The new new world

Bison herds as pathological outbreaks, the land-based equivalent of red tides in the Gulf of Mexico? Mann does it again and again, slipping in so many fresh, new interpretations of American history that it all adds up to a deeply subversive work: Our national self-conception is built around our roots as a European spinoff, one allowed to evolve on its own thanks to the happy accident of discovering this big, bountiful vacant lot known as North America. This whole notion of an empty continent just sitting there waiting for a collection of religious fanatics, adventurers and outcasts to drift on over from Europe and reinvent themselves as pilgrims and pioneers was always problematic, but it has retained its place in our history books.

Indians, robbed of their history and deprived of their voices, have never made much headway against the pretty myth of their existence: enlightened simple people living in gentle harmony with nature, ever careful not to disrupt their surroundings. In fact, as Mann carefully lays out for us, they remade their surroundings in profound ways that never occurred to Europeans. The Amazon rain forest as giant orchard -- if it's true, and few who give Mann a fair and thorough reading will doubt that it is, that would make the Amazon humanity's greatest creation.

"Of the 138 known domesticated plant species in the Amazon, more than half are trees," Mann explains. "Sopodilla, calabash, and tucuma; babacu, acai, and wild pineapple; cocopalm, American-oil palm, and Panama-hat palm -- the Amazon's wealth of fruits, nuts and palms is justly celebrated. 'Visitors are always amazed that you can walk in the forest here and constantly pick fruit from trees,'" an anthropological botanist tells Mann. "'That's because people planted them. They're walking through old orchards.'"

The first Europeans to visit the Americas were often more willing than their descendants to give credit where credit was due. The conquistador-turned-priest Bartolome de Las Casas, for example, "repeatedly described indigenous America as a crowded, jostling place  'a beehive of people,' as (he) put it in 1542. To Las Casas, the Americas seemed so thick with people 'that it looked as if God has placed all of or the greater part of the entire human race in these countries.'" Las Casas estimated the toll of Spanish disease and violence at more than 12 million, and then kept upping his estimate -- later settling on 40 million. It was only later on that people took to casting such figures as exaggerations, all the better to avoid difficult questions about where the perpetrators of this calamity rate on the all-time list of historical criminals.

The American Revolution was at its core an extension of European values, but Mann finds it interesting to look at the ways that context helped create a new American identity. "Indian insistence on personal liberty was accompanied by an equal insistence on social equality," Mann writes. "Northeastern Indians were appalled by the European propensity to divide themselves into social classes, with those on the lower rungs of the hierarchy compelled to defer to those on the upper ... Historians have been puzzlingly reluctant to acknowledge this contribution to the end of tyranny worldwide. Think of I. Bernard Cohen claiming that Enlightenment philosophers derived their ideas of freedom from Newtonian physics, when a plain reading of their texts shows that Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and Thomas Paine took many of their illustrations of liberty from native examples. So did the Boston Colonists who held their anti-British Tea Party dressed as 'Mohawks.'"

Mann asks what it would be like to be sent whirling back through time to 1491 to meet up face to face with a member of the Haudenosaunee, whose progressive constitution -- forged before the Europeans ever reached North America -- stands as a marvel of early public policy. "Is it too much to speculate that beneath the swirling tattoos, asymmetrically trimmed hair, and bedizened robes, you would recognize someone much closer to yourself, at least in certain respects, than your own ancestors?"

• View blog reactions