more than personal firearms. Disease was the decisive factor, followed closely by assaults on the land. Technology ultimately assisted, but only after the initially tenuous foothold was well established. Then, the plow did more to facilitate conquest than did the gun.

Getting it Right

Still working on an article that no one will ever read for an encyclopedia that no one will ever buy, I just came across a few marvelous articles on the Blackfeet Nation's newly designed website. Last week, the site had a modest welcome page and no links. Today, the site seems almost complete.

The writing about Blackfeet history is fresh, fervent, and perhaps well-described as Blackfeet Nationalist. Under "Our History," the site offers an article, "We Come From Right Here." I had to read this as quickly as possible because I've long known that the Piegan Blackfeet insist they have been in Montana 10,000 years, while most books state they were migrating southwest fresh from the Canadian Prairies about the time they fell into a fight with Lewis and Clark on the explorers' return from Oregon in 1806. Some of the history books put the Blackfeet in Montana a century or two before that.

But scholars write books and give lectures and huff and puff about times in which they never lived, worlds into which they never stepped foot, and languages they can never hear spoken by the ancients they study. As an example of how little is really known about Indians in the pre-Columbian period, experts can’t even agree if the population of the Americas was 8 million or 112 million. If they know so little that they can’t get within an order of magnitude of each other, why bother guessing about anything else?
"We Come From Right Here"

The link may change, and the text, too. The site is still under construction. Readers of this blog may know what I think of these population figures. If not, click the "depopulation" link below and read away.

Fragments from Bartolomé de Las Casas

I have remarked previously that Voices of a People’s History of the United States (2004) by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove offers a generous selection from the writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas. There are extracts from The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account (1542) and In Defense of the Indians (1550). These are placed in company with extracts from the diary of Columbus and a brief passage from Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire (1982) in a chapter designed to correspond with chapter one of A People’s History. Both Voices of a People’s History and A People’s History have twenty-four chapters.

Zinn and Arnove’s assertion that Columbus “is universally portrayed as a heroic figure” (29) is much harder to swallow now than when Zinn wrote the first edition of A People’s History (1980). But they are describing his portrayal for generations of Americans up through the time they were in school. Several pages later, in the headnote to the selections from Las Casas, they observe that “the idealized, romanticized picture of Columbus has begun to be reconsidered” (35).

Estimating the Dead

The passage they offer from The Devastation of the Indies focuses upon depopulation and Spanish cruelties. Bartolomé de Las Casas depicts the islands of the Caribbean as a paradise formerly heavily populated by peoples that were “docile and open to doctrine, very apt to receive our Holy Catholic faith” (36). Las Casas arrived in Hispaniola in his eighteenth year in 1502, and claims to recall such a population of Indians that “it is as though God had crowded into these lands the great majority of mankind” (36). He offers general estimates of the aboriginal population of three million on Hispaniola (36), as many as one million on San Juan and Jamaica (40), and “a countless number” on the island of Cuba (42).

We can estimate very surely and truthfully that in the forty years that have passed, with the infernal actions of the Christians, there have been unjustly slain more than twelve million men, women, and children. In truth, I believe without trying to deceive myself that the number of the slain is more like fifteen million.
Las Casas, in Voices of A People’s History, 37.

Few scholars today accept these numbers, although Zinn advances them in A People’s History with minimal discussion and argument, as noted in “Howard Zinn on Depopulation.” Las Casas’s tendency toward hyperbole should give us pause. When Las Casas declares that Hispaniola “was perhaps the most densely populated place in the world” (35), we might take it as an effort towards census. But we find more exceptionalism on the next page: “of all the infinite universe of humanity, these people are the most guileless, the most devoid of wickedness and duplicity, the most obedient and faithful” (36). They lack only the gospel, or “they would be the most fortunate people in the world” (36). The Spanish, on the other hand, are the world’s most vile sinners: “their insatiable greed and ambition [is] the greatest ever seen in the world” (37). The most people, who are the most innocent, were abused by those with the most greed. Did Las Casas have enough experience throughout the world to render such judgment? Such comparisons come not from his breadth of knowledge, but from the ethnocentrism and cultural arrogance that he both advances and critiques.

Spanish Cruelties

Las Casas blames the killing and cruelty on the Spanish motives, and the opportunities for wealth out of proportion to individual merit.

Their reason for killing and destroying such an infinite number of souls is that the Christians have an ultimate aim, which is to acquire gold, and to swell themselves with riches in a very brief time and thus rise to a high estate disproportionate to their merits.
Las Casas, in Voices of A People’s History, 37.

He illuminates Spanish greed through a story of Hatuey who fled to Cuba from Hispaniola with many of his people in hopes of escaping the cruelties. Upon learning that the Spanish were coming to Cuba, he conducted a ceremony designed to appeal to the European god.

He had a basket full of gold and jewels and he said: “You see their God here, the God of the Christians. If you agree to it, let us dance for this God, who knows, it may please the God of the Christians and then they will do us no harm.” And his followers said, all together, “Yes, that is good, that is good!” And they danced round the basket of gold until they fell down exhausted. Then their chief, the cacique Hatuey, said to them: “See there, if we keep this basket of gold they will take it from us and will end up killing us. So let us cast away the basket into the river.” They all agreed to do this, and they flung the basket of gold into the river that was nearby.
Las Casas, in Voices of A People’s History, 40-41.

Later Hatuey was burned at the stake, but was given the opportunity to convert to Catholicism when he was “tied to the stake.” When told that Heaven was populated by Christians, he declared a preference for Hell. Las Casas comments, “Such is the fame and honor that God and our Faith have earned through the Christians who have gone out of the Indies” (41). Las Casas is clear. His concern was to save the souls of the Indians. This mission was rendered more difficult by the rapid depopulation of the aboriginals at the hands of Spanish who should have been model Christians, but appeared rather to be servants of their own greed.

Footnote to Larry Schweikart’s Claim

Tuberculosis

In A Patriot's History, Schweikart and Allen’s claim that “[t]uberculosis existed in Central and North America” (8) appears slightly inaccurate in light of research published after their text. It is not clear, however, that their claim contradicts “research from the hard sciences” available to them, even though support for their claim remains elusive.

An excellent summary of the medical science regarding the presence of tuberculosis in pre-Columbian America appeared in Philip A. Mackowiak, Vera Tiesler Blos, Manuel Aguilar, and Jane E. Buikstra, “On the Origin of American Tuberculosis,” Clinical Infectious Diseases (15 August 2005), 515-18.

The article asserts, “it is now firmly established that tuberculosis existed in the New World before the arrival of Columbus” (516), but the origins, spread, and cause (M. tuberculosis or M. bovis) remain unknown. Moreover, conclusive evidence of tuberculosis in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica “has yet to be found” (516).


Richard H. Steckel and the Backbone of History

In his article for History News Network, “Why It's Time for a Patriot's History of the United States,” Larry Schweikart claims: “[we] note that considerable new research in the hard sciences and medicine shows that some diseases thought to be ‘transmitted’ from Europe likely were already here.”

Economist Richard H. Steckel coordinated the work of a large group of scholars that resulted in several publications, including two texts cited by Schweikart and Allen. As noted yesterday, I have not yet been able to access these books. However, several summaries of the work suggest that Schweikart and Allen correctly formulate a central generalization of this work, but then grossly distort the specifics. They correctly quote the work of this group as suggesting that the health of indigenous Americans was on a “downward trajectory” before Europeans arrived. On the other hand, errors range from semantic inaccuracies to substantive misrepresentations.

Schweikart and Allen note a study of “12,500 skeletons from sixty-five sites” (8). Steckel’s summary differs:

The combined data sets include 12,520 skeletons from 218 archeological sites representing populations who lived in the Western Hemisphere from about 4,000 B.C. to the early 20th century. For purposes of the present analysis, the samples were combined into 65 groups based on their chronological and ecological similarity.
Steckel, et al, “Variation in Health,” 270.

Steckel and his coauthors highlight complexities in their generalization that there was a general decline of health in the Americas.

The average values for the health index ranged from 64.0 for Native Central Americans to 78.1 for Native North Americans from the Eastern Woodlands. As measured by the index, the examples of very good health in the 65 samples were for coastal Brazil, coastal Ecuador, and coastal Georgia, while the worst health was found at Hawikku, New Mexico, and among plantation slaves of South Carolina. Some of the best and worst health conditions were found in pre-Columbian Native American communities.
Steckel, et al, “Skeletal Health,” 149.

Much of the decline in health appears to have stemmed from “improvements” in agriculture and the consequent growth of urban areas. Those very features of indigenous American life that Schweikart and Allen labor to conceal are the source of the decline they trumpet.

Groups living in paramount towns or urban settings had a health index nearly 15 points (two standard deviations) below that expressed for mobile hunter-gatherers and others not living in large permanent communities. Clearly, there is something about living in a large community that is deleterious to health. … these larger communities are fueled by an agricultural economy. Diet was also closely related to the change in the health index, with performance being lower under the triad of corn, beans and squash compared to the more diverse diet of hunter-gatherer groups.
Steckel, et al, “Variation in Health,” 272.

One of the key findings to emerge from the study is the downward trajectory of health prior to the arrival of Europeans. Historians, economists, and other social scientists have long celebrated the contributions of technological change for improvements in the human condition. However, our research underscores the importance of distinguishing between material and health aspects of the quality of life.
Steckel, et al, “Variation in Health,” 274.

Because indigenous Americans were civilized, their health was in decline. Hunter-gatherers were generally healthier. Indeed, nineteenth-century equestrian nomads were so healthy that they distort the general data on the improvement in health of Native Americans following colonization.

The transition to agriculture has been widely considered a benchmark development for humanity, laying the groundwork for “civilization” and all of its elements, such as democracy, learning, art, literature, and architecture. From this perspective, humans underwent a transition from a way of life that was “nasty, brutish, and short” to one brimming with leisure and excess. The findings from the Western Hemisphere project argue that, in fact, the reverse was closer to reality. This is not to say that life went from rosy and healthy to bleak and unhealthy. That is not the case. There is a misperception by much of the public—at least the American public—that prehistoric Native Americans were the original ecologists, whose impact on the environment was minimal. Moreover, it is commonly believed that few diseases existed before the arrival of colonizing Europeans, who carried with them a suite of infectious pathogens that wiped out many native peoples. In fact, pre-Columbian people show plenty of evidence of disease. Some were among the healthiest in the study, whereas others were among those with the greatest burden of disease.
Steckel, et al, “Skeletal Health,” 152.

Steckel and company are clear that America was not a disease-free paradise, but they do not support the counter myth that American indigenes were on the whole “fierce savages, whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest” (Chief Justice John Marshall, Johnson v. McIntosh [1823]). Schweikart and Allen do not quote Marshall, but they distort the process of disease transmission when, after acknowledgment that European introduced microbes “generated a much higher level of infection,” they state, “warring Indian tribes spread the diseases among one another when they attacked enemy tribes and carried off infected prisoners” (17).


Full Citations

Richard H. Steckel, Jerome C. Rose, Clark Spencer Larsen, and Phillip L. Walker, “Variation in Health in the Western Hemisphere: 4000 B.C. to the Present.” In M. Schultz, et al., eds., Homounsere Herkunft und Zukunft: 4. Kongress der Gesellschaft für Anthropologie (GfA)Proceedings (Göttingen: Cuvillier Verlag, 2001), 270-75.

Expanded as

Richard H. Steckel, Jerome C. Rose, Clark Spencer Larsen, and Phillip L. Walker, “Skeletal Health in the Western Hemisphere From 4000 B.C. to the Present,” Evolutionary Anthropology 11 (2002), 142-155.

Larry Schweikart’s Claim

In his article for History News Network, “Why It's Time for a Patriot's History of the United States,” Larry Schweikart makes a number of claims regarding the content and merits of A Patriot’s History. I’ve been spending some time examining one: “[we] note that considerable new research in the hard sciences and medicine shows that some diseases thought to be ‘transmitted’ from Europe likely were already here.” This claim raises two immediate questions. Which New World diseases were thought to be Old World diseases? What research in the hard sciences supports their claim?

New World / Old World

Which New World diseases were thought to be Old World diseases? Schweikart and Allen offer two answers:

Native populations had epidemics long before Europeans arrived. A recent study of more than 12,500 skeletons from sixty-five sites found that native health was on a “downward trajectory long before Columbus arrived.” Some suggest that Indians may have had a nonvenereal form of syphilis, and almost all agree that a variety of infections were widespread. Tuberculosis existed in Central and North America long before the Spanish appeared, as did herpes, polio, tick-borne fevers, giardiasis, and amebic dysentary.
Schweikart and Allen, A Patriot’s History, 8.

Disease also decimated the colony. Jamestown settlers were leveled by New World diseases for which they had no resistance. Malaria, in particular, proved a dreaded killer, and malnutrition lowered the immunity of the colonists.
Schweikart and Allen, A Patriot’s History, 17.

I’m nearly ready to present a posting here at Patriots and Peoples showing that research in the so-called hard sciences favors an African origin for malaria, at least for its most virulent strain, and that this research was widely disseminated roughly during the time that Schweikart and Allen should have been finishing the research for their text. Of course, the scientific answers regarding the origins of malaria are inconclusive, as is customary for scientific research. Scientists are a skeptical tribe and they present their research with a degree of uncertainty that is misread to produce the distortions propagated by anti-intellectual crusades against such “truths” as evolutionary theory, the necessity of habitat protection and restoration, and models of climate change that reveal the effects of carbon dioxide emissions.

I will deal with malaria and Jamestown in "Death in Jamestown" which should be posted in a matter of days. In addition, “Origins of Malaria” will address some of the latest work in the hard sciences (at the time A Patriot's History was in preparation) with respect to malaria. While I’m moving forward on these two articles, I’m pursuing other aspects of Schweikart’s claim. The existence of a variety of infections, including nonvenereal syphilis, comes as no surprise to anyone with the faintest knowledge of the vast literature on Indian health, demography, and depopulation. Indeed, except for malaria, none of the maladies listed by Schweikart and Allen are among those listed by Henry Dobyns as Old World diseases that decimated indigenous populations in the Americas.

Hard Sciences

What research in the hard sciences supports their claim? I can find no citations to medical journals or the like in Schweikart and Allen’s bibliography. There are two texts that include work in a field called macrobioarchaeology, and two short articles in popular scientific journals. The two citations to science journals are both “[a]mong those who cite higher numbers” (9), and neither supports their claim. That leaves The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere, edited by Richard H. Steckel, and Jerome C. Rose; and Michael R. Haines and Richard H. Steckel, A Population History of North America. Steckel calls his work social science (i.e. “soft science”), but his work must be the “hard science” to which Schweikart refers.

It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. –Sherlock Holmes
A. Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes, 315.

According to the publisher, The Backbone of History “gathers skeletal evidence on seven basic indicators of health to assess chronic conditions that affected individuals who lived in the Western Hemisphere from 5000 B.C. to the late nineteenth century.” This book is the source for the language “downward trajectory,” a phrase available in numerous reviews, such as the New York Times article, “Don't Blame Columbus for All the Indians' Ills,” also cited by Schweikart and Allen. However, the New York Times article is clear that Steckel and Rose “say their findings in no way diminish the dreadful impact Old World diseases had on the people of the New World.” This assertion runs counter to the thrust of the argument in A Patriot’s History.

A Scholar’s Frustration

I do not own either of Steckel’s books cited by Schweikart and Allen. The Backbone of History is unavailable in my public libraries—city and county; nor does it exist in either university library in my city. The nearest copy I’ve located is 85 miles south of my home at my alma mater. A Population History does exist at one local library, but when I checked there in December, it was checked out until the end of January (their online catalog indicates that it is there today, so perhaps I can examine it later this week). Thus I’ve been forced to defer full examination of Schweikart and Allen’s professed sources, but initial forays into summaries offered in book reviews, and articles accessible through JSTOR are pushing me towards an assessment nearly identical to that offered in “America was not a disease-free paradise”: superficial reliance on quotable comments from books that argue the opposite of the larger claims in A Patriot’s History. I keep seeking credible scholarship in Schweikart and Allen’s text, but it eludes me.

Gone Fishing: Mosquitoes, Malaria

In the summer I eat fewer bananas and catch more fish. I cut down on fruit that seems to make me more attractive to the mosquitoes that inhabit wetlands near my favorite trout streams. It’s folk wisdom, and it may be proven false by science, but as with the flies I tie on the end of my tippet, my belief is the critical factor. I think that fewer bananas (and more garlic) renders me relatively unattractive to blood sucking insects, and so the evidence of my experience bears me out.

In the winter I do more angling in the library than along streams. There I recently netted an article of interest on the introduction of malaria in the New World: Corinne Shear Wood, “New Evidence for a Late Introduction of Malaria into the New World,” Current Anthropology 16 (March 1975), 93-104. Wood’s abstract at the end of the article sums the argument.

The unique, overwhelming group-O frequency present among indigenous American populations is seen as a result of mother-child ABO incompatibility effects operating in the absence of the positive selection pressures by malaria vectors favoring enhanced survival for genes A and B that the investigation findings suggest. It is proposed that had malaria been present to act upon the original gene pool, a balanced ABO polymorphism would be found in the New World Indians today.
Wood, “New Evidence,” 5.

Comment by sixteen scholars follow Wood’s article, taking up more pages than her report. There are several criticisms that urge caution in reasoning from her preliminary results, and most suggest the need for further studies. None of them fault her assessment of the historical literature up to the time of her study. It had been inconclusive, but was leaning toward Old World origins.

There should be no doubt from the responses, and her reply, that her study does more to raise questions than offer answers. As the article was published more than thirty years ago, we might expect to find corroborating or refuting evidence by now.

A much more recent study brought to my attention by John Hawks offers a conclusion supporting at least one aspect of Wood’s contentions, that malaria could have impacted selective pressure regarding blood groups:

This work provides insights into malaria pathogenesis and suggests that the selective pressure imposed by malaria may contribute to the variable global distribution of ABO blood groups in the human population.
J. Alexandra Rowe, et al, “Blood group O protects against severe Plasmodium falciparum malaria through the mechanism of reduced rosetting,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104 (October 2007), 17471-17476.

In addition, some genetic analysis published a few years ago, also inconclusive, leans towards origins of malaria in Africa. See Jennifer C. C. Hume, Emily J. Lyons, and Karen P. Day, “Archaeology of Epidemic and Infectious Disease,” World Archaeology, 35 (October 2003), 180-192.

This kettle of fish increases skepticism regarding Larry Schweikart’s claim, that “considerable new research in the hard sciences and medicine shows that some diseases thought to be ‘transmitted’ from Europe likely were already here,” if this claim applies to malaria.

I’ve addressed this question from another angle near the end of “America was not a disease-free paradise.” Schweikart and Allen name malaria once, as a New World disease that struck down English colonists that “had no resistance” (A Patriot’s History, 17).

Howard Zinn on Depopulation

War, Slavery, Disease

In A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn offers potentially inflated figures of the number of Indians that died. His numbers and the use he makes of them are clear in four short sentences.

For a while the English tried softer tactics. But ultimately, it was back to annihilation. The Indian population of 10 million that lived north of Mexico when Columbus came would ultimately be reduced to less than a million. Huge numbers of Indians would die from diseases introduced by whites.
Zinn, A People’s History, 16.

Zinn prioritizes the intent of white colonists to annihilate Indians. He mentions disease here, but omits it elsewhere in the first chapter. The sequence is telling: European tactics, depopulation, and then disease. Earlier in the first chapter, “Columbus, The Indians, and Human Progress,” he criticizes Spanish colonization of Hispaniola without reference to epidemics, stating that from 1494 to 1508 “over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines” (7). Two pages earlier, he credited “murder, mutilation, or suicide” for decimating “half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti” during the first two years of colonization there (5).

Aside from the first chapter of A People’s History, Zinn’s one significant mention of disease afflicting Indians highlights European agency in spreading illness.

Under orders from British General Jeffrey Amherst, the commander of Fort Pitts gave the attacking Indian chiefs, with whom he was negotiating, blankets from the smallpox hospital. It was a pioneering effort at what is now called biological warfare. An epidemic soon spread among the Indians.
Zinn, A People’s History, 87.

This single documented case of deliberate introduction of lethal pathogens generates considerable discussion, as for instance NativeWeb’s “Jeffrey Amherst and Smallpox Blankets,” with links to images of the critical documents.

Implications of Large Estimates

Citing high population estimates, but deemphasizing the chief cause of depopulation presents a distorted account. All scholars that put forth high estimates, those arguing for moderate numbers, and even several of the low counters agree that disease epidemics were the principle cause of the decline in Indian numbers. Moreover, Zinn’s narrative emphasis contrasts with the discussion of causality in his principle source for some of the population figures he offers, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (1975) by Francis Jennings. The relationship between war and disease is presented with some artistry in The Invasion of America.

Not even the most brutally depraved of the conquistadors was able purposely to slaughter Indians on the scale that the gentle priest unwittingly accomplished by going from his sickbed ministrations to lay his hands in blessing on his Indian converts. As the invaders were descendants of the toughened survivors of the Middle Ages, so the Indians of today descend from those who could live through the trauma of a European handshake.
Jennings, The Invasion of America, 22.

Handshakes were more lethal than muskets. The population figures that Zinn passes along are not without controversy, as noted elsewhere in Patriots and Peoples. To his credit, he expresses some uncertainty regarding these numbers in his discussion of Bartolomé de las Casas’s criticisms of Spanish conquest. This skepticism, however, is buried within strident criticism of the effects of conquest and of sanitized commemorations.

Thus began the history, five hundred years ago, of the European invasion of the Indian settlements in the Americas. That beginning, when you read Las Casas—even if his figures are exaggerations (were there 3 million Indians to begin with, as he says, or less than a million, as some historians have calculated, or 8 million as others now believe?)—in conquest, slavery, death. When we read the history books given to children in the United States, it all starts with heroic adventure—there is no bloodshed—and Columbus Day is a celebration.
Zinn, A People’s History, 7.

Zinn is correct that conquest of the Americas meant death for immense numbers of Native American Indians, but his emphasis on European intent seems inconsistent with his report of the degree of population loss. Nowhere in A People’s History does Zinn offer a general discussion of the effects of epidemic disease in reducing the indigenous population of the Americas.

Indian Population 1492: John D. Daniels

Praise and Expectations

At first glance John D. Daniels, “The Indian Population of North America in 1492,” William and Mary Quartery (April 1992), 298-320, is an impressive article that deserves praise as “[t]he best single review of all the literature on Indian population numbers” (Schweikart and Allen, A Patriot’s History, 9). It offers a staggering list of citations, boiling down many articles and books to three or four sentence summaries of general method to identify “eleven methods,” one “expedient,” and “three schools of thought”. He states, “conflict among them culminated in a major controversy that involved far more than numbers” (298).

These three schools of thought developed chronologically from low to higher estimates. Bottom up dominated 1910-1955 and produced “estimates in the 500,000 to 2,500,000 range” (310). Area modeling “came to prevail from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s” (312), with estimates in the range “2,500,000 to 7,000,000” (310). The top down school originated with a 1966 article by Henry Dobyns, and offers estimates from “7,000,000 to 18,000,000” (310); it “gradually displaced area modeling, achieving dominance by the mid-1980s” (314).

The most influential members of bottom up school are James Mooney and Alfred Kroeber. They estimate each tribe individually, and add all estimates to achieve their totals. Area modeling is the name employed by Daniels for the work of Sherburne Cook, Harold Driver, and others that develop ecological and cultural models of areas; such factors as population density and resource availability form the base for their estimates. The top down method was initiated by Henry Dobyns who employed epidemic correction, carrying capacity, multiple multiple, and depopulation ratio multiplied by actual census data of nadir population. Although others have arrived at lower estimates, while his continued to climb, many have adopted his methods.

The crux of the problem, as Daniels sees it, stems from “the inadequacy of historical evidence” because reports by colonial Europeans “are invariably defective” (298). In order to compensate for gaps and issues of credibility in the documentary record, sophisticated methods of estimation have been developed. Daniels concludes:

Despite all the discussion of rules of evidence and logic, no one has attempted tribe-by-tribe analysis, taking all direct evidence seriously and using simple inference only when absolutely essential. In order to create a reliable estimate of the North American population in 1492, scholars will either have to find new evidence or develop better methods of handling evidence.
Daniels, “Indian Population,” 320.

From such assertions, we might expect some detailed analysis of representative primary sources to illustrate how they are “defective”. We also might expect further assessment of how particular methodologies have employed such “direct evidence,” and some explanation regarding when inference is essential. It goes without saying that Daniels’ own use of evidence should prove exemplary.

Disappointment

These expectations produce disappointment. Daniels does not cite or analyze a single primary source. Rather, he assesses the interpretation of primary sources in secondary literature through that literature alone. In contrast, much of the literature reviewed by Daniels works through and argues about a wealth of such sources. Even a look through that literature reveals telling inconsistencies in his elaboration of historiography.

He identifies “report discounting” and “guesstimates” among the methods employed by Mooney, Kroeber, and others of the “bottom up” school. Daniels notes regarding guesstimates, “critics can assess reliability only when the guesser explains the reasoning behind the estimate” (304-305). Report discounting calls for comparable scrutiny, but instead Daniels shifts the emphasis: “Some scholars have scathingly rejected this procedure, defending the value of primary sources and accusing the discounters of cultural and racial bias” (306). Later he highlights cultural concerns:

[Critics of Mooney and Kroeber] alleged that prejudice and a desire to make Indians appear insignificant led to deliberate discounting of evidence of large early native populations. …
Some critics began to wonder if Henry Dobyns and his followers were just as biased in favor of the Indians as Mooney and Kroeber supposedly had been against them.
Daniels, “Indian Population,” 317-318.

He wears the mask of objectivity through careful attribution to others of this binary:

anti-Indian = low estimate / pro-Indian = high estimate

However, he reveals his face by defending Mooney and Kroeber against attacks he feels are unjustified: “since they had spent much of their lives documenting the surviving Indian cultures, they probably would have regarded the charge of cultural bias as absurd” (318). After cultural issues came into academic debates:

The second issue involves the principles of evidence and reasoning. The bottom-up approach is essentially historical; it admits only direct primary evidence and uses only simple deductive logic involving evaluation and comparison of reported data. The school rejects all forms of inference except by simple analogy.
Daniels, “Indian Population,” 318.

Daniels’s Apologia for Discounting

Daniels seizes several opportunities to commend the work of the “bottom up” school because “[t]hey normally used whatever direct historical evidence was available” (316). On the other hand, “area modelers had loosened the rules of evidence and logic” (319). Such “loosening” opened the door for Dobyns’s “radical departure at which the work of others had only hinted” (314).

This “radical departure” was first proposed in “Estimating Aboriginal Population: An Appraisal of Techniques with a New Hemispheric Estimate,” Current Anthropology (Sept. 1966), 395-416. Inasmuch as Dobyns raises significant methodological points against Mooney, Kroeber, and those that popularized their estimates, it is worth looking more closely at his arguments. He mentions as a case in point a figure of eight million Indians perishing in the Caribbean and Peru that was put forth in 1685 by the Marques de Varina to dispute the contentions of others that mining operations were the principle cause of Indian depopulation in Spanish colonies. Dobyns admits that such figures might have been inflated, but cautions against the wholesale discounting of the “bottom up” school.

To make such an assumption does not entitle the analyst to discard those figures; it does require him to seek corroborative or negating evidence. Rosenblat, Kroeber and their imitators have not done so. Their characteristic methodology has included depreciation of all historical population figures. They deprecate the departure of historical witnesses from the "truth" for motives they intuitively impute, but which uniformly led said witnesses to overestimate, in their opinion, aboriginal populations. They ignore the fact that eyewitnesses, whatever their biases, at least observed population trends which the modern analyst can never witness.
Dobyns, “Estimating Aboriginal Population,” 398.

Nowhere in “The Indian Population of North America” does John Daniels discuss how the scholarly methods that he names reveal efforts to corroborate or negate the evidence contained in colonial accounts. Yet, such assessment of historical documents is at the heart of the conception of historiography that he assumes.

New England Case Study

Henry Dobyns asserts in Their Number Become Thinned (1983) and other works that the smallpox epidemic that afflicted Mexico during its conquest by Hernán Cortés may have spread as a continent wide pandemic. He then draws upon a letter from Roger Williams to John Winthrop to offer documentary evidence for sixteenth century epidemics among the Narragansett (Dobyns, 318-319). Dean R. Snow and Kim M. Lanphear dispute his contention in several works, including “European Contact and Indian Depopulation in the Northeast: The Timing of the First Epidemics,” Ethnohistory (Winter 1988), 15-33. They review available Spanish sources, stating that “evidence suggests that epidemics did not spread northward from Mexico” (17). Then they turn toward the Northeast and offer a careful examination of the Williams letter and Dobyns use of it. They find other documents contradict Williams, or at least Dobyns's reading of him.

They contend that the first epidemic to hit New England arrived in 1616. It may have been the bubonic plague, or it may have been yellow fever or trichinosis. In any case, they find wanting the evidence that it reached the interior, although it clearly devastated the coast from Maine to Massachusetts. There is no dispute that an epidemic struck the coast of New England before the English established their colony there. There is considerable debate regarding its extent—epidemic or pandemic—and whether it was the first.

Daniels’ assertion—citing earlier work by Dean R. Snow—thus seems terribly misleading:

[According to some] major epidemics of Old World diseases preceded European explorers by a few years or decades and killed a significant percentage of the native population. … Some authorities maintain, for example, that a serious epidemic hit the Northeast before the first English settlers arrived.
Daniels, “Indian Population,” 306.

Although it is not cited by Snow and Lanphear, Mourt's Relation corroborates their recognition that an epidemic swept the coast of New England in 1616. The document was written principally by Edward Winslow and published in London in 1622. It is one of the key primary sources for the history of the Pilgrims in what later came to be called New England. The entire text with modernized spellings is accessible online at The Plymouth Colony Archive Project.

Two excerpts:

So we light on a path, but saw no house, and followed a great way into the woods. At length we found where corn had been set, but not that year. Anon we found a great burying place, one part whereof was encompassed with a large palisade, like a churchyard, with young spires for or five yards long, set as close one by another as they could, two or three feet in the ground. Within it was full of graves, some bigger and some less; some were also paled about, and others had like an Indian house made over them, but not matted. Those graves were more sumptuous than those at Cornhill, yet we digged none of them up, but only viewed them, and went our way. Without the palisade were graves also, but not so costly. From this place we went and found more corn-ground, but not of this year. As we ranged we light on four or five Indian houses, which had been lately dwelt in, but they were uncovered, and had no mats about them, else they were like those we found at Cornhill but had not been so lately dwelt in. There was nothing left but two or three pieces of old mats, and a little sedge. Also, a little further we found two baskets full of parched acorns hid in the ground, which we supposed had been corn when we began to dig the same; we cast earth thereon again and went our way. All this while we saw no people.
Mourt’s Relation

About noon we met again about our public business, but we had scarce been an hour together, but Samoset came again, and Tisquantum, the only native of Patuxet, where we now inhabit, who was one of the twenty captives that by Hunt were carried away, and had been in England.
Mourt’s Relation

The Pilgrim records are clear that Tisquantum (Squanto) was the only survivor of his home village and that abandoned villages were present throughout the region. Although there are several possible explanations for abandoned villages, disease was certainly one cause prior to English settlement in the Northeast.

Assessment

Daniels’ seminal article is nearly comprehensive, but terribly superficial in its review. Its convoluted scheme to organize a mass of scholarship gets cited, but not embraced in subsequent scholarship. His footnotes offer a useful point of entry into the field of pre-Columbian demography, but an alphabetized bibliography might serve just as well. His analysis offers a few useful questions, but no credible answers. The entire article seems to be a thinly disguised defense of the lowest estimates—the lack of credibility of which is the starting point for all scholarship in the field.

A far better review of the literature is available in Russell Thornton, “Aboriginal North American Population and Rates, ca. A.D. 1500-1900,” Current Anthropology (April 1997), 310-315. Thornton’s article, as Daniels, is not without an agenda. Thornton’s concern emphasizes the interplay of disease with other aspects of colonialism to produce long-term population decline for the indigenous population of the Americas from initial contact through the nineteenth century. His 1997 summary is broader in scope and less comprehensive than Daniels, but its summary of the themes and contentious issues in the scholarship presents a far more credible overview. The failure of Schweikart and Allen, A Patriot’s History, to mention Thornton while they praise Daniels is but one indication that their claims rest upon shoddy scholarship.

Daniels’s article might appear to be the source for the statement: “One recent scholar, examining the major assessments of the numbers, points to at least nine different measurement methods, including the time-worn favorite, guesstimates” (Schweikart and Allen, 8). This sentence neither rests upon Daniels’ identification of eleven methods, nor upon his observation that count multiple “has been used more than any other” (305), but it otherwise bears a strong similarity to his thesis. In any case, we can apply Daniels’s scheme to some of the numbers in A Patriot’s History. Daniels explains that the method he calls depopulation ratio (DR) assumes the significance of disease, so scholars start from a nadir population that is usually reasonably certain; then they multiply. Ratios have ranged “between 5:1 and 25:1 and nadirs for North America from 1870 to 1930” (308).

Schweikart and Allen both assert and conclude a depopulation ratio (DR) near 1:2. They state that 56 million deaths, as some have alleged, requires an aboriginal population of 100 million (56% depopulation). Then by rounding Ubelaker’s 1,894,350 down to 1.8 million, they state 800,000 died (50% depopulation). I’ve already noted in “Depopulation: Ubelaker’s Low Estimate” that Ubelaker’s own figures include nearly 1.4 million dead (72% depopulation). It would seem that Schweikart and Allen have reversed Dobyns’s most controversial process, applying a ratio of 1:2 to the lowest available estimate after rounding it down. Such numbers are dishonest.

Mexica Human Sacrifice 1487

Four-Day Slaughter: 80,400 Killed

After enlarging the Great Temple with shrines to Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc in 1487, Mexica priests slaughtered an unprecedented number of victims over four days at the behest of Ahuitzotl, the Aztec king. Reports to the Spanish after their conquest of Tenochtitlán and passed along in letters to Emperor Charles V place the number of dead during this ceremony as high as 80,400. Victor Davis Hanson observes in Carnage and Culture (2001) that the “killing rate of fourteen victims a minute over the ninety-six-hour bloodbath far exceeded the daily murder record at either Auschwitz or Dachau” (195).

In A Patriot’s History of the United States (2004), Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen pass along this 80,400 figure without a note of skepticism.

[I]t was sacrifice, not science, that defined Aztec society, whose pyramids, after all, were execution sites. A four-day sacrifice in 1487 by the Aztec king Ahuitzotl involved the butchery of 80,400 prisoners by shifts of priests working four at a time at convex killing tables who kicked lifeless, heartless bodies down the side of the pyramid temple. This worked out to a “killing rate of fourteen victims a minute over the ninety-six-hour bloodbath.”
Schweikart and Allen, A Patriot’s History, 5.

They document this quote of the killing rate as reported by Hanson with the first of several references to Carnage and Culture in A Patriot’s History. Indeed, over the next several pages, Hanson’s book appears as the principal source for their central argument regarding the reasons for the success of the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica. Although the authors of A Patriot’s History pronounce this estimate of the number of sacrificial victims without qualification, Hanson exhibits some reservation through use of the adverb “purportedly”:

Ahuitzotl purportedly organized the butchery of 80,400 prisoners during a four-day blood sacrifice at the 1487 inauguration of the Great Temple to Huitzilopochtli in Tenochtitlán—an enormous challenge in industrialized murder in its own right.
Hanson, Carnage and Culture, 194-195.

Schweikart and Allen’s uncritical acceptance of this 80,400 figure in Hanson is noteworthy in light of other numbers in his book that they reject. In particular, A Patriot’s History gives 100,000 as the number of Aztec dead during the 1521 victory of Cortés in the conquest of Tenochtitlán, “many from disease resulting from Cortés’s cutting the city’s water supply” (6). In the depopulation sidebar that interrupts their narrative of the conquest of Mesoamerica, they suggest that in North America there were “800,000 Indians who died from disease and firearms” (8). They do not offer an estimate of the dead in Mesoamerica beyond the 100,000. Such figures seem to offer a striking contrast to the tally in Hanson’s Carnage and Culture. Hanson mentions the 100,000 as an estimate in Tenochtitlán itself during the summer of 1521, and continues:

But that was a small percentage of the actual losses in the two-year struggle for Mexico City. Disease, hunger, and constant fighting had essentially wiped out the population of Tenochtitlán. The final tally of the dead would eventually reach more than 1 million of the people surrounding Lake Texcoco.
Hanson, Carnage and Culture, 193.

Estimating the Dead in 1487

One of several principal sources informing Hanson’s chapter on Tenochtitlán in Carnage and Culture is Hugh Thomas, Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés, and the Fall of Old Mexico (1993). Thomas buries the 80,400 figure in a discursive footnote, where it is attributed to Motolinía, also called Friar Toribio de Benavente. In addition according to Thomas, Fr. Diego Durán, Historia de las Indias de Nueva España (1867 and 1880) “has much the same number, on what he implies was the authority of what is now called the Crónica X” (646). Drawing on a range of primary and secondary sources, Thomas presents several other figures for this one ceremony and for the annual totals, including Sherburne Cook’s estimate of 11,520 based on two minutes per victim over four days. The text of Conquest is cautious:

The innumerable prisoners who died on fourteen pyramids over four days, with long lines of victims stretching from the site of the temple in four directions, as far as the eye could see, at a festival in 1487 to mark the inauguration of the new temple to Huitzilopochtli in Tenochtitlán, had no precedent. No evidence exists which enables anything more than a good guess.
Thomas, Conquest, 25.

Between 11,520 and 80,400, Schweikart and Allen might have suggested that estimates of the dead during one four-day ceremony in 1487 reveal a plus or minus reliability factor of nearly 700 per cent. They argue against “overestimates of millions” based on the 400 per cent variation in estimates for the population of the Inka (Inca) in Peru ranging from 4 to 15 million. It seems odd that their skepticism regarding the extent of aboriginal depopulation due to disease does not extend to skepticism regarding Spanish reports of the brutality of Aztec sacrifices four decades before they arrived.

Another View of Aztec Sacrifices

Charles C. Mann does not mention this event in 1487. In 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, he does observe, “[h]uman sacrifice is such a charged subject that its practice by the Triple Alliance [the Aztec Empire] has inevitably become shrouded in myths” (133). One myth he identifies is that “post-conquest accounts of public death-spectacles are all racist lies” (133), noting that Mexica art depicts such sacrifices enough that there should be no doubt. Mann identifies a contrasting myth, “that in its appetite for death as spectacle the Triple Alliance was fundamentally different from Europe” (133). Seizing upon Cortés’s own estimate that the Aztecs sacrificed three to four thousand per year, on the one hand, and scholarly estimates of seventy-five thousand public executions in England between 1530 and 1630, on the other, he offers a comparison.

At the time, [England’s] population was about three million, perhaps a tenth that of the Mexica empire. Arithmetic suggests that if England had been the size of the Triple Alliance, it would have executed, on average, about 7,500 people per year, roughly twice the number Cortés estimated for the empire. France and Spain were still more bloodthirsty than England, according to [Fernand] Braudel.
Mann, 1491, 134.

Mann’s assertion deserves scrutiny for his assumption that a larger population would have an equivalent proportion of candidates for execution. Moreover, his arithmetic relies on a rough estimate of Mesoamerica’s population twenty percent greater than the twenty-five million estimate of Sherburne Cook and Woodrow Wilson Borah (see citation at "Population and Demography"). But even a much larger margin of error does not negate his point that the spectacle of killing in Mesoamerica was not foreign to European conquistadors and colonists. Indeed, Mann’s statement is not altogether inconsistent with Hanson’s assertion early in his book.

I am not interested here in whether European military culture is morally superior to, or far more wretched than, that of the non-West. The conquistadors, who put an end to human sacrifice and torture on the Great Pyramid in Mexico City, sailed from a society reeling from the Grand Inquisition and the ferocious Reconquista, and left a diseased and nearly ruined New World in their wake.
Hanson, Carnage and Culture, 6.