Teach about the Columbian Exchange

The New Haven Register has documented public concerns over Critical Race Theory, the 1619 Project and the indoctrination of the wider professional community in the concerns of race, multiculturalism and diversity. Emotions are high and rather than coming together as a nation we seem to be headed in opposition directions. In this most tumultuous cultural milieu, what seems to be lost are the far-reaching side effects caused by the coming together of the old and new worlds in the Age of Discovery.

A slew of scientific minded researchers starting with the historian Alfred Crosby (1971) have formulated a paradigm called the Columbian Exchange. They convincingly maintain that this model is the most significant world event in the last five centuries starting in 1492. This event explains how the coming together of the Old World continents of Europe and Africa with the New World continents of the Americas initiated an exchange of peoples, plants, animals and diseases that radically changed the world as we know it. The exchange of plants and animals — i.e. corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, beef cattle, pigs, sheep, horses etc. — enhanced the world’s resources thus expanding the world’s population to today’s levels.

The exchange of disease (some 18-30) caused mass epidemics, depleting the populations of the Americas by up to 70 to 80 percent (due to native people’s lack of immunities possessed by Africans and Europeans). This exchange naturally exacerbated the enormous cultural clash of old and new world civilizations and races. Rather than anachronistically moralizing about who displaced and exploited whom and why, wouldn’t it better our understanding of history to teach the effects of this worldchanging event? Perhaps, just perhaps, the extremes of politics rather than the facts of history and science are adding to the acrimony of today’s cultural wars.

Vincent Casanova Osher Life Learning Institute, UConn,

Waterbury Killingworth