"1491 - New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" (Vintage)
Author: Charles C. Mann

Most of us have a sense of what we think the lives of the Native American people were like before the arrival of the Europeans. This book will probably change those ideas. Not only were there more people in North and South America than most people think, their cultures were much more ancient and sophisticated than you could imagine. Unfortunately, they were not genetically prepared for the diseases that the Europeans brought with them and the toll was horrific. Who knows how the exchange would have played out if they would have had resistances to the diseases and had faced these visitors with a healthy population and a fully functioning society. As it is, Mr. Mann makes a good case for the possibility that a lot of what we take for good old U. S. independence and love of freedom might have been borrowed from the original occupants of the land.