by Rich Wandschneider | Sep 10, 2015 | American Indian languages, Babel, Charles Mann, human catastrophes, John Wesley Powell, north american languages, Plague, potato famine
I’ve always thought that Alvin’s Indian Heritage of America, published in 1968, was extraordinary in its examination of the Americas before contact. He started with languages. Ironically, it was often missionaries, intent on Christianizing and changing people, who...
by Rich Wandschneider | Jun 21, 2014 | Black Death, Brian Fagan, Father Desmet, Marcus Whitman, Plague, Salem witch trials, smallpox, Weyakin
Smallpox didn’t rate a line in the ‘Western Civilization textbook that I used in 1961—The Course of Civilization, by Strayer, Gatzke, and Harison. In fact, the Plague, or Black Death, which some now think wiped out a third of Europe’s population in the mid fourteenth...
