1493 - Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

Zusatztext 44987185 Informationen zum Autor Charles C. Mann ! a correspondent for The Atlantic! Science! and Wired! has written for Fortune! The New York Times! Smithsonian! Technology Review! Vanity Fair! and The Washington Post! as well as for the TV network HBO and the series Law & Order . A three-time National Magazine Award finalist! he is the recipient of writing awards from the American Bar Association! the American Institute of Physics! the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation! and the Lannan Foundation. His 1491 won the National Academies Communication Award for the best book of the year. He lives in Amherst! Massachusetts. Klappentext More than 200 million years ago! geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other! the two halves of the world developed totally different suites of plants and animals. Columbus's voyages brought them back together--and marked the beginning of an extraordinary exchange of flora and fauna between Eurasia and the Americas.   The Seams of Panagaea   Although it had just finished raining, the air was hot and close. Nobody else was in sight; the only sound other than those from insects and gulls was the staticky low crashing of Caribbean waves. Around me on the sparsely covered red soil was a scatter of rectangles laid out by lines of stones: the outlines of now- vanished buildings, revealed by archaeologists. Cement pathways, steaming faintly from the rain, ran between them. One of the buildings had more imposing walls than the others. The researchers had covered it with a new roof, the only structure they had chosen to protect from the rain. Standing like a sentry by its entrance was a hand- lettered sign: Casa Almirante , Admiral’s House. It marked the first American residence of Christopher Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, the man whom generations of schoolchildren have learned to call the discoverer of the New World. La Isabela, as this community was called, is situated on the north side of the great Caribbean island of Hispaniola, in what is now the Dominican Republic. It was the initial attempt by Europeans to make a permanent base in the Americas. (To be precise, La Isabela marked the beginning of consequential European settlement—Vikings had established a short-lived village in Newfoundland five centuries before.) The admiral laid out his new domain at the confluence of two small, fast- rushing rivers: a fortified center on the north bank, a satellite community of farms on the south bank. For his home, Columbus—Cristóbal Colón, to give him the name he answered to at the time—chose the best location in town: a rocky promontory in the northern settlement, right at the water’s edge. His house was situated perfectly to catch the afternoon light. Today La Isabela is almost forgotten. Sometimes a similar fate appears to threaten its founder. Colón is by no means absent from history textbooks, of course, but in them he seems ever less admirable and important. He was a cruel, deluded man, today’s critics say, who stumbled upon the Caribbean by luck. An agent of imperialism, he was in every way a calamity for the Americas’ first inhabitants. Yet a different but equally contemporary perspective suggests that we should continue to take notice of the admiral. Of all the members of humankind who have ever walked the earth, he alone inaugurated a new era in the history of life. The king and queen of Spain, Fernando (Ferdinand) II and Isabel I, backed Colón’s first voyage grudgingly. Transoceanic travel in those days was heart-toppingly expensive and risky—the equivalent, perhaps, of spaceshuttle flights today. Despite relentless pestering, Colón was able to talk the monarchs into supporting his scheme only by threatening to take the project to France. He was riding to the frontier, a friend wrote later, when the queen “sent...

Product details

• Authors: Charles C. Mann
• Publisher: Knopf
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 01.08.2011
• EAN: 9780307265722
• ISBN: 978-0-307-26572-2
• No. of pages: 560
• Dimensions: 170 mm x 242 mm x 41 mm
• Series: ALFRED A. KNOPF
• Subject: Non-fiction book