Charles C. Mann's "1491"

            In the article “1491”, Charles C. Mann’s central premise is that Native American’s way of life was very useful, resourceful, and beneficial to their people, whereas the Europeans were very detrimental to the Indians, destroying their people through disease and their land through building their settlements and introducing new plant and animal life to the Americas. As Hudson, as described by Mann, says in this article, “ ‘the window opened and slammed shut. When the French came in and the record opened up again, it was a transformed reality. A civilization crumbled. The question is, how did this happen?’” The European exploration of North America was a bad idea because these Indian tribes were doing well enough on their own; they had plenty of land and natural resources, so they didn’t need any intrusion by the Europeans. This article also suggests that the state of historically considered Western knowledge is fake. Mann describes on multiple occasions that Europeans exploring North America thought that they were correct in their dealings with the Indians, or correct about food sources or shelter in the New World, but history always shows how the Native Americans always had the better way of life. The relationship between scientific revolution and re-evalutation of Western knowledge and “development” is that science shows that the Indians did have a better quality of life, from having very few diseases to have an abundance of good food to having decent shelters.