Great Courses: Conquest of the Americas by Marshall Eakin

 In 1491 both North and South America were full of thousands of native civilizations.  Some were large like the Mayas and the Incas.  Most were smaller, and ranged from primitive hunter/gather's to agrarian cultures to societies rivaling Western cultures in their achievements.  Then Columbus crossed the Atlantic and arrived in the islands of the Caribbean. Everything started to change, and within two centuries the demographics of the Americas had totally changed.  Professor Eakin discusses this process of the conquering of the Americas by the Europeans in 24 lectures.  His main premise is that there were three groups of people who came together to form what we know now as Americans: the native people, the Europeans, and Africans brought to the Americas as slaves. He talks at length about how each groups played significant roles in the creation of the modern Americas. 

In the past few months I listened to Great Courses lectures on the history of the Middle East, Italy, and now the Americas during the period of the late medieval and early renaissance periods.  I feel like each one helped me fit another piece in place for understanding this time period.  I learned so much from this series that I didn't know before.  For example, I hadn't understood that only 6% of all Africans who served as slaves in the Americas were in what was to become the United States. Most were enslaved in Central and South America to work on plantations and in mines. I had heard that 90% of native peoples died of disease after the Europeans arrived, but I didn't understand that that die-off had already taken place in North America before the Pilgrims arrived. The diseases had spread north from the Spanish colonies of Mexico, and so when Europeans arrived in what was to become the United States, it was mostly an empty land. There was so much I found interesting but this review is already getting too long.  I know the title of this lecture series sounds like a bit of a downer, and it is, a little, but it is fascinating. (12 hrs, 2002)