One of the best aspects of studying history is being able to channel its power to crush myths and received wisdom alike. Among the many sobering revelations in recent years for me has been the absurd dysmorphia that exists between America’s self-styled status as an immigrant-friendly nation — a safe haven for the downtrodden for which the Statue of Liberty stands as an enduring symbol — and what our history, and indeed our present, actually shows. I’ve come to accept that, as a nation, we simply don’t embody the values so poignantly captured by Emma Lazarus. What I didn’t fully realize is the degree to which we never have, and how in fact we actively worked against them in favor of policies coded along racial lines. If her immortalized words represent something akin to a national credo, as generations of Americans have assumed, how come we never acted the part?

Caitlin Dickerson’s first story for The Atlantic looks at the history of immigration in the US. In speaking with dozens of scholars on the subject, she finds that our internal strife over whether to let in foreigners has existed from the country’s inception. As Caitlin demonstrates, and as our history relates with startling clarity, we’ve never been a nation that welcomed immigrants — excepting those of Northern and Western European descent. Our legacy is one in which immigrants of color were routinely and systematically deprioritized in terms of eligibility, and explicitly targeted for deportation and border enforcement.

A key point Caitlin makes is that our “nation of immigrants” tagline is only true in the most literal and superficial sense. What’s often left out of the narrative is how racialized our policy toward immigrants has always been. Examples abound of limiting immigration in a naked attempt to preserve America’s ‘whiteness’. From the 19th century onward, our government’s leaders pursued this immigration agenda with alacrity and made no attempt to conceal its singular purpose. Our history on immigration policy can thus be more accurately thought of as a history of racial exclusion, wherein only predefined ethnic groups were permitted access to the American dream.

I didn’t learn basically any of what’s covered in this article in grade school. And in talking with teacher friends of mine, that’s because it’s generally not covered in public school curricula, at least not in detailed fashion. I suspect it’s one reason why many of America’s founding myths are so pervasive: we haven’t allowed our history to speak for itself and properly debunk them. Even Trump’s maximally inhumane immigration policies were held up by opposing factions as a reason to return to a bygone era more in tune with the ideals and principles on which the country was supposedly founded. What Caitlin argues, rather, is that if we are to forge a better path for the future, we shouldn’t be looking to our own past for guidance, but should instead be using that history to improve upon the ideals we never bothered living up to in the first place.

Excerpts from America Never Wanted the Tired, Poor, Huddled Masses (emphasis mine):
 

“This forgetting has allowed the racism woven into America’s immigration policies to stay submerged beneath the more idealistic vision of the country as “a nation of immigrants.” That vision has a basis in truth: We are a multiethnic, multiracial nation where millions of people have found safety, economic opportunity, and freedoms they may not have otherwise had. Yet racial stereotypes, rooted in eugenics, that portray people with dark skin and foreign passports as being inclined toward crime, poverty, and disease have been part of our immigration policies for so long that we mostly fail to see them. “It’s in our DNA,” Romo says. “It’s ingrained in the culture and in the laws that are produced by that culture.”

[…]

“President Joe Biden’s immigration plan would make citizenship available to millions of unauthorized immigrants. Democratic members of Congress rallying behind it have said it would establish a more inherently American system, arguing implicitly that the Trump administration’s often overtly stated preference for white immigrants, or no immigrants at all, was an aberration from the past. “To fix our broken immigration system, we must pass reforms that reflect America’s values,” Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a co-sponsor of the proposed legislation, said in a statement introducing the bill. “For too long, our immigration system has failed to live up to the ideals and principles our nation was founded on,” said Senator Alex Padilla of California, another co-sponsor. But Donald Trump’s immigration agenda was executed without a single change to laws already passed by Congress, and his rhetoric and policies were consistent with most of American history. “The Trump era magnified the problem, but the template was there,” Rose Cuison-Villazor, a scholar of immigration law at Rutgers University, told me.”

[…]

“As the country moves forward from the past four years of harsh immigration policies, it must reckon with a history that stretches back much further, and that conflicts with one of the most frequently repeated American myths. “This idea that somehow immigration was based on the principles stated on the Statue of Liberty? That never happened,” Romo said. “There has never been a color-blind immigration system. It’s always been about exclusion.”

[…]

“When the Pilgrims crossed the ocean to settle in the New World, they brought with them ideas that would evolve into “manifest destiny,” which held that the United States was a land that had been bestowed by God on Anglo-Saxon white people. In 1790, the first American Congress made citizenship available only to any “free white person” who had been in the country for at least two years. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act blocked Chinese immigrants—and in 1917, it was expanded to block most Asians living between Afghanistan and the Pacific. These laws were upheld numerous times by federal courts, including in a seminal Supreme Court case from 1922, in which the government prevailed by arguing that citizenship should be granted as the Founders intended: “only to those whom they knew and regarded as worthy to share it with them, men of their own type, white men.”

[…]

“To call America a nation of immigrants is not wrong, either as a factual statement or an evocation of American myth. But that fact coexists with this one: Over the past century, the United States has deported more immigrants than it has allowed in. Since 1882, it has deported more than 57 million people, most of them Latino, according to Adam Goodman, a historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago. No other country has carried out this many deportations. This “challenges that simplistic notion of a long tradition where the United States has welcomed immigrants,” Goodman told me.”

[…]

“There are legitimate debates to be had about how to balance economic, geopolitical, and humanitarian concerns in formulating immigration policy. But too often, such concerns have been invoked as euphemisms to disguise arguments that are really about race.”

[…]

“In moving toward the more inclusive system that some elected officials now say they want, the country would be not returning to traditional American values, but establishing new ones.”

 
 
Richard Pipes’ primer covers the waning years of tsarism in Russia and the deposition of Nicholas II, the ensuing Bolshevik Revolution and Lenin’s rise to power, and the re-constituted Russian state under Lenin. The book’s contents conclude shortly after Lenin’s death in 1924, aged 54. Naturally, the main “characters” here are Vladimir Lenin, the theoretical basis of Bolshevism, and the longstanding traditions of Russian society — the canvas on which Leninism was superimposed. Toward the end we do get some brief remarks on Stalin, including the historical responsibility due Lenin for the deeds of his successor, but this serves as more of an entrée that’s left for later Russian chronologies to flesh out.

One of the more controversial issues surrounding this era concerns the connection between Marxism and Leninism as implemented under the Bolshevik regime. Here I can report the author surprised me. Given his Reaganite credentials, not to mention his family’s status as Polish refugees following Germany’s invasion at the onset of the Second World War, I expected him to hew rather closely to the views of Martin Malia and other staunchly anti-communist historians who insist that Lenin- and Stalin-esque regimes are more or less a natural consequence of Marxist-socialist philosophy. Instead, Pipes argues quite persuasively that the events of the October Revolution and the regime that took the place of tsarism were a unique function of the cult of personality around Lenin combined with the legacy of patrimonialism and other structural factors native to Russian society.
 

Lenin with a group of commanders in the Red Square, May 25, 1919.

 
In effect, Pipes shows that the Bolsheviks were not very good Marxists, despite rhetorical protestations to the contrary from the leading acts. A key feature of Marxism is the transfer of power from the bourgeoisie (capitalist ruling class) to the proletariat (the unwealthy subjects that comprise the working class). Yet at seemingly every opportunity, the Bolsheviks altogether ignored the needs of the working class, instead prioritizing the needs of the Party and the retention and accretion of power at all costs. If the interests of Lenin & Co. happened to coincide with those of the proletariat underclass, that was all the better, but where the two were in conflict, the former saw fit to hang the latter out to dry.
 

“If Marxism means anything, it means two propositions: that as capitalist society matures it is doomed to collapse from inner contradictions, and that this collapse (“revolution”) is effected by industrial labor (“the proletariat”). A regime motivated by Marxist theory would at a minimum adhere to these two principles…[the Bolsheviks] distorted Marxism in every conceivable way.”

 
Some historians and philosophers go further and argue that we shouldn’t refer to the Bolshevik Revolution as a ‘revolution’ at all since it was more akin to a putsch or a coup by an extreme ideological minority. In contrast to the National Socialist Party in Germany, which attained influence by means of democratic consent thanks to right-leaning factions with which Hitler’s overtures primarily resonated, the Bolsheviks yielded only slim representation in government until their proximity to power improved through the use of force and subterfuge and they began stacking the deck in their favor. The peasant class, which made up some 80 percent of the Russian population at the time, was for the most part passively ambivalent about tsarism and harbored a deep mistrust of the Bolshevik intelligentsia behind the seizure of power that set Russia on a new path.
 

“The so-called “October Revolution” was a classic coup d’état. The preparations for it were so clandestine that when Kamenev disclosed in a newspaper interview a week before the event was to take place, that the party intended to seize power, Lenin declared him a traitor and demanded his expulsion. Genuine revolutions, of course, are not scheduled and cannot be betrayed.”

“[The philosopher Nicholas] Berdiaev, who viewed the Revolution primarily in spiritual terms, denied that Russia even had a Revolution: “All of the past is repeating itself and acts only behind new masks.”

 
In practice — from the perspective of the evidence from the regimes with which they’re associated, the recorded words, deeds, and policies of its leadership, and the documented effects on Russian society — Leninism-Stalinism or Bolshevism shared precious little in common with the philosophy it purported to embody, and is best viewed historically as a perversion of Marxist thought.
 

“Indisputably, the theories underpinning bolshevism, notably those of Karl Marx, were of Western origin. But it is equally indisputable that Bolshevik practices were indigenous, for nowhere in the West has Marxism led to the totalitarian excesses of Leninism-Stalinism…A cause that yields different results in differences circumstances can hardly serve as a sufficient explanation.

Marxism had libertarian as well as authoritarian strains, and which of the two prevailed depended on a country’s political culture…Marx’s notion of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” was sufficiently vague to be filled with the content nearest at hand, which in Russia was the historic legacy of patrimonialism. It was the grafting of Marxist ideology onto the sturdy stem of Russia’s patrimonial heritage that produced totalitarianism. Totalitarianism cannot be explained solely with reference to either Marxist doctrine or Russian history; it was the fruit of their union.

In view of these facts, ideology has to be treated as a subsidiary factor—an inspiration and a mode of thinking of the new ruling class, perhaps, but not a set of principles that either determined its actions or explains them to posterity. As a rule, the less one knows about the actual course of the Russian revolution, the more inclined one is to attribute a dominant influence to Marxist ideas.”

 
In the end, Leninism conformed strikingly closely to its predecessor, tsarism. This suggests that Lenin and his fellow travelers borrowed from familiar themes and practices employed by tsarist autocracy as well as gradually created the conditions to stretch them further. In doing so, they supplanted one form of totalitarianism with another, and in several respects eclipsed the repressive nature of earlier regimes.
 

“Tsarist patrimonialism rested on four pillars: (1) autocracy—that is, personal rule unconstrained by either constitution or representative bodies; (2) the autocrat’s ownership of the country’s resources, which is to say, the virtual absence of private property; (3) the autocrat’s right to demand unlimited services from his subjects, resulting in the lack of either collective or individual rights; and (4) state control of information. A comparison of tsarist rule at its zenith with the Communist regime as it looked by the time of Lenin’s death reveals unmistakable affinities.”

 
Finally, the relationship of Leninism to Stalinism, including how best to apportion responsibility for Stalin’s stint as potentate and the carnage that ensued, is among the most hotly debated issues by historians and philosophers alike. I think it’s fair to say from the available evidence that a substantial portion of the blame for Stalin can be placed at Lenin’s feet. After all, Stalin was Lenin’s protégé, with the latter virtually handing the former a “free and clear” dictatorship on a silver platter.

Their governance style, moreover, differed more in terms of degree than substance or practices. Both were uncompromising despots, but Stalin’s outgroup was wider. Where Lenin tried to court ethnic minorities during his rule (even if his doing so amounted to insincere gestures layered in pretext), Stalin outright anathematized those same groups and incorporated them into his systematic persecution of political dissidents.
 

“That in the last months of his active life Lenin developed doubts about Stalin and came close to breaking off personal relations with him should not obscure the fact that until that moment he had done everything in his power to promote Stalin’s ascendancy…Stalin was the only person who belonged to all three of the ruling organs of the Central Committee: the Politburo, the Orgburo, and the Secretariat… Lenin ensured that the man who controlled the central party apparatus controlled the Party and through it the state. And that man was Stalin…There is no indication that he ever saw Stalin as a traitor to his brand of communism.

Beyond the strong personal links binding the two men, Stalin was a true Leninist in that he faithfully followed his patron’s political philosophy and practices. Every ingredient of what has come to be known as Stalinism saved one—murdering fellow Communists—he had learned from Lenin, and that includes the two actions for which he is most severely condemned: collectivization and mass terror. Stalin’s megalomania, his vindictiveness, his morbid paranoia, and other odious personal qualities should not obscure the fact that this ideology and modus operandi were Lenin’s. A man of meager education, he had no other model or source of ideas.”

 
Whereas the belief that German history would have taken the same course sans Hitler is far from assured, the case for Russia leaving a fundamentally different mark on world events without Stalin at the helm is less straightforward, to say the least. Had Lenin lived longer, we have almost every reason to believe that another two or three decades in power would have produced outcomes not unlike the history we have now. Lenin, after all, was the mastermind behind the Soviet Union and laid the foundations for the escalating inhumanity and cruelty Stalin later brought to fruition.

Note: This review is mirrored over at Goodreads and at Amazon.

Further reading:

• The Day That Shook the World
• Does the Russian Revolution have any relevance today?
• October by China Miéville review – a brilliant retelling of the Russian Revolution
• What If the Russian Revolution Had Never Happened?
• Top 10 books about the Russian Revolution

Feature image credit: Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images

 
 
Confirmation bias has taken many victims over the years. And it’s a sure bet that anyone who parrots David Barton is one of them. Best known for providing inaccurate portrayals of the religious views of the founders of this nation, Barton’s fact-deprived tales have found vast refuge in the religious right of America. Glenn Beck (who penned the foreword) has even called him “one of the most important men alive today.” If only.

The Texan native claims to be rescuing history, despite no formal training in the subject. (Barton has a bachelor’s degree in religious education from Oral Roberts University.) His books and sundry guest appearances regularly feature ideas at odds with field consensus and well-established facts, such as the claim that America was founded not as a constitutionally secular democracy but as an explicitly Christian nation. According to Barton, Jefferson and his co-founders wanted more religion, not less, in the public sphere, information that’s somehow been suppressed by a liberal, anti-Christian educational agenda. These and other similar claims may be historically untenable, but such rhetoric is music to many evangelical ears.

Barton’s reputation as a serial disinformer came to a head when his 2012 book, ironically titled The Jefferson Lies, was recalled for historical malpractice four months after publication. The book’s release was met with a blitz of controversy when it was found that he literally fabricated several of the quotes that appear in the book. As many as a dozen quotations had no primary source to support them. The History News Network later called it “the least credible history book in print.” After additional alarms were raised by actual historians pointing out the spurious content of the book, including two exposés on NPR, publisher Thomas Nelson promptly pulled it from shelves, citing a “loss of confidence”:
 

“The Thomas Nelson publishing company has decided to cease publication and distribution of David Barton’s controversial book, The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed about Thomas Jefferson, saying it has “lost confidence in the book’s details.”

Casey Francis Harrell, Thomas Nelson’s director of corporate communications, told me the publishing house “was contacted by a number of people expressing concerns about [The Jefferson Lies].” The company began to evaluate the criticisms, Harrell said, and “in the course of our review learned that there were some historical details included in the book that were not adequately supported. Because of these deficiencies we decided that it was in the best interest of our readers to stop the publication and distribution.”

 
Nelson’s Senior VP later told NPR, “The truth is, withdrawing a book from the market is extremely rare. It’s so rare I can’t think of the last time we’ve done this.” It’s true. Only in the worst cases of plagiarism or fabrication are works rescinded from publication. Barton is in exclusive company.

His record of spreading falsehoods extends beyond his single work on Jefferson. Barton’s website is littered with historical inaccuracies and his earlier DVD, “America’s Godly Heritage,” is a monument of lies and deceptions. Among his many howlers are that the American Revolutionary War was fought over slavery (it wasn’t), that the founders came down on the creationist side of the evolution-creationism debate (despite the awkward fact that Darwin’s masterstroke didn’t show up until a century later), that the Constitution quotes the Bible (it doesn’t), and that Ronald Reagan opposed the Brady Bill (he favored it). Such rampant revisionism may be best explained as evidence of pseudologia fantastica; the guy needs serious help.

Nor is it just those on the left who have come out in protest. Barton has been hounded even by the Christian right for his habitual whitewashing of American history, and in fact, they’ve been some of his loudest critics. Shortly after The Jefferson Lies was released, two professors at Grove City College (a conservative Christian school) published a rejoinder titled Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims about Our Third President. It’s essentially what you’d expect: a point-by-point refutation of the fact-averse mess Barton should have never churned out in the first place.

Even Jay Richards, a well-known creationist and senior fellow of the Discovery Institute, was so incensed by Barton’s impostures that he asked Gregg Frazer, a history professor at Master’s College, to write a rebuttal to Barton’s work. Yesterday, Warren Throckmorton uploaded Frazer’s full review on his site. In clear and certain terms, Frazer punctures the many distortions, half-truths, and false quotes popularized in the “America’s Godly Heritage” DVD.

It’s worth reading if only because you have one Christian disputing another’s patently idealized heritage of America. Not all Christians sweep inconvenient facts under the rug and invent fictions in their stead. Unlike Barton and his ilk, in other words, other Christians have academic and personal integrity.
 

“There is one type of glaring overstatement that permeates all of this video and Barton’s various works: he says “the Founders said” or “the Founders believed” or “the Founders wanted” or other broad, general references to “the Founders.” But the Founders were a diverse group of individuals who had various views about politics, religion, law, society and everything else. It is an overstatement and oversimplification to draw virtually any specific conclusion or make virtually any specific claim concerning “the Founders.” For one example: Barton says “this is what the Founders said” just before quoting George Mason at the Constitutional Convention. But this is just what one Founder said – and there would be great debate as to the appropriateness of citing him as representative of “the Founders” since he did not sign the Constitution. Barton continually begins sentences with “they felt” or “they said” or “they understood.” But “they” did not do any of those things collectively. “They” differed.

[…]

“This leads to one last area of concern in America’s Godly Heritage which can best be expressed as a question: Who counts as a “Founding Father?” This issue reappears frequently in Barton’s works. He seems to count anyone of whom he approves who was living at the time of the Revolution, the founding of the political system under the Constitution, or within fifty or sixty years of those times as a “Founding Father.” For example, he says that “the American Tract Society was started by the Founding Fathers.” First, not one of those listed as a Tract  Society founder signed the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. By what standard are they “Founding Fathers?” Furthermore, the Society was started in 1825 – 36 years after the Constitution was ratified. Madison was the last living framer and he died in 1836. How many Founding Fathers were even alive in 1825? Similarly, in his discussion of Vidal v. Girard, he said it was decided in “the time of the Founders.” It was decided in 1844 –55 years after the Constitution went into effect and, as was just mentioned, the last framer died in 1836! Barton refers to John Quincy Adams as a “Founding Father.” At the time of the Constitutional Convention, he was a 20 year-old just out of law school (he was 8 when the Declaration was signed) – by what standard is he a “Founding Father?” Barton also claims that the “Founding Fathers” established the New England Primer as a text, but the Founding Fathers did not establish any texts for schools – that was left to local communities to decide. Apparently, by Barton’s standards (whatever they are), local school boards were “Founding Fathers.” Finally, Barton says that the state constitutions indicate that the “Founding Fathers” wanted to be sure that Christians held public office. But the Founding Fathers, in Article VI of the Constitution, specifically disallowed any religious test for office. That would seem to be a strange and counterproductive prohibition to be put in place by those who want to ensure that Christians hold the various offices.”

 
Just as creationists subordinate modern science to the primacy of Bronze Age texts, so do ideologues like Barton warp history to suit their conservative religious agenda. It’s despicable, because he knows full well what he is doing — manipulating those predisposed to believe what he has to offer. The ultimate irony is that the founders he so blatantly refashions in his own narrow evangelical image would utterly despise him and everything he stands for.

Further reading:

• Publisher Pulls Controversial Thomas Jefferson Book, Citing Loss Of Confidence
• Genuine Christian Scholars Smack Down an Unruly Colleague
• David Barton, Christian Scholar, Faces a Backlash
• David Barton is wrong
• The Great Confrontation of 2012: David Barton and the Evangelical Historians
• Faux history for the GOP
• David Barton | Southern Poverty Law Center
• Christian Pseudo-Historian David Barton (Who Only Has a Bachelor’s Degree): “I’ve Got a Ph.D.”
• Antigay Pseudo-Historian David Barton Writing God-Filled Textbooks For Public Schools
• The Barton Lies: A Roundtable on the Career of Fundamentalists’ Favorite “Historian”
• Understanding the fake historian behind America’s religious right

Note: See also my review of The Jefferson Lies on Goodreads.

Feature image via Wallbuilders

 
 
What do Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and Francisco Pizarro have in common? Apart from their status as European countrymen, it was the fortuitous confluence of guns, microbes, and steel technology which all but ensured their success at colonizing regions occupied by peoples who lacked such historical fulcrums. It should be unsurprising, given this lethal mixture of offense, why invading states comprised of so few have been able to conquer, kill, or otherwise displace indigenous societies comprised of so many. These asymmetrical collisions suffuse human history, and it’s no secret that its retelling lends specific favor to Eurasian societies rather than those of other landmasses.

In Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Jared Diamond, famed anthropologist and author of The Third Chimpanzee, seeks to answer why history unfolded so differently among the various continents. Not contented with the proximate explanations above, Diamond forages deeper to uncover the ultimate explanations of why some societies procured that fateful triumvirate and why others did not. Pointedly then, why does history record Francisco Pizarro and his confederates storming the Inca Empire and capturing Emperor Atahuallpa in that momentous 1532 collision at Cajamarca instead of Atahuallpa and his band of warriors sailing east, assaulting the Spanish Empire and seizing King Charles I? Were there initial conditions which facilitated the depopulation of so much of the New World by so few of the Old?

Traditional solutions to these questions have revolved around genetic differences or innate disparities in race and intelligence. And it is these traditional explanations which Diamond hopes to sweep away. With a starting point at the tail end of the last ice age circa 13,000 years ago, Diamond takes a holistic approach to deconstructing the broad patterns of history. This is no picnic of a task. As Diamond himself points out, compressing 13,000 years of tightly coiled history into roughly 400 pages works out to “an average of about one page per continent per 150 years, making brevity and simplification inevitable.” (p. 408)

To Diamond’s great credit, Guns, Germs, and Steel represents the metamorphosis of a topic of impenetrable scope into a cohesive, well-supported and not overly prolix piece of historical literature. He begins by surveying the natural differences among the continents, noting the variations in ecological and biological diversity as well as the orientations of the main axes of the continents, all of which had deep import for the evolution of complex human societies, namely the divergence of larger food-producing cultures from smaller bands of hunter-gatherers.

As it turns out, the last ice age played a significant role in the course of our story. Compared with all other natural disasters, ice ages tend to have the most severe and lasting effects on the planet, dramatically disrupting not only climate but the chain of animal and plant life struggling to adapt to the changing circumstances. The Pleistocene drove countless of the planet’s large mammals to extinction, especially those indigenous to North America and Australia. Europe and Asia, on the other hand, suffered fewer local extinction events of their large animal species. Following the upheavals of the Pleistocene, a full thirteen of the major fourteen domestic mammals were confined to Eurasia.1 This propitious outcome presented more options for animal domestication, defined as the regulation of an animal’s breeding and food supply.
 

Of equal importance is the inequality of wild plant species distributed across the global landscape. Here again, one contender is lopsidedly advantaged in terms of ecological and topographical diversity. Home to the highest seasonal variation as well as the largest zones of temperate Mediterranean climate, Eurasia is saturated with the most diverse plant life.
 

Diamond discusses in detail the cultural shift from hunting and gathering to food-producing, emphasizing throughout that it was a gradual process. For those regions amenable to a new and more structured way of life, crop farming and pastoralism offered several benefits over the legacy lifestyle in terms of time, effort and payout. This precipitated an incremental transition from complete dependence on wild foods to a diet mainly supported by agriculture. Peoples inhabiting less fortunate regions of the globe either carried on as nomadic hunter-gatherers or were displaced by invading farmers. Australia is perhaps the best example: as the most infertile and biologically most impoverished of the continents, it has contained the largest population of hunter-gatherers into the modern era.

To illustrate the attendant, socially formative benefits of food production, Diamond enlists the reader on a voyage of deductive reasoning to link the various feedback loops at play. In low-res, highly paraphrased form, it can be sketched as follows: Whereas the hunter-gatherer existence was nomadic, food production gave rise to more sedentary societies. Farming also created food surpluses, which provided for denser human populations. With increases in human densities came a greater variety of roles to be filled within the community, facilitating the appearance of social hierarchy and political structure. At the same time, denser settlements meant more potential for crafting metal tools, inventing writing systems,2 and pioneering other technological leaps, while sedentism allowed for more time devoted to innovation and skill specialization.

In this way, food production served as a springboard for human innovation, which then radiated to surrounding populations. As the landmass with the most navigable terrain, Eurasia benefited its inhabitants by helping ease the spread of agricultural and other developments. When neighboring cultures convened to trade their goods and wares, technology and ideas were also exchanged, fostering competitive one-upsmanship and ratchet-scale modernization that would eventually sweep the region. Even more critical, when famine and other climate-triggered anomalies struck, Eurasia’s potential for east-west migration ensured that previous developments were maintained and that generational improvements in technology and social complexity kept marching onward.

The Invisible Ally

For all of its benefactions, the advent of agriculture around 8500 BCE sponsored a most pestilential side effect: increased human exposure to deadly microbes living inside domesticated animals and plants. Food-producing societies evolved resistances to these pathogens over time, or they were wiped out. First contact with foreign germs can upset the balance of a society more than any other contributing factor, and this is exactly what happened when colonizing agricultural societies encountered natives who did not share their immunities.

This was, in fact, the most important factor for each of the major collisions throughout history, including the fall of the millions-strong Aztec Empire by Cortes and his mere 600 men, as well as the largest population shift in all of human history: the initial 20 million North American indigenes being reduced by 95% in a matter of a century as a result of European conquest. In terms of their contribution to human depopulation, germs should clearly precede both guns and steel in the book’s title.

In sharp contrast with the heavily race-dependent, empirically vacuous speculations still in circulation, Diamond’s core idea is that geographic advantage proved the decisive factor in shaping the major outlines of history. Diamond links dominant cultures to the largest native palettes of domesticable biota and to the regions most congenial to technological diffusion. Thus while literacy, political organization, firearms, advanced ship technology, and infectious disease represent the proximate causes of Pizarro’s overthrow of the Inca Empire, Vasco da Gama’s success in East Africa, and countless other population shifts throughout history, Diamond insists it was their ancestors’ home turf and enduring success in cultivating the local flora and fauna which sit at the bedrock of history’s narrative.

As is the case with any work of this breadth, any implied monolithic pattern is fraught with qualification. Diamond is careful to mention caveats throughout, such as some of the difficulties involved with homogenizing Eurasia into a unified landmass. He notes that food production should not be synonymous with monotonic progress in any one category, referencing the Japanese injunction against firearms and China’s decommission of its maritime fleet in past centuries. The many nuances introduced throughout are a testament to Diamond’s attention to detail and responsible scholarship.

Closing Thoughts

One of the most fascinating gifts of history lies in the interactions among past peoples and their ripple effects down through the ages. Guns, Germs, and Steel sits above the vault of human history, providing first-stage explanations to account for its winners and losers. To a great extent, it furnishes a new hermeneutical lens by which to view history, or at the very least a soak test for assessing historical anecdotes. While Diamond was not the first to connect environmental factors to ruling states, GGS is one of the greatest syntheses of the encompassing subject matter released to date. He debunks with crack empiricism the alternative, largely racist hypotheses for history’s manifest imbalance of power, leaving a soundly reasoned case in their stead.

I can only add to the avalanche of praise that has been directed toward this book. Guns, Germs, and Steel has forever changed the way I view history and make sense of modern society. It is an academic read, to be sure, but I found it optimally dense so as not to turn away readers less interested in every detail. Some have dispraised Diamond’s repetition of common themes, but I personally found this helpful as it allowed the material to ossify more easily in my mind. The book also serves as a model of scientific rigor, with each chapter fastidiously referenced in the ending bibliography. 

If I had my say, this would be standard high school reading across the country. GGS makes the short list of books which demand to be read at least once. Polymathic in scope, unwavering in its cogency, Diamond has penned a major contribution to our historical understanding which has stood the test of time. I only wished I had read it sooner.
 

 
Note: This review is mirrored at Goodreads and Amazon.

Explore further: Guns, Germs, and Steel documentary (National Geographic)

1. While Eurasia hit the zoological jackpot with the royal flush of native oxen, sheep, goats, chickens, and pigs, the New World, comparatively, had little to recommend it: the turkey (the first animal indigenous to the Americas that was brought back to Europe), the llama (not as sinewy and rugged as the oxen of Europe), and bison (incompatible temperament compared with its cloven-hoofed counterparts from Europe) were among its greatest treasures. In terms of wild plant species, the Americas flourished in maize and select tubers (e.g., potatoes), but little else.
   
2. Writing emerged independently only very rarely, and possibly just twice: the Sumerians of Mesopotamia around 3200 BCE, known for their pictorial-style cuneiform, and the southern Mexican Indians sometime before 600 BCE. The two disputed independent appearances are Egyptian writing around 3200 BCE and Chinese writing around 2700-1300 BCE.
   

 
 
Sometimes a picture is worth (so much) more than a thousand words. This year an enterprising team launched a website called conflicthistory.com. With a bespoke reverse engineering of Google Maps, they put together a content-dense historical heatmap of the world’s major conflicts past and present. It was an instant hit for professionals and curious netizens alike, its bird’s eye perspective allowing for broad insights and a deeper understanding of history’s mosaic.

Unfortunately, the site is no longer functional. The domain is still registered and data still extant, but its creators have not updated the program to stay compatible with the latest Java and Flash platforms.

I took some time to jot down a few cursory thoughts from the assorted data that I will reproduce here. (And if anyone knows of an equally useful, functioning equivalent, please do let me know.)

• War and violent conflict appear to be permanent fixtures of human (and pre-human) civilization.

• Cold-climate regions appear to exhibit less conflict. Canada, Greenland and Iceland are the territories least encumbered by conflict. It’s completely absent from these states in the last century, for example.

• The three primary catalysts for conflict throughout human history are access to natural resources, economic trade, and political and religious differences. Middle East conflict has revolved almost entirely around oil and religious and ethnic incongruities. Nations that trade with one another are far less likely to engage in economically devastating, mutually disadvantageous conflict.

• While there are high frequencies of western hemispheric wars concluding, the opposite is true for the majority of the eastern hemisphere. Regions such as the Middle East and Africa are no less emblazoned with conflict circles now than they were at the turn of the century. Can any of this be tied into Jared Diamond’s thesis of the environmental differences and disparities in terrain among African and Eurasian landmasses?

• No matter who you were, where you lived geographically, or what era of history you occupied, conflict and war affected you in some manner. The notion of world peace has never appeared so fleeting as it does in a single Google Maps graphic.

This was a seriously useful tool, and I’ve yet to find a replication that does it justice. Again, if anyone comes across a suitable replacement, do let me know in the comments below.