Scott Madin

"birthed a nation", you say oh weird why are all these dogs barking all of a suddenhttps://twitter.com/JasonSCampbell/status/1386685340522536961 …

anyway the idea that the Americas were "empty", "untouched" "wilderness" that Europeans had a right to just for showing up was propaganda developed by "Enlightenment" philosophers to justify conquest and genocide.

they knew it was false at the time, because earlier explorers and traders had interacted with Indigenous people and reported that they were sophisticated, but different, civilizations.

one really important takeaway from Mann's excellent _1491_ is how utterly the opposite of "untouched" and "wild" the American landscape was prior to European invasion. it had been shaped and managed by people for thousands of years.

another is that the population of the Americas was _huge,_ much larger than white people typically imagine. In the 16th century there were cities in America bigger than London.