Misconceptions: Diseases in the Americas (Pt. 1) (Sub. Esp.)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 23 พ.ค. 2024
- Well known is the fact that the indigenous populations of the Americas were decimated by terrible plagues in the 16th and early 17th centuries, however this fact has been distorted and misrepresented by many, leading to fantasies of "empty lands settlers simply walked in" after diseases wiped out everyone there.
The truth however is much more complex and grim than that, and in this special we talk about that
Part 2 here:
• Misconceptions: Diseas...
Part 3 here:
• Misconceptions: Diseas...
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To learn more:
On pre-Columbian population estimates:
www.bxscience.edu/ourpages/au...
On the native American genetic bottleneck
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas...
On the current understanding of American bejel and syphilis
www.nature.com/articles/s4158...
On the possible existence of pre-Columbian American tuberculosis
www.forbes.com/sites/grrlscie...
Music:
Jeremy Blake - Heaven & Hell (Part 2)
Jo Wandrini - A Web of Delusion
Nctrnm - Like
Remote - All Gods Creatures are Animals
Scott Buckley - Meditation - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
Great episode! Can't wait for part 2!
Thanks man!
Fancy seeing you here ancient Americas
lol of course you're on here
@@atlasaltera it's a big ol' party here!
Here thanks to your recommendation!
That was fascinating. It's good to see work being done on the subject. Thanks for putting it together, looking forward to the followup.
The point about multiple epidemics is a good one as it presents a dramatically different picture to the standard popular conception.
I also appreciate that you get into the social determinants of health side of things, it's frustrating how often it's ignored. All aspects of life are interrelated and influence one another in a variety of ways. Clearly having your subsistence model disrupted is going to affect all cause mortality.
And I still have a lot more to say about that in the next episode
i love it when my favorite channels enjoy each other. is like a crossover event. yall are excellent
The Return of Aztlan!
Fantastic work! The colonial context of disease absolutely cannot be overlooked. Thank you for giving this topic the attention it deserves
Glad you liked the video
The world needs more educators like you, please keep giving people one of the sharpest, most nuanced takes on human history they could hope to find, as you have done in your time here
I shall keep working to remain worthy of such praise. Greetings!
Here by Malcom's recommendation! I'm really looking forward to it and your future material!
Welcome
Who’s Malcom?
@@lindaparisi6744 historytuber malcolmpl
Nice video, I've been meaning to check out and sub to your channel for a while now. I'm an arm chair scholar so there are holes in what I know.
It is hard to get pre-columbian population figures because of the lack of surviving written records and destruction of settlement sites (east of the Appalachian mountains conditions for preservation of wood and human remains kinda sucks too).
There was also human nature to deal with. When you see half your town or city getting sick and dying or being disfigured by a disease your brain screams at you to leave town, which means spreading it to another village. "I'm fine, I'm not sick. I better leave before I get sick!" That's the worst part of a disease, it incubates inside you and you feel good until you don't.
Not sure how much truth there is to it or if it's some outdated eugenics crap. One of the ideas why the Europeans brushed off a lot of the diseases while the First nations didn't was because of farming/animal husbandry. The Europeans were used to wallowing in the filth of horse crap, mucking out stalls, milking cows, raising chickens, ect in other words they were playing in animal poop and pee and not bathing so they had to have a stronger immune system of die. First Nations didn't have a lot of the domestic animals, and the ones they did they'd be used to the diseases they carried.
A lot of diseases don't go back and forth between animal and people but some do (bird and swine flu, bats can be, and so can some monkey/primate pathogens). For thousands of years you had a bit of balance between people dealing with animals. In gamer terms you throw 100 sided die every 6 months to see if something nasty comes up. All of a sudden over the span of a few decades/century new humans, animals, and plants are being introduced to the environment, now you have to start rolling that 100 sided die for every new element you are adding. That adds up to a lot of dice.
I'm American and 55 years old. they never taught us anything about precolumbian history in school. They gave us this paradox that the First Nations were here and helped saved the butts of our early colonies (Thanksgiving Holiday) but yet somehow the continent was empty and there for the taking of good protestant white people (except the Irish). I could spend another 30+ learning more about the First Nations and I wouldn't know anything other than surface details. The history of the US & North America didn't just begin in the early1600s with the Massachusetts Bay Colony & Jamestown.
I pretty much covered every single one of your points in my video, and on part two I'm going to elaborate more on the other factors that contributed to make them even deadlier; although I want to make some remarks:
1. Most pre-Columbian societies (including all of those living north of Mexico) lacked written records (and yes I'm aware about the wigwaasabak debate), so we have no primary sources and unlike the Spaniards, the English didn't have much interest in recording native population trends, as they weren't the main labor in (most of) the English colonies.
2. You are overlooking inherited immunity and the fact that the same diseases that caused mass deaths in the New World also caused mass deaths in Europe at the same time. The reason why they didn't depopulate the continent had nothing to do with them interacting with dung (after all not everyone in Europe was a poor peasant) and all to do with how the American natives were mistreated in the early colonial era; which is the main topic of the second part.
3. I appreciate that you highlight the role on psychology in the spread of diseases. People rarely acknowledge the role of fear and panic in major outbreaks, even after we saw a lot of that in recent years.
Hope you stay for my next video. Greetings!
Hey, great video. I was sent over to your channel by Malcolm's recommendation. About to watch part 2!
Hope you keep watching my videos. Greetings
@@AztlanHistorian Greetings to you. Yes, I subscribed to your channel. I plan to keep watching.
much love and thanks for keeping up the videos, more so for combating misconceptions, well the tendency to paint history in broad strokes. The butchers bill of conquest is never light, never.
You didn't have to put in a wailing electric guitar rift in the background, but ya did. This is why you're top quality.
Oh, you flatter me. Personally I think my audio editing is the most flawed aspect of my video production 😞
@@AztlanHistorian you're like a one man crew on these videos right? Stop beating yourself up. Your audio may be rough but your content is articulate.
@@SuperMetalMage Again, you flatter me. Although in fairness one of the main reasons why this channel takes so long to update is precisely because of that
Always a delight to see that you've posted, your work is all great and this is no exception! Looking forward to the next two parts.
Thanks. I'll do my best!
Absolutely fascinating! I look forward at the next video.
Stay tuned!
Thank you so much! Please keep up the good work! ❤
Glad you liked the video!
Nice work! Glad to find the channel!
Hope you keep supporting it. Greetings!
Looking forward to the next
The goat posted again 😻😻😻😻
And we still have two more parts to go
Great topic! I used to excavate and run pertinent archaeological laboratory processing in Eastern Wisconsin. There's a location called Lake Butte des Morts and Little Lake Butte des Morts near a town called Winneconne. The name in English is Hill of the Dead. There was always this urban legend in the area that these lakes got their name because of a large mass grave located on this hillside. The basics of the story was that there was a massacre of the locals, Meskwaki, by the French. I was loosely associated with this site and what we pretty much found out is that all those burials made it there prior to contact and showed evidence of being disease victims. However, the French crown did eventually declare war on the local inhabitants. It's interesting to see how reality changes into folk beliefs as time and memories pass on. I wish more people understood that the New World in general was exceptionally overgrown and being reclaimed as wilderness by the time anyone from the Old World ever got to see it. Well maybe anyone since Da Vaca.
Do you mean Cabeza de Vaca?
Great video!
Thanks my friend!
Thanks for the video👍🏻.
Glad you liked it
Wake up babe, new Aztlan Historian video dropped!
Ha! I was already subscribed. I'm on the right path!
Thanks for supporting the channel!
Hermoso canal
Gracias
Regarding the epidemiology being grossly effected by being the victims of war, this can also be seen in the semi contemporary Thirty Years War raging in central Europe at the time too which is something I hadn't really though of before. War always grossly exacerbates disease and disease tends to be the main driver of deaths in per-industrial warfare, with the Thirty Year's War seeing such horrific outbreaks that your likely cause of death as a soldier would just be getting infected in your camp and combat almost being a non factor. If the virgin soil theory held true, why were Europeans, in the same period as the conquest, dying of the same diseases as Americans? Influenza, livestock fevers, colds, and smallpox seem to kill them just as fine as it does for Native Americans in the same century if living conditions are atrophied by decades of raiding and sieging.
Exactly. Unfortunately diseases have been hijacked by colonial apologists as a way to present the European takeover of the Americas as they simply marching into empty real estate caused by diseases.
That's how damaging the existing Virgin Soil doctrine is
@@AztlanHistorian A large part I'd hazard is that at least in the NA context, if the Southern American conquest is covered at all by public education, it basically ends with Cortes' final campaign defeating the Aztec and seizing their territory. If you're Californian you get some brief covering on the Missions and interactions with local Californian peoples but that's about it. What's shamefully also never brought up is how there was a couple polities which, in spite of being atrophied by plague, completely whipped all attempts to conquer them like the Chichimeca (seriously they should rate up there with the North Vietnamese in modern history as resistance campaigns go.)
Maybe part of the Virgin Soil popularity in the public is also just the stark difference between the SA and NA context? SA polities at the time were huge population blocs that ultimately couldn't be shifted totally by the Iberians - assimilated or hybridized culturally, but they couldn't just come over with a genocidal broom and sweep everyone into the wind. Meanwhile the lower population density of North America feeds into the North American colonial mindset of 'virgin' land, which then gets projected down south by (white) scholarship.
The Chichimeca were not really a group, it is a more complicated story; and in general, the main forces behind their subjugation were the native troops loyal to Spain; but I guess you already watched this video:
th-cam.com/video/0dAEl2Qchmg/w-d-xo.html
I personally have a problem with labeling scholarship as "white", as colonial endeavors often involved non-Europeans as part of the conquering forces, be it Tlaxcaltecs, Otomi, Cañaris, etc. Also let's not forget those non-European groups that expanded after the Columbian contact and decimated entire nations, like the Comanche, the Haudenosaunee and the Miskito.
As for the differences in historiography, indeed some of those derive from the fact that the Spanish colonies retained larger native populations than the British ones; however the main factor has to do with how the colonies understood their role in the Americas.
The Spaniards justified themselves as being the "redeemers of the pagans" while the English looked for new land, not new subjects. So the narratives that would persist would reflect those ideas, and would have a rather interesting effect.
In the Spanish speaking world, we have native historians and chroniclers from the colonial era. The earliest of them tend be quite critical, but the more recent ones tend defend or support the Spanish colonial project (repeating the whole religious justification as part of their narrative) as they often were among those natives who got privileges from the Crown.
Meanwhile in the Anglo world, the native voices (most of which didn't write their views by themselves) were silenced as part of the dehumanization trend. The English needed natives to be understood as vermin or wild beasts by colonists, not as fellow residents of the same land.
@@AztlanHistorian That is a very interesting point.
Recommend by Malcom P.L. - subscribed!
Welcome to the community
Its a pity that there are no subtitles. That makes it hard to understand for non-native English speakers.
I intend to add Spanish subtitles soon, but right now I'm focused on producing Part 3.
PS. I'm also a non-native English speaker
Haven't seen the entire episode yet , but I'm sure it will be great. One thing about the map you showed about, among other things, the spread of agriculture.
Thanks to all kinds of new research, new data and new techniques, we now know that, for example, people around winnipeg also practised agriculture. Yes, even in these cold temperatures. Also, the 1450 "enddate" of many north American cultures has become problamatic lately with the actual dating of stuff in iroquoian country. The same goes for the south eastern us and the plains.
The north American westcoast might have had a form of agriculture that we fail to recognize so far and, finally, new research in Uruguay and Argentina is showing that also there, agriculture extended more to the south than previously thought...
Honestly, when trying to pick a pre-1492 map to fill that point of the video I originally intended to pick one mentioning major native groups, but all of them were so grossly inaccurate I really couldn't bring myself to use them.
The map I ended up using was the last choice I had, and as you pointed out is inaccurate, but at that point I just wanted a map to put a question mark atop of it, so I went with it.
The fact that pretty much no accurate map of 1492 exists says a lot about how much history was lost and how sloppy those who make historical materials unfortunately often are.
@@AztlanHistorian you are absolutely right and I suppose this one map is the best we have so far on the internet. We need to make one ourselves ! :)
I can imagine how frustrating it must be to try and find something accurate and up to date. You did a great job ! Muchas gracias ! We need more people like you on TH-cam & other (social) media that make quality videos about this topic.
@@torrawel I also make maps by the way, you can check my DeviantArt profile in case you want to see them 👍
🗿👍
A fine ep for sure a welcome one just for a idea in the future for fun a alternate history of sorts
What would happen if East Asians like Mongolians, Chinese, Japanese, And Koreans both South Koreans And North Koreans colonized The Americas instead of Western Europeans?
Given their administrative practices, the cultural biases and the fact they also carried the same diseases... natives would not have really fared better
@@AztlanHistorian yep and lets not forget the Han chinese would haninized the natives and they are a lot more han chinese than europeans, so there would be a lot morr colonist. For japs and koreans dunno howd theyd deal with colonizing americas.
This is why I hate the romanticization of precolumbian America. Makes it like it was a fairytale land full of peace with no diseases
Yeah, it's just a collection of misconceptions that only hinder our understanding of the past
My reading of the works of the early Jesuit missionaries was that by far the greatest factor for indigenous population reduction was infant mortality, not the periodic pandemics. People knew to get out of the missions until the outbreaks subsided.
That would be really off.
1. I didn't state diseases were the main reason for population reduction, just that it was one of the main factors, and in fact, I'll deal with the other main causes in the next episode.
2. Diseases, as I said in the video, worked in tandem with other causes; so saying "X was the main factor" is not really correct in any case.
3. Child mortality was often due diseases, both native and from the Old World, so I don't see how child mortality would deny or downplay the role of diseases.
I have a feeling most died in slavery.
We clarify that in the second video: th-cam.com/video/q8wr8lN-aAo/w-d-xo.html
Great video!
¡Gracias!