And he left the door open to a world-shaking event known as the Columbian Exchange. He left seeds and spores, microbes and mayhem. It seems Columbus left more than his folkloric legacy in the so-called New World. Like Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel," Mann's book changed the worldview of all who read it. Literate and surprising, "1491" was a welcome bridge between the academic and popular imaginations. In his best-selling "1491," Mann packed a generation of the latest scholarship into breezy prose to convince readers that Indians - he balks at the use of Native American - were as technologically sophisticated as the Europeans Columbus left behind. Mann tells a more nuanced story - hundreds of stories, in fact. Columbus "discovered" America and the rest was, simply, history. Schoolchildren no longer learn the old verse - "In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue" - but its innocence persists.
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