Infectious Disease and the Demography of the Atlantic Peoples
the Atlantic basin based on a new reading of the documents and data of their story during the last half millennium. I am not the first to propose such a version1 (being a member of the second generation to have taken it up), but it is new to most people out side the ranks of Americanists, anthropologists, and a few varie ties of historians. This version has only begun to appear in college textbooks, and it is still absent from high school textbooks as far as I know. One of the chief reasons for the slowness of its advance into popular perception is that it focuses not on politics and war, which many still think of as real history, but on demography and epidemiology, which many would prefer not to think about at all. It focuses on deadly disease, and on how most of us who are now living in the Americas are doing so because our ancestors were either attracted or dragged across the Atlantic to fill vacancies opened up by disease. This is not a particularly ennobling story, and a lot of people believe history should ennoble or be forgotten.