1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus by
Charles C. MannStarted: July 22, 2025
Completed: August 21, 2025
Recommendation: Recommended
Recommended By: Nobody
Review:
The titular date is more of a lodestone then an actual constraint on the book. Mann moves forward and backward of this date with lots of breathing room and this is welcome. Instead of being the story of a year (or even being the story of the Americas before Columbus as the subtitle says) this is a broader story which focuses on the state of the native American before Columbus while leaving room to examine how things changed not simply with Columbus, but with all the Europeans. This is a broad expanse to cover in one book (a couple of continents for thousands of years) and, as such, it examines more the tip of the iceberg. As a reader, the tromp through the cultures of the Americas with constant name dropping (the name dropping is surely important to researchers in each culture, but amounts to a constant rumble of single or infrequent mentions that drown out the larger story in some areas) is exhausting. There are few touchstones to other histories, so almost all of the information provided is new and is, thus, overwhelming.
In studies of European history, one might start with the Greeks, then learn of how the Romans overtook the Greeks and learn of how that went. It is rare, in my experience to consider the Greeks, then look at how the Greeks interacted with, say, the Egyptians or Persians and the myriad of other city states (with the possible exceptions of Sparta and Troy)--much less the many societies impacted by Alexander the Great, yet this is the approach taken by Mann. Surely he is glossing over the history of say, the Maya, but yet the number of cities he describes and various rulers of each become a froth of names that are hardly related to one another and only have minimal carry-over when he is talking about other nearby cultures (in time or space) much less distant cultures. It is just too much information to take in properly (compounded by the nature of the names being both distinct from European names with which I am familiar and being overlapping such as name changes upon coronation). I find it hard to say that this is a good introduction, but, yet, the high pace of archaeology which has put this book out of date on more than one occasion makes it difficult to find a coherent history of any one of these groups in some other independent book or set of books. As such, this becomes an introduction which stitches together so many societies over such a breadth of time that it can be a reference of sorts for a more detailed study of any one to understand the greater context (sort of looking at a Celtic history within a broader sense of European history in general). It feels like much ground was covered, but from such a height as to artificially blur details (to stretch a metaphor: the forest has oaks, maples, and pines and some of the characteristics of each are described to include some of their interactions, but the details get reduced to "forest" in order to look at the plains nearby by this reader.)
All-in-all, I'm glad to have read it, but unlikely to remember the details (say, comparable to parts of the Two Towers in The Fellowship of the Ring; I'll never remember the lines of various dwarves, but it is good to know for the story that there were distinct Dwarven clans).
