Lies My Teacher Told Me

that the books by these last two offer by far the fullest accounts of early Spanish settlements in “what is now the United State ...

Langer has written that the Black (or bubonic) Plague “was undoubtedly the worst disaster that has ever befallen mankind.”^10 In ...

their own survival. This requirement is nowhere clearer than in the case of smallpox, which cannot survive outside a living huma ...

to them. In 1617, just before the Pilgrims landed, a pandemic swept southern New England. For decades, English and French fisher ...

These Aztec drawings depicting smallpox, coupled with the words of William Bradford, convey something of the horror of the epide ...

including, in a later century, the “heavily pockmarked George Washington.” Native Americans usually died. The impact of the epid ...

Today, as we compare European technology with that of the “primitive” American Indians, we may conclude that European conquest o ...

tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhus, cholera, and other diseases. Many of these outbreaks reached truly pandemic proportions, begin ...

Mooney’s estimate was accepted until the 1960s and 1970s, even though the arguments supporting it, based largely on inference r ...

For a century after Catlin, historians and anthropologists “overlooked” the evidence offered by the Pilgrims and other early chr ...

bounty towards us” for sending “this wonderful plague among the salvages [sic].”^46 Two hundred years later the oldest American ...

Certainly the Pilgrims already knew quite a bit about what Massachusetts could offer them, from the fine fishing along Cape Cod ...

Among the Pilgrims’ sources of information about New England were probably the maps of Samuel de Champlain, including this chart ...

less plausible, for if a storm blew them off course, when the weather cleared they could have turned southward again, sailing ou ...

one of the most fortunate coincidences in our history.” Such a happy portrait of the Pilgrims can be painted only by omitting th ...

Pilgrims hardly “started from scratch” in a “wilderness.” Throughout southern New England, Native Americans had repeatedly burne ...

bag of beans.... In all we had about ten bushels, which will be enough for seed. It was with God’s help that we found this corn, ...

trying to get home via Newfoundland, in 1619 he talked Thomas Dermer into taking him along on his next trip to Cape Cod. It happ ...

Squanto’s travels acquainted him with more of the world than any Pilgrim encountered. He had crossed the Atlantic perhaps six ti ...

It is considered to be true. It tells how an institution came into existence. In performing the ritual associated with the myth ...