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I wrote the following as I was reading the first chapter of the popular OER textbook, The American Yawp, in preparation for writing my own lecture and chapter for my US History I course this fall. The video didn’t turn out that well: I was looking at the high res. camera which wasn’t plugged in, so my computer captured the video. I also posted the audio as the first installment in my new podcast, which may be a better way to listen. And you can subscribe and get the new episodes which should begin coming fast and furious now, as the fall semester begins.
Annotations in The American Yawp, Chapter One: “Indigenous America”, written principally by L.D. Burnett, Ben Wright, and a team of seven additional authors.
In preparation for writing my own chapter and first-week lecture in US History I, I’ve just read The American Yawp, Chapter One: Indigenous America, written principally by L.D. Burnett and Ben Wright, with a team of seven additional authors. The Yawp is a very popular open educational resource (or OER) published by Stanford University. I’ve used it in past US History surveys and am now writing my own.
Before I set about criticizing this text, I want to note that it’s incredibly valuable that people are writing and publishing open content under creative commons licenses, that anyone can read, adapt, and remix. For free. This is a huge change in education and people like the Stanford authors who donate their time and energy to a project like this should get mad respect. But. That doesn’t mean that we need to agree about everything they choose to focus on or with everything they say.
Students have been annotating this chapter since about 2015, it seems. I’m going to try to use the things they found noteworthy and the things they bypassed to gain some insight not only into what the authors did well and what they didn’t, but also to understand what students were drawn to. And whether they got the message I think the authors intended, or if not, what prevented them.
The first heavily-highlighted statement is that “Europeans called the Americas ‘the New World’. But for the millions of Native Americans they encountered, it was anything but.” This isn’t a bad way to start, since it’s true that, following Vespucci’s popular book, Mundus Novus, many Europeans did call the Americas the New World. More importantly, perhaps, Eurocentric historians have often written as if nothing much happened before Columbus’s “Discovery” of America – or at least nothing that matters in historical terms.
In addition to being wildly biased, this sentiment is inaccurate. The history of the continents, their flora and fauna, and of course their people all had an incredible impact on what happened when Europeans and Africans arrived here.
The text then moves on to a section devoted to “The First Americans”. It begins with a paragraph describing several native creation stories, which got a fair amount of student attention. They’re interesting in their way, and show a little bit of the similarities of all such stories (forming the first man out of clay), and also of the differences (it’s an eagle that does the forming, and it makes the woman out of a feather). I’m not really a cultural historian, I guess – I don’t really see the point of including these details in such a short synopsis. We’re not, I hope, going to talk about the creation myths of the Europeans.
The next paragraph moves on to the ice age that allowed humans to get to the Americas via Beringia. Again, I’m probably exposing my own interests as an environmental historian here, but I think this is much more central to this survey, and I don’t think it’s particularly well explained. Beringia is described as a “land bridge”, which is one of my particular pet peeves. And based on the comments, it seems like the students had some lingering questions. Responding to mention of the glaciers, one student asked “How much water” had been trapped. Well, enough to reduce sea levels by over 360 feet and expose a landmass as wide as Alaska for thousands of years (so not a narrow, temporary, bridge). That detail would have been helpful too, in helping the students understand the first people in the Americas.
The text does reflect recent research, however, mentioning the Monte Verde site in Chile which show people had reached the southern limits of the continent over 14,500 years ago. But the authors muddy the water by suggesting without evidence that people may have come from “many different points of origin”, and then even refers back to the native creation myths as a possible origin. My objection to this should probably be a post of its own (which I should probably hold off making until I have tenure), but suffice it to say that I have an issue with pretending for the sake of political correctness that we give more credence to native mythology than we do to, say, Greek. Does a responsible history of ancient Greece attribute historical causes to the actions of the gods, even if the people at the time thought so? And on a more practical basis, this whole paragraph seems to have been ignored by students, which is a shame because the story of the Beringian occupation is epic.
The text then moves on to discuss early American agriculture. This is helpful, because history has for too long credited “the fertile crescent” with the invention of farming. But the students are left asking questions like, “How did they get the maize” and what did people eat before farming. This would have been a perfect opportunity to explain how Mexicans selectively bred teosinte into maize over countless generations – and that it was almost certainly women who figured it out and did the work! A number of other students wanted to know what the Americans ate, in addition to corn, beans, and squash. Well, potatoes and manioc, to name two of the other top five world staple crops that Americans invented. And it wouldn’t have hurt to mention chili peppers, tomatoes, cacao.
The text then makes another bid for cultural correctness by saying “Most Native Americans did not neatly distinguish between the natural and the supernatural. Spiritual power permeated their world and was both tangible and accessible.” One student asked, “What does…’accessible’ mean?” Two other students tried to answer, which is a great demonstration of Hypothesis’ facility for social annotation – but it might have been useful for the text to give examples to support such a claim.
The rest of this section is a survey of several places such as Pueblo Bonito and Cahokia, where large native communities flourished. These descriptions don’t get a lot of attention from the students, although one takes a moment to complain that “This feels like the hundredth time [the author] has mentioned that there are a lot of languages” and wonders why. Another student astutely compares the statement that Lenape sachems governed their communities with the people’s consent to the ideals of the Enlightenment. Hopefully the text will return to this idea in later chapters; but it would have been useful to introduce that idea here.
Students react to the section’s conclusion by noting that natives have been unfairly depicted in earlier histories as savages, so from that perspective the section has been successful in debunking those fallacies. The next section, on the Europeans, begins with a brief mention that Scandinavians reached the Americas first. Students seemed to like this part, and I think it deserves a bit more coverage – especially the ongoing European knowledge of the cod fisheries which probably contributed to Columbus’ interest in sailing across the Atlantic.
The text then jumps to the Crusades (credited with enriching Europe with both wealth and knowledge) and the “investments” of Prince Henry the Navigator, which the authors say resulted in the Portuguese invention of the astrolabe and the caravel. This is a dramatic oversimplification: both technologies have a long history that extend into the Muslim world and Asia. One student speculates (unfortunately) that this is “The beginning of mapmaking?”
The text then moves on to sugar and slavery. Students seem to take from this passage a mixed message, that slavery is bad but that the Africans did it to themselves first. One student’s comment suggested they had come to the conclusion that Africans had “invented” slavery. And then it was mostly the fault of the Portuguese. These statements are not entirely untrue: African cultures used captured enemies as unfree labor – but they also often accepted the children of those captives as full members of their societies. I don’t think this coverage is particularly helpful setting the scene for a later discussion of the Atlantic slave trade.
The story then arrives at Columbus’s famous arrival in the Caribbean in 1492. The text thankfully does not perpetuate the myth that Columbus had set out to prove that the world was round. But it still manages to portray the navigator as basically incompetent: badly mistaken about the size of the globe and lucky to have made it across the Atlantic without starving himself and his crew. Students wrote notes like, “he got lucky” here. I can’t help thinking that maybe the pendulum has swung a bit too far – I think the point of clarifying the story of Columbus is not to turn him from a saint into a devil, but to recognize the complexity of people and their contributions to history.
The following paragraphs include a couple of very useful quotes from Columbus and Las Casas, which I think did a lot to bring a sense of immediacy to the story. Students commented about the peacefulness and “sweetness” of the Arawak community and the depravity of the European reaction to them. But the authors mention the depopulation of Hispaniola (from over 3 million people to none in “a few short years”) without explaining that most of the Arawak died from disease in the Columbian Exchange. The text goes on to mention the diseases that killed “as much as 90 percent of the population”, but students seemed confused. One asked, “What caused Europeans and African natives to carry such diseases?” The answer, coevolution with domesticated animals, would have been easy to provide. And honestly, I’d spend more time and effort impressing students with the significance of a series of pandemics that killed nine out of ten people across two continents. This changes everything.
The text then moves on to the Spanish conquest and the encomienda. A brief account of the Aztec and Maya civilizations suggests a comparison – although the Mayan civilization is said to have collapsed due to “unsustainable agricultural practices” (which is a theory popularized by Jared Diamond, but certainly not the only possible explanation) Aztecs are described as “militaristic migrants from northern Mexico”. I’m concerned that both these descriptions insert a sense of civilizations with end-dates to the passage.
The description of Cortés’ conquest of Tenochtitlán explains several of the high points quite well. I would spend another sentence or so on Doña Marina (La Malinche) – one of the student comments asked how Cortés managed to recruit allies and why “he” betrayed “his” people. This is one of the few moments when a female plays such a big role in the story – it’s a shame the opportunity was missed to say something about the difficult choices faced by captives and unfree people in this history. The passage concludes by explaining that after a two-year conflict and aided by smallpox, a thousand “European conquerors” finally managed to defeat “a million-person-strong empire.” Full marks for suggesting that the Spaniards would have been unsuccessful without the help of disease. But current estimates of the population of the Aztec heartland put the number closer to 25 million than one. This again underscores the power of the Columbian Exchange, which hollows out the Aztec world and kills over 20 million within a century.
The chapter concludes with a description of the caste-based society of New Spain, beginning with the statement that “the Spanish tolerated and even supported interracial marriage.” While it is true that there was substantially more mixing of Europeans and natives in Spanish America – largely because so few Spanish women came to the colonies – I’m concerned that the framing is a bit anachronistic. Sixteenth-century Europeans did not have the same understanding of “race” as we do; in large part because of the changes that resulted from the Atlantic slave trade. However, many students did get the idea when the authors described “limpieza de sangre” (pure blood) and the tables of hierarchy that became the basis of social order.
So to conclude, I think the chapter does a pretty good job introducing. Students to the Americas before and during first European contact. This period is still well before most of the colonies that were direct forebears of the United States were established, but it’s important and several of the themes will be repeated, I suspect. My criticisms are partly based on my own particular historical interests (I’m much more committed to describing the Columbian Exchange in detail, for example, and I’ll probably not mention the Lady of Guadalupe statue), and partly on having the benefit of reading responses in the annotations to get a better sense of what students seem to be getting and what confuses them. I’m definitely going to use student responses to gauge my own text’s effectiveness – and I realize that the critique I’ve just written paints a target on my own back! My response to that is, bring it on! I consider this type of project to be iterative, so I’m fully expecting to revise the text based on. What works and what doesn’t. Peer reviews as well as student feedback will be hugely valuable, and I hope to get engagement and criticism like this when I publish my own OER.