Native American tribes in America before the Europeans #maps
Posted By RichC on November 20, 2022
Maps and history have always held my interest (as they do for my son Taylor too). Having grown up when schools glossed over most of American the history prior to Columbus in 1492 (or perhaps the Vikings) … it is interesting to learn a little bit more about the “approximately 20 million” Native Americans that populated North America prior to the 16th century.
I certainly did not remember learning that there were “over 1000 tribes, bands or clans” prior to disease and war during the first 300 years that our country was “founded” (hm?) I’m not a “woke” education advocate and prefer most of what we learn is from the contemporary teaching of American history, but I still don’t mind some attention to and learning about the native population … and particularly enjoy learning through maps. Check out the article “Why Isn’t This Map in the History Books?”
While I’m on the subject of maps, history and learning, I’m going to pull a book by Gavin Menzies off our bookshelves (below) that I started several years ago but never finished. The “claim” by Menzles is that the Chinese sailed to America before Columbus. It is intriguing …even if most historians call his assertion pseudohistory.
His book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, is a work of sheer fiction presented as revisionist history. Not a single document or artifact has been found to support his new claims on the supposed Ming naval expeditions beyond Africa … Menzies’ numerous claims and the hundreds of pieces of "evidence" he has assembled have been thoroughly and entirely discredited by historians, maritime experts and oceanographers from China, the U.S., Europe and elsewhere.
