| Period: Fall 2023 | |
| Instructor: Pierre Desrochers | Office: Davis Building, room 3273 |
| Lectures: Tuesday 3-5 PM | Lecture room: CC 3150 |
| Phone: (905) 828-5206 | E-mail: pierre.desrochers@utoronto.ca |
Lecture 1 (Sept. 12 ): Is Geography (and Climate) Destiny? Part I
Lecture 2 (Sept. 19): Out of Africa
Lecture 3 (Sept. 26 ): Collision at Cajamarca
Lecture 4 (Oct. 3): Farmer Power, Part I
No class (Oct. 10) Thanksgiving; Fall Reading Week
Lecture 5 (Oct. 17): Farmer Power, Part II
Lecture 6 (Oct. 24): Farmer Power, Part III
Lecture 7 (Oct. 31): Germs and “Virgin Soils”, Part I
Lecture 8 (Nov. 7): Germs and “Virgin Soils”, Part II
Lecture 9 (Nov. 14): Writing, Technology and Government
Lecture 10 (Nov. 21): Around the World, Part I
Lecture 11 (Nov. 28): Around the World, Part II
Lecture 12 (Dec. 5): Is Geography (and Climate) Destiny? Part II
SUGGESTED READINGS
Geopolitics
Immerwahr, Daniel. 2022. “Are we really prisoners of geography?” The Guardian (November 10)
McAleer, Graham. 2022. Story of the Isles [Review of Ian Morris’ Geography Is Destiny Britain and the World: A 10,000-Year History] Law and Liberty (October 6)
Biogeography and paleoenvironmental research
Coombes, Paul and Keith Barber. 2005. “Environmental Determinism in Holocene Research: Causality or Coincidence?” Area 37 (3): 303-311.
Hibbs, Douglas A. and Ola Olsson. 2004. “Geography, Biogeography, and Why some Countries are Rich and Others are Poor.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) 101 (10): 3715-3720.
Economics
Dell, Melissa, Benjamin F. Jones, and Benjamin A. Olken. 2014. “What Do We Learn from the Weather? The New Climate-Economy Literature.” Journal of Economic Literature 52 (3): 740-798.
Enrico Spolaore, Enrico and Romain Wacziarg. 2013. “How Deep Are the Roots of Economic Development?” Journal of Economic Literature 51 (2): 325-369.
Bosker, Maarten, and Harry Garretsen. 2012. “Economic Geography and Economic Development in Sub-Saharan Africa.” The World Bank Economic Review 26 (3): 443-485.
Haber, Stephen H. and Victor A. Menaldo. 2011. Rainfall, Human Capital, and Democracy (April 2, 2011). SSRN.
Nunn, Nathan, & Diego Puga. 2007. “The blessing of bad geography in Africa.” Vox, 6 June.
Lora, Eduardo, Alejandro Gaviria and John Luke. 2003. Is Geography Destiny? Lessons from Latin America, Inter-American Development Bank.
Jeffrey Sachs
Jeffrey Sachs’s Website and Wikipedia entry and publications.
– 2003, “Institutions Matter, but not for everything,” Finance and Development 40 (2): 38-41.
– and Andrew D. Mellinger and John L. Gallup, 2001, “The Geography of Poverty and Wealth,” Scientific American 284 (3): 70-75.
– 2012, “Government, Geography, and Growth. The True Drivers of Economic Development.” Foreign Affairs (September/October 2012).
– 2012, “Reply to Acemoglu and Robinson’s Response to My Book Review.” jeffsachs.org (December 3). (Reply to Acemoglu and Robinson)
Critics of Sachs
Acemoglu, Daron, and James Robinson. 2012. “Response to Jeffrey Sachs.” Why Nations Fail (November 21).
Cassidy, John. 2005. “Always with us – Jeffrey Sachs’s plan to eradicate world poverty.” The New Yorker, April 11.
Economic history
Landes, David S. 1998, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, W.W. Norton & Company, pp. 3 – 28 (Ch. 1: Nature’s Inequalities and Ch. 2: Answers to Geography: Europe and China).
On the history of geographical thought
> General references
“Geography” on Wikipedia.
Johnston, R.J. 2000. The Dictionary of Human Geography. Blackwell Publishers.
Martin, Geoffrey J. 2005. All Possible Worlds: A History of Geographical Ideas, 4th revised edition. Oxford University Press.
Rodrigue, Christine M. 2002, “Four traditions of geography.”
Smith, Neil. 1987, “‘Academic War over the Field of Geography’: The Elimination of Geography at Harvard, 1947-1951,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77 (2): 155-172.
Pattison, W. D. 1964. “The Four Traditions of Geography.” Journal of Geography, Vol. 63 no. 5: 211-216.
Robinson, J. Lewis. 1976. “A New Look at the Four Traditions of Geography.” Journal of Geography, Vol. 75 no. 9: 520-530.
Rosenberg, Matt. “The Four Traditions of Geography.” About.com: Geography.
> Geographical (or Environmental) Determinism
“Environmental Determinism,” Wikipedia Encyclopedia.
Meyer, William B. and Dylan M. T. Guss. 2017. Neo-Environmental Determinism: Geographical Critiques. Palgrave MacMillan.
Mises, Ludwig von. 1957. Theory and History, Chapter 15 (“Environmentalism“), pp. 324-326.
Goldberg, Jacob. 2015. “The Economic Struggles of Landlocked Countries. Why Are Only a few Landlocked Countries Successful?” About.education.
– Classic writings
Aristotle. 350 BC, Politics Book 7, VII.
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat. The Spirit of Laws, Volume 1, Printed for J. Nourse and P. Vaillant, 1750.
Voltaire. 1764. “Climate.”
Semple, Ellen Churchill. 1911. Influences of Geographic Environment, on the basis of Ratzel’s System of Anthropogeography. H. Holt & Co.
Huntingdon, Ellsworth. 1915. Civilization and Climate. Yale University Press.
Commons, John. R. 1907. Race and Immigrants in America. MacMillan.
– Discussions of classic writings
Peet, Richard. 1985. “The Social Origins of Environmental Determinism,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 75 (3): 309-333.
Harden, Carol P. 2012. “Framing and Reframing Questions of Human-Environment Interactions.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 102 (4): 737-747.
Judkins, Gabriel, Marissa Smith, Eric Keys. 2008. “Determinism Within Human-Environment Research and the Rediscovery of Environmental Causation.” The Geographical Journal 174 (1) , 17–29.
Konigsberg, Charles. 1960. “Climate and Society: A Review of the Literature.” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 4 (1): 67-82.
Livingstone, David N. 2012. “Changing Climate, Human Evolution and the Revival of Environmental Determinism,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 86, 564-595.
Radcliffe, Sarah A., Elizabeth E. Watson, Ian Simmons, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, and Andrew Sluyter. 2010. “Environmentalist Thinking and/in Geography.” Progress in Human Geography 34(1): 98-116.
Beck, Joanna Eunice. 1985. Environmental Determinism in Twentieth Century America Geography: Reflections in the Professional Journals, Volumes 1 and 2, PhD Dissertation (Geography), University of California, Berkeley.
Abramsson, C. 2013. “On the Genealogy of Lebensraum.” Geographical Helvetica 68: 37-44.
The following books have chapters on the history of environmental determinism:
Arnold, D. 1996. The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion. Oxford University Press.
Barrow, C.J. 2003. Environmental Change and Human Development. Oxford University Press.
Kitchin, Rob and Nigel Thrift. 2009. International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Elsevier.
Kamarck, Andrew M. 1973. “Climate and Economic Development: Is the location of many developing countries in the tropics a cause of their poverty?” Finance & Development 10 (002).
– Environmental determinism, recent debates and controversies
Gopnik, Adam. 2012, “Faces, Places, Spaces. The Renaissance of Geographic History.” The New Yorker, October 29.
DeGregori, Thomas R. 1998. “An Updated Adam Smith / David S. Landes studies economic inequity among nations (Review of The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor, by David S. Landes. Norton, 1998),” Houston Chronicle, June 21.
Hausmann, Ricardo. 2001, “Prisoners of Geography,” Foreign Policy 122 (January): 45 – 53.
Pinkovskiy, Maxim, and Xavier Sala-i-Martin. 2010. “African Poverty is Falling… Much Faster than You Think.” Vox (December 6).
Sachs, Jeffrey, Andrew D. Mellinger and John L. Gallup. 2001. “The Geography of Poverty and Wealth.” Scientific American (March): 71- 75.
Matthews, Lipton. 2021. “Why Africa’s Geography Is a Barrier to Growth.” Mises Wire (July 6, 2021).
MacDonald, Glen M. 2016. “Geography, Institutions and the Fate of People and Planet in the 21st Century.” AAG Newsletter (November 2).
Herbert Spencer, Social Darwinism and Eugenics
-Herbert Spencer
“Herbert Spencer, 1820-1903.” The History of Economic Thought Website.
“Herbert Spencer.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP).
“Is Social Darwinism a Myth?” History of Economics Playground (June 4 2009) (“Reply : Tim Leonard on Social Darwinism and Mythology.” 2009. History of Economics Playground Redux (July 8))
Caplan, Bryan. 2005. “Was Herbert Spencer Reincarnated as Julian Simon?” EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty, March 07.
Davies, Stephen. 2001. “Spencer’s Law: Another Reason Not to Worry.” The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty, August 1.
Goldberg, Jonah. 2012. “Fantasies of Social Darwinism.” The Weekly Standard (April 23).
Leonard, Thomas C. 2009. “Origins of the myth of social Darwinism: The ambiguous legacy of Richard Hofstadter’s Social Darwinism in American Thought.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, March 6.
Long, Roderick T. 2003. “Herbert Spencer: The Defamation Continues.” LewRockwell.com, August, 28.
Shapin, Steven. 2007. “Man with a Plan – Herbert Spencer’s theory of everything.” The New Yorker, August 13.
Wee, Alvin. 2006. “Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)” University Scholars Programme, National University of Singapore (November 6).
Wilkins, John. 2007. “The inimitable Mr Spencer.” Evolving Thoughts, August 07.
Zwolinski, Matt. 2011. “A Bleeding Heart History of Libertarian Thought – Herbert Spencer.” Bleeding Heart Libertarians, November 16.
-Climate and Civilization
Ball, Tim. 2016. “A Warm Period by Any Other Name – The Climatic Optimum.” Watts Up with That? (July 31).
Wootson, Cleve R. Jr. 2018. “Mayan Civilization was Much Vaster than Known, Thousands of Newly Discovered Structures Reveal.” The Washington Post (February 3).
Brooke, John. 2012. “Climate, Human Population and Human Survival: What the Deep Past Tells Us about the Future.” Origins 5 (8).
Grunwal, Michael. 2017 “A Requiem for Florida, the Paradise That Should Never Have Been.” Politico (September 8).
Harper, Kyle. 2017. “6 Ways Climate Change and Disease Helped Topple the Roman Empire.” Vox (November 4) (See also Harper, Kyle. 2017. The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire. Princeton University Press).
Carrier, Richard. 2017. “Did the Environment Kill Rome?” Richard Carrier blog (November 3).
Dunston, Sara. 2016. “Revealed: Cambodia’s Vast Medieval Cities Hidden Beneath the Jungle.” The Guardian (June 11).
“Hampi – India. The remains of what was, not so long ago, the world’s largest city.” Atlas Obscura.
Clynes, Tom. 2018. “Exclusive: Laser Scans Reveal Maya “Megalopolis” Below Guatemalan Jungle.” National Geographic (February 1).
Marshall, Michael. 2022. “Did a mega drought topple empires 4,200 years ago? People abandoned thriving cities in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and farther afield at about the same time as a decades-long drought gripped parts of the planet.” Nature News (January 26).
–Eugenics, Geography and Environmentalism
Cohen, Adam S. 2016. “Harvard’s Eugenics Era : When academics embraced scientific racism, immigration restrictions, and the suppression of “the unfit.”” Harvard Magazine (March-April).
Conniff, Richard. 2016. “How a Notorious Racist Inspired America’s National Parks. Madison Grant was dedicated to preserving species-including the “great race.” Mother Jones (July/August).
Levy, David M. & Sandra J. Peart, “The Secret History of the Dismal Science. Part VI. Eugenics and the Amoralization of Economics.” Library of Economics and Liberty, May 13, 2002.
Saini, Angela. 2018. “Racism is Creeping Back into Mainstream Science – We Have to Stop It.” The Guardian (January 22).
Sowell, Thomas. 2012. “An Ignored ‘Disparity’.” Jewish World Review (January 17).
Tucker, Jeffrey. 2016. ” Policy Science Kills. ” Fee.org (February 8).
Tucker, Jeffrey. 2016. “The Link between Extreme Environmentalism and Hard-Core Racism.” Fee.org (July 6).
-Other Topics
Carroll, Rory. 2004. “New Book Reopens Old Arguments about Slave Raids on Europe. US scholar claims more than 1m people were captured by African pirates.” The Guardian (March 11).
“China’s Age of Invention.” PBS Nova (February 29, 2000).
Gearin, Conor. 2016. “Mongol Hordes Gave up on Conquering Europe due to Wet Weather.” New Scientist (May 26).
Holloway, April. 2014. “The White Slaves of Barbary.” Ancient Origins (October 6).
Dr. M. 2012. “How Presidential Elections are Impacted by a 100 Million Year Old Coastline.” Deep Sea News (June 27).
> Critics of new environmental determinists
Critics of Jared Diamond’s work on environmental determinism are listed in lecture 12, suggested readings.
Brätland’s, John. 2009. “Geography as Causal in Societal Ascendance: An Austrian Retrospective on Diamond.” Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 12 (4): 46-63.
Boettke, Peter. 2007. “Entrepreneurial Responses to Poverty and Social Conflict: The Enterprise Africa! Project.” Economic Affairs, 27 (2): 2-5.
Correia, David. 2013. “F**k Jared Diamond.” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 24 (4): 1-6.
Easterly, William & Levine, Ross, 2003. “Tropics, Germs, and Crops: How Endowments Influence Economic Development,” Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 50(1), pages 3-39, January.
Gavin, Robert. 2005. “MIT Professor Named Top Economist Under 40 – Key Study Minimizes Geography in Formation of Rich vs. Poor Nations.” The Boston Globe, June 15.
Judkins, Gabriel, Marissa Smith, Eric Keys (2008). “Determinism Within Human-Environment Research and the Rediscovery of Environmental Causation.” The Geographical Journal 174 (1) , 17–29.
Kimenyi, Mwangi S. 2007. “Markets, institutions and Millenium Development Goals.” Economic Affairs, 27 (2): 14-19.
McNeill, J. R. 2014. “Changing Climates of History.” Public Books (December 1).
Radcliffe, Sarah A. (organizing editor), Elizabeth E. Watson, Ian Simmons, Felipe Fernández-Armesto and Andrew Sluyter (contributors). 2010.
“Forum: Environmentalist Thinking and/in Geography.” Progress in Human Geography 34(1): 98-116.
Rodrik, Dani & Subramanian, Arvind & Trebbi, Francesco, 2002. “Institutions Rule: The Primacy of Institutions Over Geography and Integration in Economic Development,” CEPR Discussion Papers 3643, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers (later published as Dani Rodrik & Arvind Subramanian & Francesco Trebbi, 2004. “Institutions Rule: The Primacy of Institutions Over Geography and Integration in Economic Development,” Journal of Economic Growth, Springer, vol. 9(2), pages 131-165).
Sowell, Thomas. 2015. Wealth, Poverty and Politics: An International Perspective. Basic Books.
Spolaore, Enrico and Romain Wacziarg. 2013. “How Deep are the Roots of Economic Development?” Journal of Economic Literature 51 (2): 325-369.
Environment and Diseases
See lecture 13, suggested readings, Malaria, for more readings on the history and debates surrounding malaria.
A debate in the British medical journal The Lancet (1998) on “Global warming and vector-borne disease” between Paul Epstein, Andy Haines and Paul Reiter.
A debate on “Malaria and global warming in perspective” in Emerging Infectious Diseases (2000) between Pim Martens and Paul Reiter.
Reiter, Paul. “Climate Change and Mosquito-Borne Disease.” Environmental Health Perspectives Supplements, Volume 109, Number S1, March 2001.
Reiter, Paul. 2007, “It’s Tires, Not Global Warming.” The Korea Times, October 4.
Reiter, Paul. 2003, “Could Global Warming Bring Mosquito-Borne Disease to Europe?” In Kendra Okonski (ed.), Adapt or Die: The Science, Politics and Economics of Climate Change, Profile Books, pp. 19-38.
Under the Weather: Climate, Ecosystems, and Infectious Disease. The National Academies Press, 2001. 160 pp.
Nicolaï, Henri and Yola Verhasselt. 2000. “Health and Tropical Geography.” Belgeo (1-4).
SUGGESTED LINKS
Global warming and diseases
See lecture 12, suggested links, Malaria, for more links on the topic.
Eugenics and Environmental Determinism
Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian Institution) Human Evolution – Timeline Interactive
PBS Nova series “The Human Spark” (2010)
Marcus, Alan P. 2021. “The Dangers of the Geographical Imagination in the U.S. Eugenics Movement. ” Geographical Review 111 (1): : 36-56.
Environmental Determinism
Sargon of Akkad. 2016. “Re: Environmental Determinism: Crash Course Human Geography #1.” (October 26).
New Environmental Determinists
University of Bristol – Economic Growth Resources (Physical Geography and Growth).
Geopolitics
REQUIRED VIDEOS
American Museum of Natural History. 2016.
Kuzoian, Alex. 2015. “This Animated Map Shows how Humans Migrated across the Globe.” Business Insider (May 19).
Smithsonian Channel. 2018 “Terrifying Mammals That May Have Greeted Early Humans in America.”
Cooke, Lacy. 2017. “Ancient Village Discovered in Canada is 10,000 Years Older than the Pyramids.” Inhabitat (April 17).
REQUIRED READINGS
Mega-Fauna Extinction
Knudsen, Jeppe Kyhne. 2023. “People, not the climate, caused the decline of the giant mammals.” Aarhus University (December 7).
Boissoneault, Lorraine. 2017. “Are Humans to Blame for the Disappearance of Earth’s Fantastic Beasts?” Smithsonian.com.
Pearce, Fred. 2017. “Human Arrivals Wiped Out the Caribbean’s Giant Ground Sloths.” New Scientist (November 10).
Parletta, Natalie. 2020. “Unique Megafauna Fossils Unearthed in Tropical Australia. Rich site suggests climatic change, not humans, drove their extinction.” Cosmos (May 19).
Human Origins and Ancient Migrations
-Ancient Origins
Rutherford, Adam. 2018. “The Human League: What Separates us from other Animals?” The Guardian (September 21).
Pobiner, Briana and Rick Potts. 2020. “These are the Decade’s Biggest Discoveries in Human Evolution.” Smithsonian Magazine (April 28).
Lewis, Dyani. 2020. “Diverse genomes open new window into human history. Global gene sequencing effort tells of our evolutionary past.” Cosmos Magazine (March 23).
-Ancient Migrations
Bae, Christopher. 2017. “In to Asia.” Aeon.
Yirka, Bob. 2017. “Anthropologist Group Suggests First Humans to the Americas Arrived via the Kelp Highway.” Phys.org (November 3).
Daley, Jason. 2019. “Idaho Site Shows Humans Were in North America 16,000 Years Ago.” Smithsonian.com (August 30).
Anonymous. 2012. “New Book Reveals Ice Age Mariners from Europe were America’s First Inhabitants.” Smithsonian Insider (March 1).
Handwerk, Brian. 2020. “Discovery in Mexican Cave May Drastically Change the Known Timeline of Humans’ Arrival to the Americas.” Smithsonianmag.com (July 22).
Weber, Bo. 2019. “DNA Analysis Suggests Dene Descended from First North Americans.” National Post (June 5).
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Diamond, Prologue – (to, including Ch. 1) Ch. 2.
SUGGESTED READINGS
On Human Evolution
Hawks, John. 2016. “Human Evolution is more a Muddy Delta than a Branching Tree.” Aeon (February 8).
Ridley, Matt. 2017. “The Deep Divergence in African Genomes.” RationalOptimist.com (July 5).
Warmflash, David. 2017. “Moroccan Fossils: New thinking on human evolution shaped by technological advancements.” Genetic Literacy Project (June 15).
Mass Extinction
American Museum of Natural History. “Mass Extinction.”
Recent news and debates
Romero, Simon. 2014. “Discoveries Challenge Beliefs on Humans’ Arrival in the Americas.” The New York Times (March 27).
Eamer, Claire. 2017. “Archaeological Find Puts Humans in North America 10,000 Years Earlier Than Thought.” Hakai Magazine (January 13).
Daley, Jason. 2017. “Controversial Study Claims Apes and Human Ancestors Split in Southern Europe. Researchers believe these 7.2-million-year-old teeth have a lot to say about human evolution.” Smithsonian Magazine (May 23).
On Human Origins and Ancient Migrations
–Human Origins (Ancient History)
The Quillette Editorial Board. 2022. “Svante Pääbo and the Human Story.” Quillette (October 6).
Choi, Charles Q. 2023. Human and ape ancestors arose in Europe, not in Africa, controversial study claims Live Science (August 31)
Cassella, Carly. 2023. “Ancient Skull Found in China Is Unlike Any Human Seen Before.” Science Alert (August 7)
Yazgin, Evrim. 2023. “Nearly 600 obsidian handaxes from 1.2 million years ago found in Ethiopia show early humans were smarter than we think.” Cosmos (February 2)
Schuster, Ruth. 2022. “Early Homo Sapiens Found in Ethiopia Is Older Than Had Been Thought.” Haaretz (January 12)
Piore, Adam. 2020. “How We Learned to Love Neanderthals.and a Lot of Other Hominids, Too. Genetic analysis reveals a complex tale of migrations and cross-species trysts in our human past.” Nautilus (April).
Taub, Matthew. 2018 “Found: Remains of a Half-Neanderthal, Half-Denisovan Ancient Human.” Atlas Obscura (August 22).
Brodwin, Erin. 2017. “300,000-year-old Skulls that Look Shockingly like Ours could Rewrite the Human Origin Story.” The Independent (November 10).
Laskow, Sarah. 2017. “The Oldest Known Homo Sapiens Fossils Now Come From North Africa.” Atlas Obscura (June 7).
Mooallem, Jon. 2017. “Neanderthals were People Too.” New York Times (January 11).
Guarino, Ben. 2017. “Oldest Homo sapiens Fossils Discovered in Morocco.” Washington Post (June 7).
Gibbons, Ann. 2017. “World’s oldest Homo sapiens fossils found in Morocco.” Science (June 7).
Viegas, Jennifer. 2015. “Big-Toothed Fossil May Be Primitive New Human.” Discovery News (January 27).
Heltzel, Paul. 2014. “‘Hobbit’ Human May Have Had Down Syndrome.” Discovery News (August 4).
Zimmer, Carl. 2013. “Toe Fossil Provides Complete Neanderthal Genome.” The New York Times (December 18).
Zimmer, Carl. 2013. “Baffling 400,000-Year-Old Clue to Human Origins.” The New York Times (December 4).
US National Academy of Sciences. 2010. Understanding Climate’s Influence on Human Evolution. National Academy Press.
McKie, Robin. 2010. “How a hobbit is rewriting the history of the human race.” The Observer, 21 February.
Schmid, Randolph E. 2009. “Before Lucy came Ardi, new earliest hominid found.” Yahoo! News, October 1st.
Chabris, Christopher F. 2009. “Last-Minute Changes – Scientific orthodoxy says that human evolution stopped a long time ago. Did it?” The Wall Street Journal, February 12.
Schmid, Randolph E. 2008. “Poop Fossil Pushes Back Date for Earliest Americans.” Discovery News, April 3.
Trinkaus, Erik. 2005. “Early Modern Humans.” Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 34: 207-30, October.
Mayell, Hillary. “Documentary Redraws Humans’ Family Tree.” National Geographic News, January 21, 2003.
Wade, Nicholas. 2002. “The Human Family Tree: 10 Adams and 18 Eves.” New York Times, May 2.
–Ancient Migrations (Global)
Schuster, Ruth. 2021. “Genetic Study Detects Unknown Vast Migration to Britain 3,000 Years Ago. The English derived half their DNA from French migrants who descended from early Turkish farmers. Not so the Scots.” Haarezt (December 28)
Antón, Susan C. and Carl C. Swisher III, 2004, “Early Dispersals of HOMO from Africa,” Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 271-296.
Frost, Natasha. 2018. “The Sad Story of the Moriori, Who Learned to Live at the Edge of the World. How the remoteness of the Chatham Islands forged a resilient people.” Atlas Obscura (March 6).
Herman, Doug. 2014. “How the Voyage of the Kon-Tiki Misled the World About Navigating the Pacific.” Smithsonian Magazine (September 4).
Manning, Patrick. “Homo sapiens Populates the Earth: A Provisional Synthesis, Privileging Linguistic Evidence.” Journal of World History, Vol. 17, Issue 2.
Pringle, Heather. 2008. “Did Humans Colonize the World by Boat?” Discover Magazine, May 20.
Rincon, Paul. 2006. “Early Humans Followed the Coast.” BBC News, October 5.
Stix, Gary. 2008. “The Migration History of Humans: DNA Study Traces Human Origins Across the Continents.” Scientific American Magazine, July 7.
Warsh, David. 2007. “Putting the (Molecular) Clock on Development.” Economic Principals, August 26.
–Ancient Migrations (North America)
Cressey, Daniel. 2008. “Unexpected origin of an early Eskimo.” Nature News, May 29.
Day, Matthew. 2012. “Stone-age Europeans ‘were the first to set foot on North America’.” The Telegraph (February 28).
Wade, Nicholas. 2010. “Ancient Man in Greenland Has Genome Decoded.” The New York Times, February 10.
Preston, Douglas. 2014. “The Kennewick Man Finally Freed to Share His Secrets.” Smithsonian Magazine (September).
University Of South Carolina. 2014. “New Evidence Puts Man in North America 50,000 Years Ago.” ScienceDaily (18 November).
Hodges, Glen. 2015. “Tracking the First Americans.” National Geographic (January).
NBC News. 2021. “Fossil footprints show humans in North America more than 21,000 years ago.” (September 23).
Price, Michael. 2023. “Native Americans—and their genes—traveled back to Siberia, new genomes reveal.” Science (January 12)
Olena, Abby. 2018. “All Native Americans Descended from One Ancestral Population.” The Scientist (January 3).
Semeniuk, Ivan. 2018. “Ancient Genes Reveal First Americans Separated and Reunited on their Way South.” The Globe & Mail (May 31).
Anonymous. 2023. “New Thoughts on the First Migrants to the Americas.” Archeology (May 11)
Choi, Charles Q. 2023. “Some of the 1st ice age humans who ventured into Americas came from China, DNA study suggests.” Live Science (May 10)
Agence France Presse. 2023. “Some of the first humans in the Americas came from China, study finds.” The Guardian (May 9)
Kindy, David. 2021. “New Research Dispels Theory That First Americans Came from Japan.” Smithsonian Magazine (October 15)
Swaminathan, Nikhil. 2014. “Destination: The Americas.” Archeology (September / October)
UCL. 2012. Native American populations descend from three key migrations | UCL News – UCL – University College London (July 12)
Megafauna Extinction
Overview and non-anthropogenic factors
“Extraterrestrial Impact Likely Source of Sudden Ice Age Extinctions.” Brown University, September 24, 2007.
Wikipedia
Holocene Extinction Event
Blitzkrieg
Anthropogenic factors
- Overview
Tel-Aviv University. 2021. “Early humans hunted the largest available animals to extinction for 1.5 million years.” Phys Org (December 12)
Nagaoka, Lisa, Torben Rick and Steve Wolverton. “The Overkill Model and its Impact on Environmental Research.” Ecology and Evolution 8 (19): 9683-9696.
Sandom, Christopher, Søren Faurby, Brody Sandel and Jens-Christian Svenning. 2014. “Global late Quaternary megafauna extinctions linked to humans, not climate change.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 281 (1787): 20133254.
Doughty, Christopher E. 2013. “Preindustrial Human Impacts on Global and Regional Environment.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 38: 503-527.
Esty, Amos. 2005, “Investigating a Mega-Mystery.” American Scientist Online, September-October.
Wroe, Stephen, Judith Field , Richard Fullagar and Lars S. Jermin. 2004. “Megafaunal Extinction in the late Quaternary and the Global Overkill Hypothesis.” Alcheringa 28 (1): 291-331.
0been, Brook, Barry and David M. J. S. Bowman. 2004. “The Uncertain Blitzkrieg of Pleistocene Megafauna.” Journal of Biogeography 31 (4): 517-523.
- Australia
Saltré, Frédérik, Christopher Johnson and Corey Bradshaw. 2021. “New analysis finds no evidence that climate wiped out Australia’s megafauna.”The Conversation (January 29)
ABC. (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
- Tiny SA island cave site reveals possible evidence of human interaction with megafauna – ABC News
- Megafauna Extinction – Behind The News (abc.net.au)
- Humans to blame for megafauna extinction: study – ABC News
- Drought blamed for megafauna extinction – ABC listen
- Americas
ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). 2019. “Mammoth skeletons and 15,000-year-old human-built traps found in Mexico.” (November 7).
Cooke, S. et al. 2017. “Anthropogenic Extinction Dominates Holocene Declines of West Indian Mammals.” Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 48:301-327.
George Washington University. 2009. “Mass Extinction: Why did half of N. America’s large mammals disappear 40,000 to 10,000 years ago?” ScienceDaily (November 27).
On the Hunting-Gathering Lifestyle
DeGregori, Thomas R. 1998, “Back to the Future: A Review Article of Limited Wants, Unlimited Means: A Reader on Hunter-Gatherer Economics and the Environment, edited by John Gowdy, Island Press,” Journal of Economic Issues 32 (4): 1153-1161.
Krech III, Shepherd. 1999, The Ecological Indian, Myth and History, W.W. Norton & Company, pp. 29-43 (Ch. 1: Pleistocene Extinctions).
Smith, Vernon L. 1993, “Humankind in Prehistory: Economy, Ecology and Institutions.” In The Political Economy of Customs and Culture, edited by Terry Anderson and Randy Simmons, Rowman and Littlefield Press, pp. 157-184.
On Yali and the Cargo Cult
More information on one of the main characters in Guns, Germs, and Steel, the Papua New Guinean politician Yali Singina (1912-75), can be found on the anthropological blog Savage Minds.
•About Yali
•On cargo and cults – and Yali’s Question
•Diamond’s Argument about the Haves and Have-Nots
More detailed histories of the cargo cult and more information on Yali are available here, here and here.
Sullivan, Nancy. 2010. “Tari’s Question.” Nineteen Years and Counting in Papua New Guinea.
The Bell Curve and IQ Debates
“The Bell Curve,” on Wikipedia.
Auster, Lawrence. 2007. “Michael Hart and the Role of IQ in Human History.” View from the Right, September 30.
Flynn, James R. 2007. “Shattering Intelligence: Implications for Education and Interventions.” Cato Unbound, November 5th.
Heckman, James. J. 1995. “Cracked Bell.” Reason (March).
Murray, Charles. 2005. “The Inequality Taboo.” Commentary, September.
Nugent, Helen. 2007. “Black People ‘Less Intelligent’ Scientist Claims.” Times Online, October 17.
Syal, Rajeev. 2007. “Nobel Scientist Who Sparked Race Row Says Sorry — I Didn’t Mean It.” Times Online, October 19.
Tierney, John. 2016. “The Real War on Science. The Left has done far more than the Right to set back progress.” City Journal (Autumn).
Ancient DNA Studies and Cultural-Historical Anthropology
Reich, David. 2018. Who We Are and How We Got Here. Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. Random House (Wikipedia entry).
Diamond, Jared. 2018. “A Brand-New Version of Our Origin Story: Who We Are and How We Got Here. Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past By David Reich.” The New York Times (April 20).
Littlefoot’s Anthro Blog. 2019. “David Reich and The New York Times.” (January 19).
Moser, Cody. 2019. “Is Science Racist?” Areo (January 18).
Others
McNeill, John Robert 2012. “Chapter 1: Global Environmental History: The First 150,000 Years.” In J. R. McNeill and Erin Stewart Mauldin (eds). A Companion to Global Environmental History. Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 3-17.
SUGGESTED LINKS
–Human Origins (Ancient History)
National Museum of Natural History’s (Smithsonian Institution)
– What Does It Mean to be Human
– Human Evolution Research
– Human Timeline Interactive
– Human Characteristics
– Resources
–Human Origins (North America)
More to come
–Ancient Migrations (Global)
“Atlas of the Human Journey – The Genographic Project.” National Geographic.
The Journey of Mankind on the Bradshaw Foundation website.
The Great Human Odyssey (CBC The Nature of Things, 2015).
–Ancient Migrations (North America)
A 2004 NOVA (PBS) episode on America’s Stone Age Explorers.
Kennewick Man on Trial (Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture)
–Megafauna extinction
A 1997 American Museum of Natural History symposium on “Humans and Other Catastrophes” that looked at the possible causes of past extinctions and on how lessons from past extinctions could help us set policy for preventative action today.
REQUIRED VIDEOS
Exceptionally this semester, I will ask you to watch episode 2 of the PBS-National Geographic Series on Guns, Germs and Steel on your own: – video | – summary | – full transcript
Wade, Lizzie. 2018. “Feeding the Gods: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital.” Science (June 21).
POLICYed. 2020. “Original Indigenous Economies.” (April 21).
Chief Sitting Bull vs Colonel Nelson Miles (Excerpt from the 2007 movie Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee).
REQUIRED READINGS
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Chapter 3
Critique of Diamond’s account of military history
Raudzens, George. 1999, “Military Revolution or Maritime Evolution? Military Superiorities or Transportation Advantages as Main Causes of European Colonial Conquests to 1788,” (Please access this article through the UofT library website) The Journal of Military History 63 (3): 631-641.
Others
Mann, Charles C. 2015. “What Endures From the Ancient Civilizations That Once Ruled the Central Andes?” Smithsonian.com (July 22).
Rubenstein, Hymie. 2017. “The Myth of Indigenous Utopia.” C2C Journal (November 8).
Shoalts, Adam. 2011. “Reverse Colonialism – How the Inuits Conquered the Vikings.” Canadian Geographic (March 8).
Sinclair, Niigaan. 2017. “Indigenous Nationhood can Save the World. Here’s How.” The Globe & Mail (Revised, November 17).
SUGGESTED READINGS
•On Diamond’s Historical Narrative
Raudzens, George (ed.), 2003, Technology, Disease, and Colonial Conquests, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries: Essays Reappraising the Guns and Germs Theories. Brill Academic Publishers.
•Historical Facts and Debates
-Chinese Treasure Ship Fleets
Finlay, Robert. “How Not to (Re)Write World History: Gavin Menzies and the Chinese Discovery of America.” Journal of World History, Vol. 15, Issue 2.
Gunde, Richard. 2004. “Zheng He’s Voyages of Discovery” UCLA International Institute, April 20.
Wake, Christopher. 2004. “The Myth of Zheng He’s Great Treasure Ships.” International Journal of Maritime History 16 (1): 59-75.
–. 2008. “Gavin Menzies: Mad as a Snake – or a Visionary?” Telegraph, August 1st.
-Inca Empire and Social System
McEwan, Francis Gordon. 2006. The Incas: New Perspectives. ABC-Clio.
Hyland, Sabine. 2003. The Jesuit & the Incas: The Extraordinary Life of Padre Blas Valera, S. J. The University of Michigan Press, Chapter One.
Bassi, Daniella. 2021. “The Inca Empire: An Indigenous Leviathan State.” Mises Wire (November 24).
Baudin, Louis. 1961. A Socialist Empire. The Incas of Peru. D. Van Nostrand Company.
Hevesi, Dennis. 2006. “John V. Murra, 90, Professor Who Recast Image of Incas, Dies.” New York Times (October 24).
Ferrara, Scott. 2017. “Photos of the Peruvian Festival That Creates a New 118-Foot Bridge Every Year: A centuries-old tradition brings Inca infrastructure into the present.” Atlast Obscura.
-Aztec Empire and Social System
Weston Phippen, J. 2017. “Archeologists in Mexico Find an Aztec Tower of Skulls.” The Atlantic (July 3).
Taylor, Peter Shawn. 2019. “Does Cortés’ Conquest of Mexico Require an Apology, Or a Thank-You?” C2C (May 7).
Agreen, David. 2021. “Don’t call us traitors: descendants of Cortés’s allies defend role in toppling Aztec empire.” The Guardian (August 13).
Bassi, Daniella. 2021. “Pre-Columbian America Wasn’t Exactly a Paradise of Freedom.” Mises Institute (October 14).
Berdan, Frances. 2022. “The Aztec Way of Empire.” Quillette (May 2).
-Mayas
Bassi, Daniella. 2022. “What Mayan Civilization Can Teach Us about Secession and Decentralization.” Mises Wire (January 10)
Schultz, Isaac. 2020. “Found: The Oldest and Largest Maya Structure in Mexico.” Atlas Obscura (June 12)
-Carribeans
Hofman, Corinne L. et al. 2018. « Indigenous Caribbean perspectives: archaeologies and legacies of the first colonised region in the New World.” Antiquity 92 (361): 200-216
Napolitano, Matthew et al. 2020. “Archaeologists determined the step-by-step path taken by the first people to settle the Caribbean islands.” The Conversation (September 29)
–North America
-Narrative
Sturgis, Amy H. 2020. “Indians and Aliens: Human beings’ disturbing capacity to manufacture history to serve our own ends.” Reason (August/September).
Immerwahr, Daniel. 2022. “Contest or Conquest? [Review of Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, by Pekka Hämäläinen.]” Harper’s (November)
Weiss, Elizabeth. 2022. “Jennifer Raff’s ‘Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas’—A Review.” Quillette (April 3)
-Canada and Arctic
Canada
Koabel, Greg. 2023. “Canada’s First Inhabitants.” Quillette (April 5).
Greenland
Folger, Tim. 2017. “Why Did Greenland’s Vikings Vanish?” Smithsonian Magazine (March).
Arctic
Alix, Claire and Owen K. Mason. 2022. “Analyzing Early Driftwood Houses of Coastal Alaska.” Bering Land Bridge National Preserve (National Parks Service) (January 16)
Hirst, K. Kris. 2019. “Prehistoric Semi-Subterranean Arctic Houses.” Thought.Co (February 14)
Gamble, Jessa. 2016. “Redux: Whither the Dorset?” The Last Word on Nothing (January 8)
NBC News. 2014. “Dorset DNA: Genes Trace the Tale of the Arctic’s Long-Gone ‘Hobbits’ Genetic analysis reveals a previously unknown migration that brought a “hobbit”-like Arctic culture into the Americas from Siberia 4,500 years ago.” (August 28)
Canadian Museum of History. Undated. Civilization.ca – Life and Art of an Ancient Arctic People – Disappearance of Dorset Culture (historymuseum.ca)
Norse and Inuits
Arden G Christen, Arden G. and Joan A. Christen. 2011. “The Unicorn and the Narwhal: A tale of the Tooth.” Journal of the History of Dentistry 59 (3): 135-142.
Pringle, Heather. 2012. “Vikings and Native Americans.” National Geographic (November).
Koabel, Greg. 2023. “Canada’s Norse Interregnum.” Quillette (April 20).
-Trade and Migration
Smith, Kiona. 2018. “Find shows 4,000-year-old trade routes stretched from Carolinas to Great Lakes.” Ars Technica (July 31).
Western, Samuel. 2016. “Trade Among Tribes: Commerce on the Plains before Europeans Arrived.” WyoHistory (April 26).
Gade, Gene. 2021. “The VBJ and the Apache Odyssey.” Vore Buffalo Jump Newsletter (May).
Strauss, Mark. 2016. “Discovery Could Rewrite History of Vikings in New World.” National Geographic (March 31).
-Warfare, cannibalism and slavery
Goska, Danusha V. 2017. “Taboo Truths about the Comanche.” FontPage Mag (October 11).
Government of Canada. Undated. “Warfare In Pre-Columbian North America.”
Bassi Daniella. 2021. “Pre-Columbian America Wasn’t Exactly a Paradise of Freedom.” Mises Institute (October 14).
Smith, Ryan P. 2018. “How Native American Slaveholders Complicate the Trail of Tears Narrative.” Smithsonian.com (March 6).
Snyder, Christina. 2014. “Indian Slavery.” Oxford Research Encyclopedias: American History.
Sumner. William Graham. 1902. Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals. 277. Slavery in North America among Savages.
Hirst, K. Kris. 2019. “Prehistoric Semi-Subterranean Arctic Houses.” Thought.Co (February 14).
-Others
Fynn-Paul, Jeff. 2020. “The Myth of the ‘Stolen Country.’ What should the Europeans have done with the New World?” The Spectator (Magazine) (September 26).
SUGGESTED LINKS
NOVA – The Great Inca Rebellion – PBS
Thompson, Niobe. 2009. Inuit Odyssey. CBC – The Nature of Things.
Morrison, David. 1997. “The Inuvialuit of the Western Arctic, From Ancient Times to 1902.” Canadian Museum of Civilization
– From Ancient Times. Early Thule Culture
A Portrait of Tenochtitlan • 3D reconstruction of the capital of the Aztec empire. (thomaskole.nl)
REQUIRED VIDEOS
BBC Scotland. 2012. How to Grow a Planet – Episode 3: The Challenger (Göbekli Tepe and the domestication of wheat).
WPSU. 2009. Apple Grafting.
North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. 2011. Pawpaw Trees and their Tasty Fruit: A Moment of Science.
REQUIRED READINGS
Lecture 4
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Chapter 4
•Agricultural History
-Overview
University of Sheffield. 2017. “Why did Hunter-gatherers First Begin Farming?” Phys.org (May 16).
Lewis, Dyani. 2019. “We’ve been Changing the Planet for Thousands of Years.” Cosmos (August 30).
Caradonna, Jeremy. 2016. “How Old is Agriculture? (And Just What IS Agriculture?)” History News Network (December 6).
Wallace, Eric J. 2019. “The Moroccan Food Forest That Inspired an Agricultural Revolution. These ancient forest gardens may be more relevant than ever.” Atlas Obscura (April 1).
–On hunting-gathering
Buckner, William. 2017. “Romanticizing the Hunter-Gatherer.” Quillette (December 16).
Taub, Matthew. 2019. “How Long Have Dogs Been Helping Us Hunt? New findings in Jordan indicate that they’ve been assisting us for nearly 12,000 years.” Atlas Obscura (January 16).
Azihari, Ferghane. 2020. “Hunter-Gatherers Ravaged the Environment. Industrialization Saved It.” Mises Wire (January 1).
-Worst Mistake?
Diamond, Jared. 1987. “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.” Discover Magazine, May, pp. 64-66.
Laudan, Rachel. 2018. “With the Grain : Against the New Paleo Politics.” Breakthrough Journal (vol. 9, Summer).
Bliss, Sam. 2019. “There Is No Anti-Grain Consensus. A response to Rachel Laudan’s “With the Grain”.” Breakthrough Journal (vol. 10, Winter).
Laudan, Rachel. 2019. ” Grain for All: The Case Against Repeasantization.” Breakthrough Journal (vol. 11, Summer).
Lecture 5
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Chapters 5-7
–Crops
CIAT (International Center for Tropical Agriculture). “Where our Food Crops Come From” (Interactive website).
“The story of wheat – Ears of plenty.” The Economist, December 20, 2005. *Please access it using the UofT library website.
Bradt, Steve. 2005. “Ancient Humans brought Bottle Gourds to the Americas from Asia. Plants Widely Used as Containers Arrived, Already Domesticated, Some 10,000 Years Ago.” Harvard University Gazette (December 15).
Gattuso, Reina. 2019. “The Promise and Perils of Resurrecting Native Americans’ Lost Crops.” Atlas Obscura (April 4).
Lecture 6
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Chapters 8-10
Jarvis, Anne. 2012. “Planting my pawpaw.” Windsor Star (April 18).
SUGGESTED READINGS
• Diamond’s Update
Diamond, Jared. 2002. “Evolution, consequences and future of plant and animal domestication.” Nature 418, p. 700-707, 8 August.
Diamond, Jared. 2012. “What Makes Countries Rich or Poor?” (Review of Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson), The New York Review of Books, June 7.
• Hunting and Gathering Controversy
– Overview and Broader Intellectual Context
Antrosio, Jason, 2011. “Agriculture as ‘Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race’?” Living Anthropologically (last updated 6 October 2017).
Antrosio, Jason, 2011. “Many Ways of Gathering and Hunting.” Living Anthropologically (last updated 1 February 2018).
Hames, Raymond. 2007. “The Ecologically Noble Savage Debate.” Annual Review of Anthropology 36: 177-190.
Kaplan, David. 2000. “The Darker Side of the ‘Original Affluent Society’.” Journal of Anthropological Research 56 (3): 301-324.
Karnofsky, Holden. 2021. “Was Life Better in Hunter-gatherer Times?” Cold Takes (October 26).
Krech III, Shepherd. 1999, The Ecological Indian, Myth and History, W.W. Norton & Company, pp. 29-43 (Ch. 1: Pleistocene Extinctions).
Smith, Vernon L. 1993, “Humankind in Prehistory: Economy, Ecology and Institutions.” In The Political Economy of Customs and Culture, edited by Terry Anderson and Randy Simmons, Rowman and Littlefield Press, pp. 157-184.
O’Connell, Sanjida. 2009. “Is Farming the Root of All Evil?” The Telegraph (June 23).
– Hunting-gathering was generally better
Diamond, Jared. 1987. “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.” Discover Magazine, May, p. 64-66.
Lanchester, John. 2017. “The Case Against Civilization. Did our hunter-gatherer ancestors have it better?” The New Yorker (September 18).
Harari, Yuval Noah. 2014. “Were we Happier in the Stone Age?” The Guardian (September 5).
Harari, Yuval Noah. “Ecology.”
Curnoe, Darren. 2017. ” Was Agriculture the Greatest Blunder in Human History?” The Conversation (October 18).
Suzman, James. 2021. Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots. Penguin.
O’Lemmon, Matthew. 2022. “The worst mistake 2.0? The digital revolution and the consequences of innovation.” AI & Society: 1-10.
– Farming was generally better
Stock, Jay T. et al. 2023. “Long-term trends in human body size track regional variation in subsistence transitions and growth acceleration linked to dairying.” PNAS 120 (4) e2209482119.
Marshall, Michael. 2023. “Worst Mistake in History?” New Scientist 257 (3427): 28.
Laudan, Rachel. 2016. “Was the Agricultural Revolution a Terrible Mistake? Not If You Take Food Processing Into Account.” Rachel Laudan (January 21).
Wood, Jim. 2013. “A Few Words in Defense of Farming.” The Mermaid’s Tale (November 14).
Corry, Stephen. 2013. “Savaging Primitives: Why Jared Diamond’s “The World Until Yesterday” is Completely Wrong.” The Daily Beast (January 30).
Kaczynski, Ted. 2008. The Truth About Primitive Life: A Critique of Anarchoprimitivism (Yes, this is really the Unabomber but he knows a lot about living off the land.)
Caldwell, John C., & Caldwell, Bruce K. 2003. “Was There a Neolithic Mortality Crisis?” Journal of Population Research, Vol. 20, No.2.
DeGregori, Thomas R. 1998, “Back to the Future: A Review Article of Limited Wants, Unlimited Means: A Reader on Hunter-Gatherer Economics and the Environment, edited by John Gowdy, Island Press,” Journal of Economic Issues 32 (4): 1153-1161.
Elligson, Ter. 2001. The Myth of the Noble Savage. University of California Press (Summary in Hill, Amelia. 2001. “Racists Created the Noble Savage.” The Guardian (April 15).
Geloso, Vincent. 2021. “The history of work and the myth of a leisurely past.” Economist Writing Every Day (November 7).
PBS NOVA. 2007. The Great Inca Rebellion – Bones: Growth Arrest Lines.
– Optimal Foraging Theory
Optimal Foraging Theory (Controversy)
Piperno, Dolores R., Ranere, Anthony J., Dickau, Ruth, and Aceituno, Francisco. 2017. “Niche construction and optimal foraging theory in Neotropical agricultural origins: A re-evaluation in consideration of the empirical evidence.” Journal of Archaeological Science. 78: 214–220.
Smith, Bruce D. 2014. “Failure of optimal foraging theory to appeal to researchers working on the origins of agriculture worldwide.” PNAS 111 (28) E2829
Zeder, Melinda. 2012. “The Broad Spectrum Revolution at 40: Resource Diversity, Intensification, and an Alternative to Optimal Foraging Explanations.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 31 (3): 241–264.
More substantial pieces (Global)
Gremillion, Kristen J., Loukas Barton and Dolores R. Pipernoc. 2014. “Particularism and the Retreat from Theory in the Archaeology of Agricultural Origins.” PNAS 111 (17): 6171–6177.
Barker, Graeme. 2023 / 2013. “Is Farming the Root of Civilisation?” Engelsberg Ideas (March 6).
Zhao, Yang et al. “Advances in Genomics Approaches Shed Light on Crop Domestication” Plants 10 (8): 1571.
Ahmad, Hafiz Ishfaq et al. 2020. “The Domestication Makeup: Evolution, Survival, and Challenges.” Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 8 (103).
Gavin, M. C. et al. 2018. « The global geography of human subsistence.” Royal Society Open Science 5: 171897.
• Early Farmers and the Development of Agriculture
– Shorter and/or more accessible pieces
Gupta, Anil K. 2004. “Origin of agriculture and domestication of plants and animals linked to early Holocene climate amelioration.” Current Science 87 (1): 54-59.
Mann, Charles C. 2005. “Archaeology: Oldest Civilization in the Americas Revealed.” Science 7 January: Vol. 307. no. 5706, pp. 34 – 35.
Pringle, Heather. 1998, “The Slow Birth of Agriculture,” Science 282 (5393): 1446.
Viegas, Jennifer. 2015. “Oldest Dog Turns out to be a Wolf.” Discovery News (February 5).
Stephens, James M. 2009 (1994). “Gourd, Bottle – Lagenaria siceraria (Mol.) Standl.” University of Florida IFAs Extension HS602.
– More substantial pieces (Global)
Larson, G. et al. 2014. “The Modern View Of Domestication (Special Feature)” PNAS 111 (17) (April) (April 2014) (several articles).
Spengler III, Richard N. 2020. “Opinion: Anthropogenic Seed Dispersal: Rethinking the Origins of Plant.” Trends in Plant Science 25 (4): 340-348.
McHugo, Gilles P., Michael J. Dover and David E. MacHugh. 2019. “Unlocking the Origins and Biology of Domestic Animals Using Ancient DNA and Paleogenomics.” BMC Biology volume 17, Article 98.
Doughty, Christopher E. 2013. “Preindustrial Human Impacts on Global and Regional Environment.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 38: 503-527.
Weisdorf, Jacob L. 2005. “From Foraging to Farming: Explaining the Neolithic Revolution.” Journal of Economic Surveys 19 (4): 561-586.
Kirch, Patrick V. 2005. “Archeology and Global Change: The Holocene Record,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 30: 409-440.
Prakash, Channapatna S. 2001, “The Genetically Modified Crop Debate in the Context of Agricultural Evolution,” Plant Physiology 126: 8-15.
– More substantial pieces (Localized)
Fuller, Dorian Q. 2006. “Agricultural Origins and Frontiers in South Asia: A Working Synthesis.” Journal of World Prehistory 20 (1): 1-86.
• Eastern Agricultural Complex
Hirst, K. Kris. “Eastern Agricultural Complex.” About.com: archaeology.
“Eastern Agricultural Complex.” Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
• The Columbian Exchange
“Columbian Exchange.” Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
“Spud we like – In praise of the humble but world-changing tuber.” The Economist, February 28, 2008.
“History of the potato – Wonder-food.” The Economist, February 28, 2008.
Crosby, Alfred W. “The Columbian Exchange.” History Now, Issue 12, June 2007.
Crosby, Alfred W. “The Columbian Exchange: Plants, Animals, and Disease between the Old and New Worlds.” National Humanities Center.
Findlay, Ronald, and Kevin O’Rourke. 2006. “Mr Columbus’s Economic Bombshell.” BBC History, May, p. 41-43.
Grennes, Thomas. 2007. “The Columbian Exchange and the Reversal of Fortune.” Cato Journal 27 (1): 91-107.
Nunn, Nathan and Nancy Qian. 2010. “The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food and Ideas.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 24 (2): 163-188.
• Current controversies
> I have posted several links on current agricultural controversies on my GGR 387 (Food and Globalization) webpage.
Miller, F. P. 2008. “After 10,000 Years of Agriculture, Whither Agronomy?” Agronomy Journal, 100: S-40-S-52.
Harari, Yuval Noah. 2014. “Were we Happier in the Stone Age?” The Guardian (September 5).
Ellis, Erle C., Jed O. Kaplan, Dorian Q. Fuller, Steve Vavrus, Kees Klein Goldewijk and Peter H. Verburg. 2013. “Used Planet: A Global History.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110 (20): 7978-7985.
Alex, Bridget. 2023. “Worldwide survey kills the myth of ‘Man the Hunter’.” Science (June 28).
SUGGESTED LINKS
– Overview/References
Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CORA), Cornell University
Science Tracer Bullets Online – Food History (Library of Congress)
– History of Agriculture
The Food Timeline
The Cambridge World History of Food (Edited by Kenneth F. Kiple and Krimhild Conee Ornelas)
– Archeological sites of significance
UNESCO. Göbekli Tepe
Çatalhöyük – Excavations of a Neolithic Anatolian Höyük
– Crops
Natural History Museum (UK)
– Seeds of Trade
International Year of Natural Fibres 2009
International Year of the Potato 2008
– Critics of Agriculture
BBC Reel. 2020. “Was this humanity’s biggest mistake?” (March 10).
REQUIRED VIDEOS
Exceptionally this semester, I will ask you to watch episode 1 of the PBS-National Geographic Series on Guns, Germs and Steel on your own: Video; Summary; Full transcript.
Quartz News. 2019. “Episode 26 – Ancient Civilizations can Show Us how to Protect the Amazon.”
Discovery UK. 2018. “The Eradication Of Smallpox.”
Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site.
REQUIRED READINGS
Lecture 7
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Chapter 11
•Overview
Rosen, Julie. 2021. “Why there’s no such thing as pristine nature” Knowable Magazine (December 1).
LePan, Nicholas. 2020. “Visualizing the History of Pandemics.” Visual Capitalist (March 14)
•Europe – Dark and Middle Ages
Lévèque, Christian. 2020. “Viewpoint: The Dark Side of Biodiversity-Why living ‘in harmony’ with nature is a fantasy.” Genetic Literacy Project (April 13).
Watts, Edward. 2020. “What Rome Learned from the Deadly Antonine Plague of 165 AD.” Smithsonian Magazine (April 28).
Cartwright, Mark. 2020. “Black Death.” Ancient History Encyclopedia (March 28).
Twentieth Century
Black, Tim. 2020. “The Making of a Global Pandemic. How the Spanish Flu was turned into an anticipation of the apocalypse.” Spiked! (May 8).
Tucker, Jeffrey A. 2020. “No Lockdowns: The Terrifying Polio Pandemic of 1949-52.” AIER (May 10).
Smil, Vaclav. 2020. “Pandemic Memories and Mortalities.” IEEE Spectrum (October): 16-17.
Lecture 8
•Diseases and Civilization
– AMERICAS
— General
Mann, Charles C. 2002, “1491,” The Atlantic 289 (3): 41-53. (see also Gene Expression. 2011. “10 Questions Charles C. Mann.” Discover Magazine, September 3.)
Pringle, Heather. 1998, “The Sickness of the Mummies.” Discover (December) (Due to new copyright rules, please access the article through the UofT library website).
Pearce, Fred. 2013. “True Nature: Revising Ideas On What is Pristine and Wild.” Yale 360 Environment (May 13).
Koch, Alexander et al. 2019. “European Colonisation of the Americas Killed 10% of World Population and Caused Global Cooling.” The Conversation (January 31).
— Canada and USA
Spaulding, William B. (2015/2006) “Smallpox.” Canadian Encyclopedia.
Houston, C. Stuart and Stan Houston. 2000. “The First Smallpox Epidemic on the Canadian Plains: In the fur-traders’ words.” Canadian Journal of Infectious Diseases 11(2): 112-115.
Hopper, Tristin. 2017. “Everyone was Dead: When Europeans First Came to B.C., They Stepped into the Aftermath of a Holocaust.” National Post (February 21).
Ostroff, Joshua. 2017. “How a Smallpox Epidemic Forged Modern British Columbia.” MacLean’s (August 1).
Kelly, David. 2018. “Archaeologists Explore a Rural Field in Kansas, and a Lost City Emerges.” Los Angeles Times (August 19).
Taylor, Peter Shawn and Greg Piasetzki. 2018. “The 19th-century Indigenous Policy Success Story We’ve Forgotten. The vaccination of native populations against smallpox was one of Canada’s most impressive, if least-acknowledged, public-health feats.” National Post (March 28).
Tutton, Mark, Holly Brown and Samantha Bresnahan. 2019. “Is Ted Turner the real Captain Planet? Best known as the media mogul who founded CNN, Ted Turner is also a conservationist, dedicated to restoring native wildlife in the United States.” CNN (September 27).
— Mexico and Central America
Zhang, Sarah. 2018. “A New Clue to the Mystery Disease That Once Killed Most of Mexico. The evidence comes from the 16th-century victims’ teeth.” The Atlantic (January 15).
BBC News. 2018. “Sprawling Maya Network Discovered under Guatemala Jungle.” BBC News (February 2).
— South America
Meyer, Robinson. 2017. “The Amazon Rainforest Was Profoundly Changed by Ancient Humans. The region’s ecology is a product of 8,000 years of indigenous agriculture.” The Atlantic (March 2).
University of Exeter. 2018 “Ancient Farmers Transformed Amazon and Left an Enduring Legacy on the Rainforest.” Science Daily (July 23).
University of Exeter. 2018. “Parts of the Amazon Thought Uninhabited were Actually Home to Up to a Million People.” Science Daily (March 27).
Panko, Ben. 2017. “The Supposedly Pristine, Untouched Amazon Rainforest Was Actually Shaped By Humans. Over thousands of years, native people played a strong role in molding the ecology of this vast wilderness.” Smithsonian.com (March 3).
McGrath, Matt. 2020. “Crops were Cultivated in Regions of the Amazon ‘10,000 years ago’.” BBC News (April 20).
– AFRICA
Nelson, Robert H. 2003, “Environmental Colonialism: ‘Saving’ Africa from Africans,” The Independent Review 8(1): 65-86.
Sikkema, Albert. 2016. “Shades of Colonialism in the War on Poaching.” Resource WR (March 23).
SUGGESTED READINGS
•Travels and Diseases (Overview)
Kobler, Stacey et al. (Institute of Medicine (US) Forum on Microbial Threats). 2006. The Impact of Globalization on Infectious Disease Emergence and Control Exploring the Consequences and Opportunities. Washington (DC): National Academies Press.
Wilson, Mary D. 1995. “Travel and the Emergence of Infectious Diseases.” Emerging Infectious Diseases 1 (2).
•Diseases, Civilization and Genocide (Historical Perspective)
– WORLD
Kilbourne, Edwin D. 2006. “Influenza Pandemics of the 20th Century.” Emerging Infectious Diseases 12 (1): 9-14.
Glaeser Edward L. 2023. “Cities and Pandemics Have a Long History.” City Journal (March 29)
Vernimmen, Tim. 2019. “Profiling the perpetrators of past plagues.” Knowledge (October 30)
– AMERICAS
— General
Lewy, Guenter. 2004. “Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?” History News Network (September) (Originally published in Commentary).
Anderson, Terry. 1996. Conservation Native American Style. PERC (July 1).
Simmons, Randy T. 2005. “Nature Undisturbed – The Myth Behind the Endangered Species Act,” Perc Report, 23 (1).
— Canada
Hackett, Paul. 2004. “Averting Disaster: The Hudson’s Bay Company and Smallpox in Western Canada during the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 78 (3) : 575-609.
Ladley, Jane. 2020. “Anishinabe Knew Secret to Winter Warmth along Grand River: Cattails.” MLive (November 17).
Fiamengo, Janice. 2021. “Anne of Green Gables Meets the Coronavirus.” The Dorchester Review 11 (1): 12-16.
Curry, Andrew. 2023. “Curly haired ‘woolly dogs’ of the Pacific Northwest were no myth. Lost history of unique dogs recovered by weaving together data from DNA and Coast Salish oral traditions.” Science (December 14).
— United States
Johnson, Madeleine. 2012. “The Pilgrims Should Have Been Thankful for a Spirochete. A gruesome disease granted them uninhabited, cleared land and a sweet brook.” Slate (November 20).
— Mexico and Central America
Guarino. Ben. 2018. “This Major Discovery Upends Long-held Theories about the Maya Civilization.” Washington Post (September 27).
Stutz, Bruce. 2006. “Megadeath in Mexico.” Discover, Vol. 27 No. 02 (February).
Acuna-Soto, Rodolfo, David W. Stahle, Malcolm K. Cleaveland, and Matthew D. Therrell. 2002. “Megadrought and Megadeath in 16th Century Mexico.” Emerging Infectious Diseases 8 (4) (April).
Acuna-Sotoa, Rodofo, David W. Stahle, Matthew D. Therrell, Richard D. Griffin, Malcolm K. Cleveland. “When half of the population died: the epidemic of hemorrhagic fevers of 1576 in Mexico.” FEMS Microbiology Letters, Vol. 240 Issue 1, November 2004.
Acuna-Sotoa, Rodofo, Leticia Calderon Romero, and James H. Maguire. “Large Epidemics of Hemorrhagic Fever in Mexico 1545–1815.” American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 62(6), 2000, pp. 733–739.
Brooks, Francis Joseph. 1993, “Revising the Conquest of Mexico: Smallpox, Sources, and Populations,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 24 (1): 1-29.
Johnson, Charles William. 2006. “Cocoliztli or Cocolitzli? Indigenous Hemorrhagic Fever and The Spanish Conquest.” Earth/matriX, February 3.
Lloyd, Marion. 2006. “Disease Tracker Wants to Rewrite Mexican History.” BanderasNews, October issue.
McCaa, Robert. 1995, “Spanish and Nahuatl Views on Smallpox and Demographic Catastrophe in Mexico,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 25 (3): 397-431.
— South America
University of Exeter. 2017. “Hundreds of Ancient Earthworks Built in the Amazon.” Science Daily (February 6).
Wade, Lizzie. 2014. “Searching for the Amazon’s Hidden Civilizations.” Science (January 7).
McKey, Doyle and Stéphen Rostain. 2015. “Farming Technology in Amazonia.” Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer.
Hotz, Robert Lee. 2018. “Satellites Reveal Ancient Civilization Beneath the Amazon Rainforest.” The Wall Street Journal (March 27).
Mann, Charles C. 2005. 1491. New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. C-SPAN Book TV (September 6) (Video).
Anonymous. 2006. “Reflections on Charles Mann’s 1491” Geographical Review 96 (3): 478-513.
Coe, Michael D. 2006. “The Old New World.” American Scientist (July-August).
LaCombe, Michael A. “Separate but Equal?” Review of Charles C. Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.
Sturgis, Amy. 2006. “The Myth of the Passive Indian – Was America before Columbus just a “continent of patsies”?” Reason magazine (April).
Dick, Christopher W. and R. Toby Pennington. 2019. “History and Geography of Neotropical Tree Diversity.” Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 50 (1): 279-301.
Orozco-Ortiz, Juan Manuel, Clara Patricia Peña-Venegas, Sara Louise Bauke, Christian Borgemeister, Ramona Mörchen, Eva Lehndorff, and Wulf Amelung. 2021. “Terra Preta Properties in Northwestern Amazonia (Colombia)” Sustainability 13, no. 13: 7088.
Kimbrough, Liz. 2020. “Amazonia’s people domesticated crops on ‘forest islands’ 10,000 years ago: Study.” Mongabay.com (July 31).
– AFRICA
Black, Edwin. 2016. “In Germany’s Extermination Program for Black Africans, A Template for the Holocaust.” The Times of Israel (May 5) (read up to “Africa comes to Germany”).
Steers, Julia. (Undated). “Mordecai Ogada’s “People First” Mantra Rankles Fellow Conservationists, whom WHe Compares to Colonists.” Ozy.
– EURASIA
Schulz Richard, Katherine. (Date unknown) “The Global Impacts of the Black Death.” About.com.
Hankins, James. 2020. “Social Distancing During the Black Death.” Quillette (March 28).
Wazer, Caroline. 2016. “The Plagues That Might Have Brought Down the Roman Empire. Bioarcheologists are getting better at measuring the toll of ancient pathogens.” The Atlantic (March 16).
Green, Monica. 2018. “Black as Death (Review essay of Bruce Campbell’s The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World.)” Inference 4 (1) (Responses and Rejoinder: Curtis, Roosen and Green; Paulus and Green).
Follett, Chelsea. 2022. “Centers of Progress, Pt. 37: Dubrovnik (Public Health): In the midst of the Black Death, Dubrovnik kept its port open with innovations in public health.” Human Progress (My 25).
•On diseases and colonial expansion generally
Jones, David S. 2003. “Virgin Soils Revisited.” William and Mary Quarterly 60 (4): 703-742.
Francis Joseph Brooks, 2003, “The Impact of Disease,” in George Raudzens (ed.), Technology, Disease, and Colonial Conquests, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries: Essays Reappraising the Guns and Germs Theories, Brill Academic Publishers, pp. 127-165.
Linda Newson, 2003, “Pathogens, Places and Peoples: Geographical Variations in the Impact of Disease in Early Spanish America and the Philippines,” in George Raudzens (ed.), Technology, Disease, and Colonial Conquests, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries: Essays Reappraising the Guns and Germs Theories, Brill Academic Publishers, pp. 167-210.
Symposium on Massimo livi Bacci’s Conquest and El Dorado, Population and Development Review 37 (1) 2011.
•Animal Diseases
Scott, Gordon R. “The Murrain Now Known As Rinderpest.” Newsletter of the Tropical Agriculture Association, U.K., 20 (4) 14-16 (2000).
“History of battle against rinderpest, Animal Production and Health (APH),” Joint FAO/IAEA Programme.
O’Toole, Donald. “Cattle Plague: A History. By C. A. Spinage. Published by Kluwer/Plenum Publishers, New York, USA. 2003. 770 Pages. ISBN 0-306-47789-0, US$249.50 (Hardback).” Journal of Wildlife Diseases, 40(3), 2004, pp. 612-613.
•Modern Advances
– Concepts and Tools
Rothstein, Aaron. 2015. “Vaccines and their Critics, Then and Now.” The New Atlantis (Winter).
Willingham, Emily and Laura Helft. 2014. “What is Herd Immunity?” Nova (September 5).
“How Herd Immunity Works.” Imgur.
– Historical Perspective
Essert, Matt. 2014. “How Americans Died in 1900 vs. Today, in One Chart.” News.Mic (June 8).
Lewis, James. 2018. “‘White Privilege’ and the Great Stink of 1858.” The American Thinker (January 19).
– Pioneers and Benefactors
Offit, Paul A. 2021. “‘It works! It works! It works!’: Jonas Salk and the Vaccine that Conquered Polio.” Quillette (October 29).
Keim, Brandon 2008. “Remembering Thomas Weller, Unappreciated Vaccine Hero.” Wired, August 27.
Newman, Laura. 2005. “Maurice Hilleman.” British Medical Journal 330(7498): 1028.
Riedel, Stefan. 2005. “Edward Jenner and the History of Smallpox and Vaccination.” BMUC Proceedings 18(1): 21-25.
– Recent News
Pickrell, Ryan. 2017. “Doctors found Parasites They’d Never Seen Before Inside the North Korean Soldier who Bolted at the DMZ.” The Daily Caller (November 16).
Winter, Lisa. 2014. “One Map Sums Up The Damage Caused By The Anti-Vaccination Movement.” IFL Science (January 24).
•Humans, Epidemics and Biodiversity
– Overview
Balée, William. 2006. “The Research Program of Historical Ecology.” Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 35: 75-98 (October).
Jones, David S. 2004. Rationalizing Epidemics. Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600. Harvard University Press.
Stahl, Peter W. 1996. “Holocene Biodiversity: An Archaeological Perspective from the Americas,” Annual Review of Anthropology (October), Vol. 25, Pages 105-126.
Hames, Raymond. 2007. “The Ecologically Noble Savage Debate.” Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 36: 177-190.
Ellis, Erle C. 2021. “Land Use and Ecological Change: A 12,000-Year History.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 46: 1-33.
Ellis, Erle C. et al. 2021. “People have shaped most of terrestrial nature for at least 12,000 years.” PNAS 118 (17) e2023483118.
•Foreign Diseases, Native Americans and Ecological Disturbances
— Americas
“Population History of American Indigenous Peoples.” From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Storey, Rebecca. 2012. “Population Decline during and after Conquest.” In The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Bermejo , J.E. Hernández, and J. León. 1994. Neglected Crops – 1492 from a Different Perspective, FAO Plant Production and Protection Series, no. 26.
Pearce, Fred. 2007. “Virginity Lost.” Conservation, January-March.
Sturgis, Amy H. 2006. “The Myth of the Passive Indian – Was America Before Columbus Just a ‘Continent of Patsies’?” Reason Online, April.
Watts, Sheldon. 1999, “Review of N.D. Cook’s Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492-1650. Cambridge University Press, 1998,” Journal of World History 10 (2): 459-461.
— North America
Binnema, Theodore. 2000. “Disease History on the Northwest Coast: A Microcosm, or a Unique Region?” (Review of Robert Boyd’s The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence: Introduced Infectious Diseases and Population Decline among Northwest Coast Indians 1774-1874), H-Net Review (April).
Bowser, David. 2003. “Ecologist Debunks Popular Myth Of ‘Pristine West’ With Facts,” Livestock Weekly, July 3.
Chernick, Karen. 2020. “How Drones Help Archaeologists Peer Into the Earth. A late-night drone flight spotted a large, circular earthwork beneath a field in Kansas.” Atlas Obscura (October 9).
Kay, Charles E. 2003, “Lewis and Clark: Aboriginal Overkill, and the Myth of Once Abundant Wildlife,” Proceedings of the Conference “A Confluence of Cultures: Native Americans and the Expedition of Lewis and Clark,” May 28-30, University of Montana – Missoula.
Kay, Charles, and Randy Simmons, 2002, Wilderness & Political Ecology: Aboriginal Influences & the Original State of Nature, The University of Utah Press.
> Ch 5: William L. Preston, “Post-Columbian Wildlife Irruptions in California: Implications for Cultural and Environmental Understanding,” pp. 111-140.
> Ch 6: Thomas W. Newmann, “The Role of Prehistoric People in Shaping Ecosystems in the Eastern United States : Implications for Restoration Ecology and Wilderness Management,” pp. 141-178.
> Ch 8: Charles Kay, “Are Ecosystems Structured from the Top-Down or Bottom-Up? A New Look at an Old Debate,” pp. 215-237.
> Ch 9: Charles Kay, “Afterword: False Gods, Ecological Myths, and Biological Reality,” pp. 238-261.
References Cited, pp. 263-337.
Newitz, Annalee. 2016. “Finding North America’s Lost Medieval City. Cahokia was Bigger than Paris.” Ars Technica (December 13).
Richter, Daniel K. 2002, “Review of Elizabeth Fenn’s Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82. Hill & Wang Publishers, 2001,” Common Place 2 (3).
Seppa, Nathan. 1997. “Metropolitan Life on the Mississippi.” The Washington Post, March 12.
— Central and South America
Heidt, Amanda. 2024. “An ancient, massive urban complex has been found in the Ecuadorian Amazon.” Science News (January 11).
Anonymous. 2022. “Lost cities of Bolivia: Rethinking prehistoric life in the Amazon.” The Past (September 20).
“The Secret of El Dorado – Transcript.” Horizon (BBC).
Barlow, Jos et al. 2012. “How Pristine are Tropical Forests? An ecological perspective on the pre-Columbian human footprint in Amazonia and implications for contemporary conservation.” Biological Conservation 151 (1): 45-49.
Bosveld, Jane. 2008. “Top 100 Stories of 2008 #15: The Lost Cities of the Amazon.” Discover Magazine, December 20.
Florida Institute of Technology. 2017. “Ancient Human Disturbances may Skew Understanding of Amazon and its Impact (Update).” Phys.org (January 10).
Heckenberger, Michael, and Eduardo Góes Neves, “Amazonian Archaeology. ” Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 38: 251-266 (Volume October 2009).
Mann, Charles C. 2000. “Earthmovers of the Amazon.” Science, February 4, Vol. 287:786-789.
Messenger, Stephen. 2009. “Strange Geoglyphs Discovered Beneath Clearcut Amazon.” TreeHugger, December 28.
Petit, Charles. 2006, “Jade Axes Proof of Vast Ancient Caribbean Network, Experts Say,” National Geographic, June 12.
Roach, John. 2010. ““Lost” Amazon Complex Found; Shapes Seen by Satellite.” National Geographic, January 4.
Levis, Carolina et al. 2018. “How People Domesticated Amazonian Forests.” Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution (January 17).
Watling, Jennifer et al. 2017. “Impact of Pre-Columbian “Geoglyph” Builders on Amazonian Forest.” PNAS 114 (8): 1868-1873.
Coelho SD, Levis C, Baccaro FB, Figueiredo FOG, Pinassi Antunes A, Steege H, et al. 2021. “Eighty-four per cent of all Amazonian arboreal plant individuals are useful to humans.” PLoS ONE 16(10): e0257875.
•Africa
Parletta, Natalie. 2018. “The Serengeti isn’t Wilderness. It’s the Product of Livestock Farming.” Cosmos (August 30).
•Neo (Green) Colonialism
Zaitchik, Alexander. 2018. “How Conservation Became Colonialism. Indigenous people, not environmentalists, are the key to protecting the world’s most precious ecosystems.” Foreign Policy (July 16).
Tauli-Corpuz, Victoria, Janis Alcorn and Augusta Molnar. 2018. “Cornered by Protected Areas” website (includes a number of case studies).
Lunstrum, Elizabeth. 2016. “Green grabs, land grabs, and the spatiality of displacement: Eviction from Mozambique’s Limpopo National Park.” Area 48 (2): 412-153.
Kopnina, Helen. 2016. “Half the earth for people (or more)? Addressing ethical questions in conservation.” Biological Conservation 203: 176-185.
Bose, Pablo and Elizabeth Lunstrum. 2014. “Introduction: Environmentally induced displacement and forced migration.”Refuge 29 (2): 5-10.
Special Issue “Debate: Relocation from Protected Areas.” Conservation & Society 4 (3) (2006).
Dowie, Mark. 2009. “Human Nature.” Guernica Magazine, May.
Carruther, Jane. 2007. “‘South Africa: A World in One Country’: Land Restitution in National Parks and Protected Areas.” Conservation & Society 5 (3): 292-306.
Dowie, Mark. 2005. “Conservation Refugees.” Orion Online, November-December.
Rangarajan, Mahesh. 2003. “Parks, Politics and History: Conservation Dilemmas in Africa.” Conservation and Society (1):77-98.
DeGregori, Thomas R. 2002. “The Environment, our Natural Resources, and Modern Technology,” Iowa State Press.
•Varia
Yablonski, Brian. 2007. “Bisonomics.” PERC Report, Vol. 25 No. 3.
SUGGESTED LINKS
Overview
World Health Organization
– Health topics – Zoonoses
– Zoonoses and veterinary public health (Information resources)
– Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Pandemic
Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC)
– Plague
– Smallpox
– Measles (Rubeola)
– Pandemic Influenza
– Past Pandemics
– History of Quarantine
Wikipedia
– Black Death
– Spanish flu
College of Charleston historian Peter McCandless‘ research seminar syllabus on Disease, Migration and the Environment
Pre-Columbian Americas and Eurasian Diseases
Wikipedia
– Population history of American indigenous peoples
An audio link to a column written by Charles C. Mann on the background of his book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.
Journalist Charles Mann’s homepage including the homepage of his book 1491
Anthropology Professor Clark Erickson’s homepage
A talk by Rodolfo Acuna-Soto on “Drought-Associated Epidemics of Hemorrhagic Fevers and Massive Population Loss in Mexico” given at Yale University in December 2005.
REQUIRED VIDEOS & interactive maps
- Language
Woollaston, Victoria. 2015. “Plotting the Spread of Language on our Planet: Interactive Map Reveals how Words have evolved across the World’s Continents.” Daily Mail (January 30).
Conner, Stef. “The Flood” (Background: Main, Douglas. 2014. “What Did Ancient Babylonian Songs Sound Like? Something Like This.” Newsweek, December 14).
- Writing
British Museum. 2022. Inca Khipu: The record and writing system made entirely of knots | #CuratorsCorner Ep9 S6.
Free to Choose Network. 2022. Johan Norberg’s New and Improved – The Printing Press (November 30).
Curbed. (Undated) “A Brooklyn Letterpress Studio Uses Fonts that Have Never Been …”
- Invention
Johnson, Steven. 2010. “Where Good Ideas Come From.” RiverHead Books.
Tech Insider. 2016. “Zipper Truck Builds Tunnel.” (March 3).
REQUIRED READINGS
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Chapters 12-14.
Language
Wade, Nicholas. 2011. “Phonetic Clues Hint Language Is Africa-Born.” The New York Times, April 14.
Writing
Erard, Michael. 2018. “The Deep Roots of Writing.” Aeon (July 6).
Postrel, Virginia. “Four Thousand Years Ago, Textile Traders Invented a Basic Social Technology: Mass Literacy. Reason (December).
Davis-Young, Katherine. 2017. “The College Student Who Decoded the Data Hidden in Inca Knots. Manny Medrano cut loose on spring break by analyzing a set of khipus.”
Medrano, Manual and Gary Urton. 2018. “The Khipu Code: The knotty mystery of the Inkas’ 3D records.” Aeon (June 13).
Keating, Fiona. 2014. “Ancient Greece: 4,000 Year-Old ‘CD-ROM’ Code Cracked. Scientists unravelling mystery of the mysterious Minoan stone disk.” International Business Times (October 25).
Invention
Smil, Vaclav. 2011. “The Myth of the Innovator Hero.” The Atlantic, November 15.
West, Patrick. 2015. “The Secret to Star Wars’ Success? Unoriginality.” Spiked (December 18).
Sowell, Thomas. 2013. “The Tragedy of Isolation.” Townhall.com (July 30).
SUGGESTED READINGS
Languages and Writing
- Languages
Matthes, Dylan. 2015. “23 Maps and Charts on Language.” Vox (April 15).
Lucas López, Alberto. 2015. “A World of Languages – and How Many Speak Them.” South China Morning Post (May 27).
- Writing
Ferreira, Becky. 2023. “A Total Amateur May Have Just Rewritten Human History With Bombshell Discovery.” Vice (January 5) (See also Bacon, Bennett et al. 2023. “An Upper Palaeolithic Proto-writing System and Phenological Calendar.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 33 (3): 371-389.
Schnare, David W. 2021. “4600 Years of Proverbs.” Jane’s Take on History (May 6).
Mann, Charles C. 2003. “Cracking the Khipu Code.” Science, June 13.
Potier, Beth. 2003. “String theorist: Anthropologist Gary Urton untangles the mystery of Inkan khipus.” Harvard University Gazette, May 23.
– Technology
Cowen, Tyler. “Globalization and Diversity: Friends or Foes?” Independent Institute, 2003.
Dittmar, Jeremiah and Skipper Seabold. 2019. “Gutenberg’s moving type propelled Europe towards the scientific revolution.” LSE Business Review (March 19).
– Government
Johnson, Charles. 2022. “Book Review: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.” Reason (June).
Hames, Raymond. 2007. “The Ecologically Noble Savage Debate.” Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 36: 177-190.
Levy, Jacob. 2017. “Statist Just-So Stories. The author of Seeing Like a State casts a skeptical eye on the conventional wisdom about the cradle of civilization.” Reason (November 26).
Singh, Manvir. 2022. “The idea of primitive communism is as seductive as it is wrong.” Aeon (April 19).
SUGGESTED LINKS
REQUIRED VIDEOS
We will watch episode 3 of the PBS-National Geographic series on Guns, Germs and Steel : – video | – summary | – full transcript
1000 Years of European Border Changes
REQUIRED READINGS
Lecture 10
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Chapters 15-16
Berney, Leila. 2014. “Polynesian Migration Mystery Solved.” Australian Geographic (October 1).
Wade, Lizzie. 2013. “Clues to Prehistoric Human Exploration Found in Sweet Potato Genome.” ScienceNOW (January 21).
Newitz, Annalee. 2016. “First Discovery of 50,000-year-old Human Settlements in Australian Interior.” Ars Technica (November 2).
Carne, Nick. 2020. “Settlers Arrived in East Polynesia Earlier than Thought.” Cosmos (April 8).
Timmer, John. 2021. “Denisovans may have met us in the Pacific. Different island populations also intermingled in complex ways.” Ars Technica (April 19).
Lecture 11
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Chapters 17-19. For those of you who have a 2003 (or later) edition of the book, read the “2003 Afterword: Guns, Germs and Steel Today.” For those of you who have an earlier edition, read “How To Get Rich,” A Talk by Jared Diamond, June 7, 1999.
Callaway, Ewen. 2020. “Ancient African Genomes offer Glimpse into Early Human History.” Nature News (January 23).
Editorial Team. 2018. “The Bantu Migration: the irony of “them” and “us” thinking.” Think Africa (October 30).
SUGGESTED READINGS
•Australia – Papua New Guinea
Media Team. 2016. “The Genetic History of Aboriginal Australians and Papuans.” Wellcome Sanger Institute (September 21).
Taylor, Rebe. 2008. “The polemics of making fire in Tasmania: the historical evidence revisited.” Aboriginal History 32: 1-26.
Collard M, Vaesen K, Cosgrove R, Roebroeks W. 2016″ The empirical case against the ‘demographic turn in Palaeolithic archaeology.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 371: 20150242.
Smith, Lewis. 2013. “Migrants from India settled in Australia 4,000 years ago before Captain Cook’s arrival (and they took their dingos with them).” Daily Mail (January 15).
•Chinese History
“Chinese writing ‘8,000 years old’.” BBC News, May 18, 2007.
•African History
Diop-Maes, Louise Marie. 2008. “What Slavery Did To Africa.” The Toronto Star, February 3.
> South Africa
History of South Africa on Historyworld.net
“In Focus: The Battle of Blood River, 16 December 1838.” South African History Online.
Cmdt S. Bourquin, DWD. “The Zulu Military Organization and the Challenge of 1879.” Military History Journal, Vol 4 No 4.
Major (Dr) Felix Machanik. “Firepower and Firearms in the Zulu War of 1879.” Military History Journal, Vol 4 No 6.
Tomaselli, Keyan G. 2003. “Shaka Zulu and Visual Constructions of History.” Screening the Past, June 30.
Hale, Frederick. “The Defeat of History in the Film Zulu.” Military History Journal, Vol 10 No 4.
“African languages,” Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“Bantu,” Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Manning, Patrick. “The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800. By Christopher Ehret. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002. 481 + xiv pp. Maps and illustrations. $22.50 (paper).” Journal of World History, Vol. 15, Issue 2.
Oppenheimer, Stephen. “Myths of British Ancestry.” Prospect Magazine, October 2006.
Webb, James L. A. 2005. “Malaria and the Peopling of Early Tropical Africa.” Journal of World History, Vol. 16, Issue 3.
Suggested video
NaturalHistoryDK . 2017. The genetic history of Aboriginal Australians.
SUGGESTED LINKS
REQUIRED VIDEOS
McCloskey, Deirdre. 2014. “Why Does 1% of History Have 99% of the Wealth?” Learn Liberty.
Marginal Revolution University. 2016. “The Importance of Institutions.”
“Human Population Through Time.” 2016. American Museum of Natural History (October).
Cynical Historian. 2019. African History Disproves “Guns Germs and Steel” by Jared Diamond (October 26).
Malaria – What is history’s deadliest pandemic? The Economist.
REQUIRED READINGS
Jared Diamond on geography and political institutions
Diamond, Epilogue.
Diamond, Jared. 2012. “What Makes Countries Rich or Poor?” (Review of Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson), The New York Review of Books, June 7.
Burkeman, Oliver. 2014. “Jared Diamond: ‘Humans, 150,000 years ago, wouldn’t figure on a list of the five most interesting species on Earth.” The Guardian (October 24).
Supporters of Diamond
Laitin, David D. Joachim Moortgat and Amanda Lea Robinson. 2012. “Geographic Axes and the Persistence of Cultural Diversity.” PNAS 109(26): 10263-10268.
Critics of Diamond
Blaut, James. 1999, “Environmentalism and Eurocentrencism,” The Geographical Review 89 (3): 391-408.
McNeill, J.R. 2001, “The World According to Jared Diamond,” The History Teacher 34 (2).
Callahan, Gene. 2005, “The Diamond Fallacy,” Mises Institute Website, March 28.
Barker, Jean E. 2005. “The Christian roots of capitalism.” San Francisco Chronicle, December 25.
Hanson, Victor Davis. 2005. “Decline and Fall.” National Review (March 28).
Acemoglu, Daron and James Robinson. 2012. “The Great Debate: No, A nation’s Geography is not its Destiny.” Reuters (March 19).
Taylor, Peter Shawn. 2019. “Was Cortés the conquistador a human-rights warrior?” National Post (February 19).
Antrosio, Jason, 2011. “Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond: Against History.” Living Anthropologically (First posted 7 July 2011. Last updated 18 February 2018.)
Deirdre McCloskey
McCloskey, Deirdre. 2021. “The West Didn’t Steal Its Way to Wealth.” National Review (December 27).
McCloskey, Deirdre N. 2018. “Slavery did not Make America Rich.” Reason (August-September).
McCloskey, Deirdre. 2015. “The Great Enrichment.” National Review (November 19).
Joel Mokyr
Mokyr, Joel. 2016. “Progress Isn’t Natural. Humans Invented It-and not that long ago.” The Atlantic (November 17).
Others
-Historical Analysis
Rees, Amanda. 2020. “Are There Laws of History?” Aeon (May 12).
-Slavery
Boudreaux, Don. 2005. “Capitalism and Slavery.” Pittsburgh Tribune (February 17).
Carden, Art. 2020. “Slavery Did Not Enrich Americans.” AIER (June 25).
-Political Organization
McMaken, Ryan. 2020. ““Political Anarchy” Is How the West Got Rich.” Mises Wire (March 4).
Davies, Stephen. 2020. “Good Riddance to the Roman Empire. Maybe Rome needed to disintegrate before the West could grow wealthy.” Reason (March).
Ridley, Matt. 2016. “Free Movement of Genius was Crucial to Europe’s Prosperity.” The Rational Optimist (December 17).
Passey, Eamon. 2023. “What Medieval China Teaches Us about Overregulating Innovation. European powers established their dominance through the very technologies that China repressed” Human Progress (August 17).
-Market institutions
Tupy, Marian. 2016. “Africa is Growing Thanks to Capitalism.” Cap X (July 22).
Sanandaji, Nima. 2018. “The “Laffer Curve” Was Discovered by a Medieval Islamic Philosopher.” Fee.org (May 31).
Tupy, Marian L. 2017. “How Africa Got Left Behind.” CapX (April 17).
Carden, Art. 2020. “Why We Are Wealthy.” AIER (January 2).
•Environment and Diseases
– Malaria
— Facts and History
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
– About Malaria
– The History of Malaria, An Ancient Disease
– Eradication of Malaria in the United States (1947-51)
Our World in Data. Malaria: One of the leading causes of child deaths, but progress is possible and you can contribute to it.
Jarvis, Brooke. 2019. “How Mosquitoes Changed Everything.” New Yorker (July 29).
Tupy, Marian. 2021. “Humanity’s Most Ancient Enemy May Be on Its Way Out. Thanks to COVID-19, few have noted the emergence of an amazing new malaria vaccine.” Human Progress (July 9).
Roland, Charles G. 2015/2006. “Malaria.” Canadian Encyclopedia.
– Climate Change and Malaria
Reiter, Paul. 2008. “Global warming and malaria: knowing the horse before hitching the cart,” Malaria Journal, Volume 7 (Suppl 1):S3, Dec. 11.
“Trying to Hit a Mosquito with a Sledgehammer.” World Climate Report, June 8, 2010.
SUGGESTED READINGS
• Supporters of Diamond
Bologna Pavlik, Jamie and Young, Andrew T., 2018. “Did Technology Transfer More Rapidly East-West than North-South?” or here.
• Other Critics of Jared Diamond
Brätland’s, John. 2009. “Geography as Causal in Societal Ascendance: An Austrian Retrospective on Diamond.” Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 12 (4): 46-63.
Barnett, Jerry. 2021. “Guns, Germs, and Steel is a Powerful Anti-Racist Book. So Why Doesn’t the Left Love It?” Quillette (October 3).
Jaschik, Scott. 2005. “‘Guns, Germs, and Steel’ Reconsidered.” Inside Higher Ed, August 3.
Jones, Leslie. 1998. “Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs And Steel; The Fates Of Human Societies, Jonathan Cape, 1997, £18. 99, pp 480.” Galton Institute Home Page (February).
McNeill, William H. 2003. “History Upside Down.” Gene Expression, November 11.
Sluyter, Andrew. 2003. “Neo-Environmental Determinism, Intellectual Damage Control, and Nature/Society Science,” Antipode 35 (4): 813-817(5)
Judkins, Gabriel, Marissa Smith, Eric Keys (2008). “Determinism Within Human-Environment Research and the Rediscovery of Environmental Causation.” The Geographical Journal 174 (1) , 17–29.
Heidt, Amanda. 2024. “An ancient, massive urban complex has been found in the Ecuadorian Amazon.” Science News (January 11).
Anonymous. 2022. “Lost cities of Bolivia: Rethinking prehistoric life in the Amazon.” The Past (September 20).
[For more recent debates on the importance or irrelevance of geography for economic development, see lecture 1, suggested readings, especially the recent debate between Jeffrey Sachs and Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson].
Koyama, Mark and Jared Rubin. 2022. How the World Became Rich. Polity.
• About Deirdre McCloskey
Carden, Art and Deirdre McCloskey. 2018. “How the West got Rich by Following the ‘Four R’s.’” CapX (May 25).
Jone, Eric. 2017. “Economic Growth as the Child of Literature and Ethics: Deirdre McCloskey’s ‘Bourgeois Era’ Trilogy.” Economic Affairs 37 (1) (February).
Emmett, Ross B. 2016. “The Chicago School Student of Bourgeois Civilization.” Man and the Economy 3 (2): 213-224.
Young, Andrew T. 2017. “How the City Air Made Us Free: The Self-Governing Medieval City and the Bourgeoisie Revaluation“.
McMahon, Darrin. 2016. “The Morality of Prosperity.” Wall Street Journal (June 12).
Cox, Wendell. 2016. “Deirdre McCloskey’s Tricke-Out Economics.” New Geography (October 15).
McCloskey, Deirdre. N. 2017. “Excuses for Statism, and for Staying Poor.” Cato Online Forum (April 4).
McCloskey, Deirdre. 2006. “Bourgeois Virtues?” Cato Policy Report (May/June).
McCloskey, Deirdre N. 2016. “The Formula for a Richer World? Equality, Liberty, Justice.” New York Times (September 2).
• About Joel Mokyr
Swanson, Ann. 2016. “Why the Industrial Revolution didn’t happen in China.” Washington Post (October 2).
Mokyr, Joel. 2012. “How Europe Became so Rich.” Aeon (February 15).
• Others
Koyama, Mark and Jared Rubin. 2022. How the World Became Rich. Polity. (Book Review: How the World Became Rich – by Davis Kedrosky).
van de Haar, Edwin. 2022. “The Dutch Roots of Capitalism (Review of Pioneers of Capitalism by Maarten Prak and Jan Luiten van Zanden).” Law and Liberty (November 8).
Raico, Ralph. 1994. “The Theory of Economic Development and the European Miracle.” in Peter Boettke (ed.) The Collapse of Development Planning, New York University Press.
Phelps, Edmund S. 2017. “The Dynamism of Nations: Toward a Theory of Indigenous Innovation.” Capitalism and Society, Vol. 12 [2017], Iss. 1, Art. 3. (See also Carl Christian von Weizsäcker, “Comment on ‘The Dynamism of Nations: Elements of a Theory of Indigenous Innovation’ (by Edmund Phelps).” Capitalism and Society: Vol. 12: Iss. 1, Article 8.)
Stark, Rodney W. 2005. “How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and the Success of the West.” The Chronicle of Higher Education 52 (15) (December 2): B11.
• Historical lock-ins and QWERTY
Gandy, Anthony. 2014. “QWERTY – Kay’s analysis of a non sub-optimal standard.” NEP-HIS Blog (April 16).
• Slavery
McLaughlin, Dan. 2022. “American Slavery in the Global Context.” National Review (January 6).
Magness, Phillip. 2022. “Free Markets, Not Slave Markets.” National Review (January 6).
Wright, Gavin. 2022. “Slavery and the Rise of the Nineteenth-Century American Economy.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 36 (2): 123-148.
• Malaria
– Substantial Pieces
Wikipedia – Malaria
WHO 2022 Malaria Report
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The History of Malaria, An Ancient Disease
Zeldovich , Lina. 2020. “Cracking the Malaria Mystery—from Marshes to Mosquirix.” JSTOR Daily (April 21).
Rodrigues, Priscila. T et al. 2018. “Human Migration and the Spread of Malaria Parasites to the New World.” Scientific Reports 8, Article number: 1993.
Bagnato, Andrea. Unknown. 2017. “Mapping Malaria in Italy.” Canadian Centre for Architecture – Articles (Issue 23: Take Care).
Roberts, Donald, Richard Tren. 2010. “DDT in Malaria Control: Roberts and Tren Respond.” Environmental Health Perspectives 118 (7): A283.
Packard, Randall M. 2009. “‘Roll Back Malaria, Roll in Development’? Reassessing the Economic Burden of Malaria.” Population and Development Review, Volume 35, Issue 1, Pages 53 – 87.
[Note: Project MUSE – Disease, Colonialism, and the State in the list is not referenced properly. It should instead be Yip, Ka-che (ed.). 2009. Disease, Colonialism and the State: Malaria in Modern East Asian History. Hong Kong University Press].
Bleakley, Hoyt. 2007. “Malaria Eradication in the Americas: A Retrospective Analysis of Childhood Exposure.” August 17.
Krupke, Christian et al. 2007. “Professional Entomology and the 44 Years since Silent Spring. Part 2: Response to Silent Spring.” American Entomologist (Spring).
Kumar, Sanjai Ph.D. 2006. “Global Problem of Malaria, Biology of Malaria Parasites and Implications for Transfusion-Transmitted Malaria and Detection Methods.” Center for Biologics Research and Review Food and Drug Administration, Malaria Workshop, July 12.
Anelli, Carol M. et al. 2006. “Professional Entomology and the 44 Years since Silent Spring. Part 1.” American Entomologist (Winter).
Hay, Simon I. and Robert W Snow. 2006. “The Malaria Atlas Project: Developing Global Maps of Malaria Risk.” PLoS Med. 3(12): e473.
Arrow, Kenneth J., Claire Panosian, and Hellen Gelband. 2004. Saving Lives, Buying Time: Economics of Malaria Drugs in an Age of Resistance. The National Academies Press, 388 pp.
Reiter, Paul. 2003, “Could Global Warming Bring Mosquito-Borne Disease to Europe?” In Kendra Okonski (ed.), Adapt or Die: The Science, Politics and Economics of Climate Change, Profile Books, pp. 19-38.
Carter, Richard, and Kamini N. Mendis. 2002. “Evolutionary and Historical Aspects of the Burden of Malaria.” Clinical Microbiology Reviews (October) p. 564-594, Vol. 15, No. 4.
Hay, Simon I., Carlos A. Guerra, Andrew J. Tatem, Abdisalan M. Noor and Robert W. Snow. 2004. “The Global Distribution and Population at Risk of Malaria: Past, Present, and Future.” Lancet Infectious Diseases 4 (6): 327-336.
Heaton, Leonard D. Medical Department, United States Army, Preventive Medicine In World War II, Volume VI – Communicable Diseases: Malaria, Medical Department, United States Army.
Reiter, Paul. 2001. “Climate Change and Mosquito-Borne Disease.” Environmental Health Perspectives Supplements, Volume 109, Number S1 (March).
Reiter, Paul. 2000. “From Shakespeare to Defoe: Malaria in England in the Little Ice Age,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 6(1).
Marten, Pim and Lisbeth Hall. 2000. “Perspective: Malaria on the Move: Human Population Movement and Malaria Transmission.” Emerging Infectious Diseases 6 (2).
Snow, Bob & John Ouma, “Report prepared for Roll Back Malaria, Resource Network on Epidemics, World Health Organisation.” July 1999.
Anonymous. 1937. “Reclaiming the Pontine Marshes.” Wonders of the World of Engineering 1 (2).
Wiser, Mark. “Plasmodium Species Infecting Humans.” Tulane University.
– Popular Articles
Berlau, John. 2006. “The Case of the DDT Deniers – Kenya Crazy Talk.” National Review Online, November 29.
Cotton, Simon. “The Mighty Quinine.” Molecule of the Month.
“DDT and Attacks on Rachel Carson: The CliffsNote Version.” Bug Girl’s Blog, June 29, 2007.
Dobson, Mary. 1999. “The History of Malaria in England.” The Wellcome Trust, December 1st.
Driessen, Paul. 2008. “Killing Malarial Mosquitos Now!” Townhall.com, October 4.
Dugger, Celia W. 2006. “W.H.O. Supports Wider Use of DDT vs. Malaria.” The New York Times, September 16.
Finkel, Michael. 2007. “Stopping A Global Killer.” National Geographic (July).
Gladwell, Malcom. 2001. “The Mosquito Killer.” Gladwell.com, July 2.
Greenwood, Brian. 2006. “Lessons from Italy.” Nature, 441, 933-934, 22 June.
Dr. Miller, Henry I. and Gregory Conko. 2006. “The UN vs. Technology.” Tech Central Station, April 7.
Muir-Cochrane, Ian. 2005. “WHO malaria figures are ‘flawed’.” BBC News, August 30.
Paul, Marla. 2007. “Researchers Discover Surprising Drug that Blocks Malaria.” EurekAlert!, January 15.
Reiter, Paul. 2007. “Dangers of Disinformation.” International Herald Tribune, January 11.
Reiter, Paul. 2007, “It’s Tires, Not Global Warming.” The Korea Times, October 4.
Reiter, Paul. 2007. “Global Warming Won’t Spread Malaria.” EIR Science & Environment, April 7.
Sandle, Tim. 2014. “Why do Some Mosquitoes Carry Malaria?” Digital Journal (December 3).
WHO. Malaria Fact sheet N°94. April 2012.
Ziegler, Michelle. 2012. “Mapping Malaria in Anglo-Saxon England.” Contagions (February 5).
> Malaria in Ontario
- Shorter pieces
Bradburn, Jamie. 2021. “‘Then the shaking begins’: When malaria was a fact of life in Ontario. During the late 18th and much of the 19th century, Ontarians faced a different kind of variant — one carried by a buzzing, biting threat.” TVO.org (October 27).
Marmora Historical Foundation. 2016. “Malaria? Here? Really?” (November 22).
British Library. 2012. “Malaria in Ontario: a World Malaria Day post” (April 25).
McManus, Paul. 2007. “Malaria in Canada?” Mysteries in Canada, October 30.
Wayson, Ken W. 2007. “Malaria – A Rideau Mythconception.” Rideau Reflections, Winter/Spring Ed.
“History of the Rideau Lockstations – Malaria on the Rideau.”
- Academic articles
Berrang-Ford, Lea et al. 2009. « Climate change and malaria in Canada: a systems approach.” Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Infectious Diseases 2009:385487.
Fallis, A. Murray. 1984. “Malaria in the 18th and 19th centuries in Ontario.” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 1:2: 25-38.
The Dutch Roots of Capitalism – (lawliberty.org)
• DDT and other insects and diseases
“Bed Bugs.” University of Kentucky Entomology.
-Environment and Diseases
— Eradication Strategies
Driessen, Paul. 2010. “Three Billion and Counting.” Townhall (September 11).
Roberts, Donald. 2010. “A Feverish Malthusian Defends Malaria as a Non-Problem.” 21st Century Science and Technology (Winter): 42-46.
Administrator. 2014. “A Knockout Punch against Malaria? Maybe.” ACSH Dispatch.
Vezina, Kenrick. 2015. “Malaria Vaccine? Genetic Engineering turns Parasite into Vaccine Candidate.” Genetic Literacy Project (January 4).
– Other diseases
Goldstein,Richard. 2010. “René Le Berre, Entomologist Who Fought River Blindness, Is Dead at 78.” The New York Times, December 17.
Sridhar, Arvind. 2015. “How Does Geography Impact the Ebola Virus?” About.com (September 20).
SUGGESTED LINKS
• Natural Experiments as Research Methods
Distinguished Science Lecture Series, The Skeptics Society in California (2010). “Dr. Jared Diamond – Natural Experiments of History.”
Special Issue of Antipode (volume 35, no. 4, 2003): Review Symposium: Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel.
J. M. Blaut, Eight Eurocentric Historians, Guilford Press, 228 pp., August 2000.
WHO | Control of Neglected Tropical Diseases is Feasible
• Malaria
3 Billion and Counting (movie)
A special issue of the Malaria Journal on “Towards a research agenda for global malaria elimination.”
aBetterEarth.Org – Insecticides, DDT, and the Malaria Epidemic
The Malaria Website of the Wellcome Trust
Malaria Site: Comprehensive Malaria Website
The History of Malaria, an Ancient Disease
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The History of Malaria, An Ancient Disease
Our World in Data – Malaria
Barcelona Institute of Global Health. “Malaria Treatment.”
Malaria Consortium: Malaria: blood, sweat, and tears. (A photographic exhibition by Adam Nadel).