People have different ideas about what they think is the real reality. Some people think that any of the five senses that can be experienced is reality, but what if someone gets told that a really bad disaster happened. Then that person believes it and thinks its true, wouldn’t that be reality as well. Zinn, a well known american historian thinks of reality in a different way. He thinks that reality is based on what happened in the past. He looks at old books and stories of what happened. Looking at the facts and research instead of what’s happening right now.
Mann, an American journalist and author, looks at this another way. He believes that reality is what is happening right now currently. He believes that you have to experience things yourself in order to call it reality. That’s why he went to south america himself, to look and see what’s going on right now and ask the people what happened there, to the land, to the people and the culture. From many different sources of history and one person’s self thoughts, Mann has a better understanding of reality and other concepts that Zinn, due to his views and self intuition.
Mann describes the people he saw, what they did and what they told him. He connects with the people, and sees the world through his, but most importantly their eyes too. He looks at the land, the fossils and burial sites, the impact of history on the region. It’s not like looking through a 300 year old paper about data that has been gathered or reading about what might have happened through another person’s thoughts and writings, it’s much better.
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Mann’s writings include history and anthropology as well, he provides detailed examples and events that happened a long time ago. He includes methods the Indian people had back then, like burning infetile ground to make it suitable to grow crops again. He talks about burial sites and skeletons found, old archaeological sites and his insight on everything involving the Indians too.
The truth is told within the book. Everything he sees and experiences both from the past and the present, all revolving around one true principle what really happened long ago. Who are these people and what did they do? How did they live? What special and unique ways of life did they have or believe in. It can all be answered within the text and thought of after. It is an accurate reconstruction of events, because this way Mann is looking at the whole picture not just a small part of a research article that could of been wrong of the author was mislead into thinking that.
Just like Holmberg’s mistake, how he was misled and just looked at the surface of the picture, instead of looking deep into the truth and reality. He only scraped the surface of the Indians history, overseeing the vast amount of things that happened there. He underestimated the Indians, they had a far greater and much more enormous empire that he would have ever imagined, “among the most culturally backward peoples in the world. Living in constant want and hunger, he said, they had no clothes, no domestic animal, no music instruments, (not even rattles and drums), no art or design (except necklaces of animal teeth) and almost no religion (the Sirono “conception of the cosmos” was “almost completely uncrystallized”). Incredibly they could not count beyond three or make fire”.
Like Holmberg’s mistake about the Sirono and the disease that happened before them in chapter 4 of Manns book, he talks about a similar coincidence of Cortes and his army. Cortes won a battle against the Mexica, but what he didn’t know was that the city lost ⅓ of its population before he attacked, greatly increasing his chances of winning,”Without any apparent volition by Cortes, the great city lost at least a third of its population to the epidemic, including Cuitlahuac”.
If this had not happened the outcome of the war couple of been much different,” Absent smallpox, it seems likely that Cortes would have lost. In the event, he was able to take the city only by systematically destroying it”(pg 143). People should not look at only the research and facts, but they should look deeply and use their intuition to see the real truth and reality. Mann was able to achieve this by being their and connecting with people, understanding that they were much more than it seems on the surface, but due to difficult events it turned out this way.
