Charles Mann's mission: How the Amherst-based author seeks to influence the telling of history
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In 1983, Charles C. Mann was a reporter on assignment for Science Magazine, traveling with a team of scientists studying what was thought to be the thinning of the planet's ozone layer, when the group's plane made a stop in Mexico.
The plane was in need of scheduled maintenance. But the repairs had an unintended benefit: They afforded Mann a few days of free time that would ultimately change his career.
At the recommendation of hotel staff in Merida, Mann rented a VW bus and set off to see the ruins of Chichen Izta and Uxmal, ancient Mayan cities which had dominated the Yucatan Peninsula at various points prior to the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century.
Mann had lived in Rome in the 1970s and was not unaccustomed to the grandeur of the remains of empires gone by. Still, he was not prepared for what he encountered.
"My socks were knocked off," Mann said in a recent interview at his home in Amherst. "I am not an art critic or anything, but I looked at these ruins and thought, these look to me as sophisticated aesthetically as the Roman stuff, although really different.
"I thought, 'Wait a minute. In my school we learned about Romans.' .... But I don't recall the word Maya ever having been said in my education and that's my own hemisphere."
Mann's work in following years would try to correct that imbalance.
Rethinking globalization
It is a hot July afternoon and Mann is sitting at his kitchen table in Amherst, sipping a cappuccino, talking about his writing. Next month, his seventh book, "1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created," will be published by Random House.
The book is about how globalization began, Mann says. "I argue, and I think I am representing a lot of researchers, that globalization is best thought of as a biological phenomenon and not an economic one. And it's not one that started 15 years ago when we started losing jobs to China, but almost 500 years ago with Columbus."
"1493" comes on the heels of Mann's much-acclaimed "1491: New Revelations of America Before Columbus," published in 2006. That book relies on scientific, archaeological and anthropological research to paint what The New York Times Book Review proclaimed a "sweeping portrait of human life in the Americas before the arrival of Columbus." The National Academies named it the book of 2006.
"I look for something that is longer-term deeper stuff, partly because that is what interests me and partly because I can't compete on the shorter term stuff," Mann says. "I'm the sole proprietor so to speak. I am not an institution. I can't cover what everyone else is covering. If there are 20 people on it, I can't make a living that way."
As Mann says this his wife, Ray, laughs quietly. This is, after all, a man who recently penned his third cover story for National Geographic in almost as many years. The latest story, in the June issue, concerns the discovery of the world's oldest known temple at Gobkli Tepe in Turkey and its potential to drastically change the historical narrative about how human beings came to live in permanent village settings.
"You're being incredibly self-deprecating," Ray, an architect, tells her husband. "What you're really doing is making connections to things we don't realize we are connected to, even now. Like 1491, how we use land now is connected to how we used land centuries ago. And we don't have a historical memory to do that."
Mann readily agrees. He said that when he traveled to Brazil to research the history of the indigenous peoples there, he learned that not only did they get a raw deal in the past, they are getting one now. "And part of it is we simply think of them as having vanished - them and all their works never existed, so to speak. It's just not true.
"You only have to talk to a few native people to realize they are upset about this place they have lived and shaped for hundreds of years being called a wilderness," Mann continues. "I felt in that way a sense of mission."
Early inspiration
Mann was born in 1955, the son of a corporate executive. The family moved around a lot before settling in the Seattle area when he was 12. His father bought a marina there and young Charles worked for his dad, washing boats and doing other tasks.
Along the way, he developed a respect for the Pacific Northwest's still-thriving Native American community and its culture. At art museums in Seattle and Victoria, British Columbia, he marveled at "unbelievably sophisticated designs" created by indigenous artists.
He went on to attend Amherst College, where he majored in math and biology. But when graduation day came, he decided against going into either field. Instead he headed to Rome, where he found work at an English language newspaper, the International Daily News. In his first year at the paper he served as the sports editor. Italian sports proved quite a shock. Going to his first Roma-Lazio game - the inter-city rivalry between Rome's two biggest soccer teams - he "stupidly sat between the boundary of the Roma and Lazio fans."
"I didn't know," Mann said laughing. "There were people drawing guns. It was really hard to pay attention to the game."
After two years at the International Daily News, Mann moved to New York in the early 1980s.
"I thought I'd do some freelancing work while I found a job. I never found one. I'm still looking," he said.
Mann has written for a number of national publications, including Science, The Atlantic Monthly and Wired magazine. He met Ray when the two were teammates on a Central Park softball team.
The couple, who have three children, moved to Amherst in the early 1990s in search of a place with good libraries that was not too far from New York.
Seeds of change
Today, Mann is something of an expert when it comes to pre-Columbian America and, more broadly, the changes that followed the explorer's arrival in the Caribbean.
Michael Sugerman, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said "1491" was widely hailed by the academic community, not because it came to any great new conclusions, but because Mann successfully translated widely held academic theories into a narrative aimed at the general public.
"Most 'popularizers' of academic research tend to do a very superficial job and the researchers are usually unhappy with the result because the debates are simplified and often reduced to a kind of "he said/she said" presentation," Sugerman said.
"Mann, on the other hand, did a great deal of research and presented the debates in all their complexity, while maintaining a powerful, interesting narrative that can be followed by non-academic readers," he said.
A consistent theme throughout Mann's work is the idea that the trade of animals and plants between the Eastern and Western hemispheres led to a series of dramatic biological changes that forged a new world, both ecologically and economically.
These changes also gave Europeans an advantage over the native peoples they encountered in places like the Americas, Mann contends. The introduction of European crops and animals made the Americas more comfortable to Europeans colonists while also making it harder for indigenous people to continue their traditional ways of life, he said.
That idea plays a central role in "1493." He writes that Spanish explorer Miguel Lopez de Legazpi managed to accomplish something that Columbus tried but failed to do - establish overseas trade with China. In 1571 Legazpi founded Manila in the Philipines and from there traded silver mined by African slaves in South America for Chinese silk and porcelain.
The event is notable because it marks the first time that the world economy was completely intertwined, Mann said. But it also had a larger, unintended effect.
In the 1590s a Chinese merchant, Chen Zhenlong, brought sweet potatoes, introduced to the Philippines by the Spanish, to China. Until that point Chinese agriculture had been rice-intensive and centered around the deltas of the Yangtze and Huang He rivers. The vast majority of the country was dry and unsuitable for such crops, Mann said.
But the sweet potato changed that. The tuber thrived along dry hillsides. Its arrival coincided with the introduction of maize to China, which entered the country through Portuguese traders at Macao. The crop proved similarly suited to China's dry climate.
"Suddenly, not only are you growing stuff in the areas where you couldn't grow anything before, but it's fantastically productive," Mann said. "It was always a populous place, but this was the moment when China became China, the watchword for huge numbers of people. And it had a whole lot to do with the introduction of the sweet potato and maize."
Yet the Chinese made a series of beginners' mistakes in planting the new crops, Mann said. They planted them vertically along the hillsides, instead of horizontally. They deforested much of the land to make way for new crops. The result was erosion and massive flooding. Mann said he talked to one researcher who likened the situation to "one Katrina a month for 20 years."
The flooding helped weaken the Qing Dynasty, Mann said, opening the door for the British to essentially walk into the country unopposed before the dynasty's ultimate fall in 1911.
"That's what I mean when you talk about the biological consequences outstripping the financial consequences. It was important for China to have the silver trade," Mann said. "But the sweet potato and maize had far greater consequences."
Expanding the story
In the preface to "1493," Mann writes that historians "tended to explain Europe's spread across the globe almost entirely in terms of European superiority, social or scientific."
Mann wants to change that story.
"I kept waiting for that book to appear," Mann wrote in "1491." "The wait grew more frustrating when my son entered school and was taught the same things I had been taught, beliefs I knew had long been sharply questioned. Since nobody else appeared to be writing the book, I finally decided to try it myself."
In 2009 he released a children's book ended to introduce these ideas to a younger audience. Mann said part of his effort was aimed at educating teachers, who can put pressure on textbook publishers.
"I guess you always hope that if you write something that is true and good that you will have some impact," he said. "And so I hoped mine would give it a little nudge."
