Analysis Of In Your Hands: A World History By Thomas Mann

Mann seems to get particularly excited when the discoveries debunk the textbooks he was raised on, such as William McNeill's 1967 A World History, which ignored the Americas when charting the wellsprings of civilization. Mann forgives McNeill for reflecting the conventional wisdom of his day, which explained the so-called rise of the West as the result of an endogenous European capacity for progress. But he has no patience for the historians who commit the same oversight in his son's textbooks several decades later. "The thesis of the book in your hands," he tells readers, "is that Native American history merits more than nine pages. Mann's books invite readers to picture the past differently. He asks them to imagine flying over the urban sprawl
of Tiahuanaco, in modern-day Bolivia, one of the oldest metropolises of the ancient Andes, or to examine from a height the farm of Dona Rosario, a descendant of runaway slaves in Brazil. These snapshots of the New World show how nature was ordered, resources organized, and property tended. What may look ramshackle or dilapidated from one angle makes good sense from another.