Why Did Disease Devastate Native Americans—but Not European Colonists? | Charles C. Mann - American History Hotline

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[00:00]
A
Do we know what kind of diseases were found in America before the Europeans?
[00:06]
B
Now, this is going to require a little bit of a nerdy response because
[00:13]
A
you are in the right place. You've reached American History Hotline. You ask the questions, we get the answers. Leave a message. Hey there, American History Hotliners. Bob Crawford here. Thrilled to be joining you again for another episode of American History Hotline. It's the show where you ask the questions and the best way to get us a question is on our website. That's americanhistoryhotline.com americanhistoryhotline.com Today's question comes from Christian. He writes, I've never really understood why disease wiped out so many of the native people but not the colonists. Was it because indigenous people had no exposure to the diseases like smallpox, or is that an oversimplification? Thanks for the question, Christian. I love it. And we found the perfect expert to answer it for you today. Joining me now is Charles C. Mann. He's a journalist and author, including the book 1491 New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. His new podcast is Everyday Abundance, which he co hosts with Virginia Postural. Charles, thanks for joining us today.
[01:30]
B
Very happy to be here. And that's like a great question from Christian.
[01:34]
A
Excellent question. Let's dive into it. Okay. Big fan of your book. I want to get to Christian's question, but first, let's start with America. Before Europeans arrived. People might have a few questions about the nomadic tribes that existed at that time, but there were actually massive metropolitan areas here. Right. What was America like before the 1490s in a population sense.
[02:08]
B
So when you say the Americas, you're talking about a whole continent. So imagine if you were somehow in an airplane, you know, flying over the Americas, and we'll start in New England because that's where I live. And what you would have seen were small groups of villages that were rapidly consolidating into larger groups but were still mostly small groups of villages. Then if you went to the Southwest, you would see societies getting bigger and bigger, but until you got to the Mississippi Valley, and you would see tens of thousands of of ceremonial centers with big pyramids in them, kind of like the pyramids in Egypt. If you went into the actual Southwest itself, you would see the Pueblo societies who lived in these kind of giant apartment buildings, if you like, you know, very packed together. Groups of people go further south and you get into really large societies. That most famous of which is called the Aztec Empire. That's a name, is a 19th century invention. It was really an alliance of three different groups of people. And so maybe a better name is the Triple Alliance. That had this empire right up north of them was Purepecha, who had their own empire. Then there's lots and lots of Maya kingdoms. You go further south into the Andes and you have the Inca, this very rapidly rising imperial power, had the, in some ways, the largest empire in the world at the time. It stretched. Their Inca road network stretched over a distance that's equivalent between Stockholm and Cairo all along the spine of the Andes. And then if you curved into the Amazon. This is a very exciting story in archeology that's just being discovered. You know, now you would find all kinds of urban complexes up and down the tributaries of. Of the Amazon. So it was really a crowded, bustling, thriving place that, you know, if you were an alien coming from Mars, it wouldn't have seemed that different from something in Western Europe or Asia.
[04:18]
A
Do we know what kind of diseases were found in America before the Europeans?
[04:23]
B
Yes. Now, this is going to require a little bit of a nerdy response because
[04:31]
A
you are in the right place, okay.
[04:33]
B
Because the instant you talk about types of diseases, you start getting into medical terminology, okay? And so a big difference. There's in diseases are. There are two types that are called zoonotic and then, you know, just everything else. And zoonotic diseases are the ones that were originally animal diseases and they mutated and do what scientists call jumping the species barrier and became human diseases. So. And almost all of the big killers in human history are those. And so you think of smallpox, which originally was probably camelpox. You think of tuberculosis, actually. Tuberculosis, a peculiar thing. So let's set tuberculosis aside, you know, flu, which originally came from poultry, and on and on.
[05:21]
A
Charles, can we put SARS into this category?
[05:24]
B
Yes, yes, exactly. And very probably Ebola and quite possibly Covid, of course, that's a big sars.
[05:33]
A
That's part of sars, right?
[05:35]
B
Yeah, Right. It's a different. But, yeah, it's a different kind of. So all of these are zoonotic, you know, generally zoonotic diseases. And understandably, people contract diseases from animals they spend a lot of time with. And so if you have camels in your. In the Middle East, a camel disease has the maximum opportunity to. To jump into the human disease through mutation. And that's where, you know, presumably smallpox came from. Now, by a quirk of evolutionary history, that would require further nerding out, and I'm happy to do it if you want.
[06:11]
A
Look, Charles. Michael. Charles, I'm going to interrupt for A joke, but a real, real joke. My goal is for people to listen to this show and do better on Jeopardy.
[06:22]
B
Okay, so. So by a quirk of evolutionary history, there were very few domestic, domesticable animals in the Americas. So we didn't have cattle, we didn't have horses, we didn't have goats, we didn't have sheep. Well, or their analogues. Except in the Andes, there were. There was llamas and kunas and so forth, but only up in the Andes and most of the rest of the continent, there just weren't candidates for domestication. And so you could say, well, what about deer? Or something like that? And all attempts that people made to domesticate deer, they just wouldn't do it. They just batter themselves. The same thing is true for bison. Now, with modern technology, you can do these kinds of things. But, you know, up in the great bulk of human history, there weren't these kinds of animals in the Americas. And as a result, people didn't spend much time around them. Whereas European and Asian and African farmers were constantly with their cattle and their horses and their sheep and their goats and so forth. We. We over here, meaning Americans, were not. And the result was that there is a great buildup of zoonotic diseases in Europe, in Asia and Africa, and next to none here. You know, there's a couple of significant exceptions, tuberculosis being the big one. And that was actually an old World disease that came to South America, probably carried by seals. So it was a human disease that became a seal disease that became a human disease because people in Tierra del Fuego ate the seals. I mean, that's the thought. It's still tricky knowing this, to be sure, but that's the general theory now, anyway, the point is that there's a big difference in the burden of disease between one hemisphere and the other. And if you want to think about it, what Columbus did and the people who followed him, it was as if they brought all those diseases over, and then all the suffering and death that those diseases had caused over the centuries in Europe, in Asia and Africa were compressed into a couple hundred years here in the Americas.
[08:40]
A
Okay, so let's go there. So Europeans start coming over in big waves in the early 1600s. What diseases or illnesses did they bring with them?
[08:52]
B
It may be that the first was malaria, and malaria is a fascinating disease. And they brought over some African slaves. And it's quite possible that as early as 1493, in Columbus's second voyage, they brought over malaria, but the big one was smallpox. And you say this originally comes from Camels? Yeah, possibly. It's, you know, there's a lot of. This is the kind of thing that there's a lot of argument about. I believe camels is the current reigning theory, but one of the things about theories is that they get disproven from time to time as people have new discoveries. But probably camels, it gets much more virulent for reasons that aren't completely clear a few hundred years before Columbus. And so this virus, virulent type of smallpox, is the type that is brought into the Americas and it comes with Cortez. Cortez. Hernan Cortez is the guy, the conquistador who's in the Caribbean, in the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean. He gets a small expedition, sails to Mexico and proceeds to invade the Aztec Empire, or the Triple Alliance. To make a long and complicated and fascinating story very short. His initial foray doesn't work out. I gather you had Matthew Restall here. He probably told you about how the story that we hear about these small band of people conquering, you know, the, the mighty Aztecs isn't really what actually happened. I won't add any much more onto that, except to say that the Spaniards are initially beaten back, they come back, they get a whole ton of native allies. But what really helps them is that as they get some reinforcements from the Caribbean, they bring in smallpox. And smallpox sweeps through Mesoamerica, which is this highly populated, densely populated region between sort of just north of Mexico City and Central America. It's one of the most densely packed places in the world. Densely populated urban places are just great for spreading disease. And nobody's ever seen smallpox or even any diseases like it. And as a result, it just cuts through this area. Untreated smallpox kill something like 30 or 40% of its victims. And you. We had enormous havoc in the United States from just having, you know, 1 million, which is a third of 1% of our people die from COVID Now imagine, you know, a hundred times that many, one out of every three people or one out of every four people around you dying very rapidly. And Cortez and his allies walk in while the chaos is happening. And so I would argue that that disease is a key reason for the Spanish victory in the conquest of the Aztecs or the Triple Alliance.
[12:07]
A
So is this the, the first European caused epidemic in America? Would you say that
[12:15]
B
if. Sorry, it's possible. There is a smaller one in the Caribbean in the 1490s, in 1493, but this is certainly the first major one. And it seems like it spread south and into the Inca empire. And when, shortly after that, the Spaniards went into the Inca empire, they discovered that it had just been ravaged by a disease that sounds like smallpox that had actually killed the emperor, much of his court, and led to a successional war, civil war. And the Spaniards walked into this place, that empire that had been ravaged by successional civil war and disease, and it made it very easy for them to horn their way in.
[13:00]
A
So these diseases come from Europe, from Europeans. Did the outbreaks affect the native populations the same as European settlers, or did European settlers have built up immunity at this point to these diseases?
[13:15]
B
Yeah, so there's two kinds of immunity. There's genetic immunity. And an example of that is that people in Central and West Africa have lived with malaria for so long that their bodies have built up various genetic defense mechanisms against it. The most famous is sickle cell anemia, which is. And people with one copy of this particular gene have differently shaped red blood cells that are hard for the parasite to invade, which is what malaria does. It invades your red blood cells. So that's genetic immunity. The other kind of immunity is acquired immunity. And that's when, if you get chickenpox and you survive it, you get. You're immune for a long time. Same thing with measles and so forth. And most Spaniards at the time had had, you know, these. These childhood diseases, one of which at the time was smallpox. And as a result, they were immune to these epidemics. Now, the interesting thing is that their kids would not have been right because they wouldn't have acquired immunity. And so the settlers kids died at the same rate as, as. As native people, but they themselves were this sort of lucky generation in this way.
[14:37]
A
Thinking about the great dying of 1617-1619, thinking about the pilgrims, right? Talk about this. The pilgrims bringing illness and the great dying.
[14:48]
B
So the pilgrims probably didn't bring the illness, but there are people, you know, Europeans who came to the. To the coast, to the New England coast. There are French people.
[14:57]
A
Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait. I got to stop you just for clarity. So you're saying the pilgrims didn't bring these diseases?
[15:05]
B
No, not that great dying. Okay, that happened just before they arrived. So there were various ships that came there. The Pilgrims are important because they created the first long lasting permanent settlements in New England. But lots of traders had been there, including famous people like La Salle, the French explorer. And they. If you have a disease and you're on a long flight, on a long trip, the disease will, they say, burn itself out. Everybody will get sick and neither die or survive. And if the trip is long enough, the disease will burned itself out and won't be present. And so one of the tricks about in those days is that it took something like six weeks to cross the the Atlantic. And so somebody had to come on with an early stage of the disease. And then there had to be a passenger who didn't have it and so forth. And there's. There had to be enough people who hadn't had the disease to have a chain of infection that would let you have a fresh case when you came on land. And that eventually happened both for the Spaniards in, you know, 1519 and for new England when it seems like a French crew shipwrecked in, I believe, 1616 on Cape Cod and somebody had an illness. There's been a speculation that it was viral hepatitis that infected people, again, who had no experience with this kind of communicable disease. And it spread through all of coastal New England. It was barred around Buzzards Bay, which is the big bay in Rhode island, because the Narragansett and the people, you know, the, to their east in Cape Cod didn't get along. So that there was a kind of a natural frontier and probably the same thing to the north, where the Abenaki and the, and the various peoples of Massachusetts also had some issues. So all along coastal Massachusetts, this terrible disease came. And that was what the Pilgrims sailed into. They sailed into a place that had been recently emptied, if you, if you follow, and they established their town right on top of an abandoned native village. Abandoned because of disease.
[17:29]
A
This is American History Hotline. I'm your host, Bob Crawford. Today my guest is Charles C. Mann. He's a journalist and author, including the book 1491 New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. He also wrote 1493 uncovering the new World Columbus created. His new podcast is Everyday Abundance, which he co hosts with Virginia Pastro. We're talking about disease in the early days of Europeans arriving in America, who got sick, who didn't. Why. Remember, send us your burning questions about American history. You can do that on our website, americanhistoryhotline.com that's americanhistoryhotline.com now back to the show. I've seen numbers saying that 90% of the native population in America died between 1616 and 1619. That's a scale I can't imagine. Is that true or. And do we have firsthand accounts of what that period was like?
[18:34]
B
So that's not true because that's too short of a period of time. Okay, that would the 1616 to 1619. That was in New England, in coastal New England. And, you know, we don't know what percentage, but there were a bunch of villages that were abandoned because everybody died. And when the Pilgrims landed, and they first landed on. On Cape Cod, they found graves and bodies everywhere and they saw that there had been a catastrophe. Was it 90%? Was it 60%? Was it. We don't know, but it was terrible. What we can say is that between, say, 1520 and say about 1850, something like 90% died. But that was. All these things were entangled with each other. And one thing that's important is that people are more likely to die of disease if they're in poor health and they've been mistreated.
[19:40]
A
Right.
[19:40]
B
And there's an awful lot of mistreatment and slavery and so forth that made populations very vulnerable. So when historians talk about this, they say, yes, disease, you know, killed all these people, but was entangled with the colonial history, which in many cases was not good, shall we say?
[20:00]
A
No, it was terrible. In fact, how did the Pilgrims interpret the massive die off of the native population in their time? Like I've seen it referred to as a wonderful, quote, unquote, wonderful plague.
[20:16]
B
Yeah. So you have to remember that neither Europeans nor native people had a modern understanding of disease. For both of them, you know, disease was a supernatural thing. It was, you know, it was a reward or punishment by God. It had to do with whether you had been good or bad. You know, it had to do with whether your society was operating right. It was very much a moral thing. And so both sides kind of interpreted when they saw that the disease disproportionately affected one side more than the other. It was hard for them not to draw spiritual lessons from that and say, you know, we must have done something wrong, or conversely, we must have done something right. And, you know, the idea that they could have brought it was just sort of dimly present, you know, the idea. And so you see things like in. Of Plymouth Plantation, I think it is. William Bradford, the governor, talks about it. Please God, to sweep them away. I think that language is in there and also in his letters. And so they saw it as this celestial event that showed that they were being favored. And, you know, today, now that we know about bacteria and so forth, this seems appalling. But. But it was really very much of the time.
[21:43]
A
You mentioned the other factors, right. In the life of the. In the existence of the native populations. Would they have fared better, do you think, ultimately, if they weren't also involved in warfare with European settlers and being displaced from their homes and having their social structures destroyed.
[22:07]
B
Well, it seems. I mean, obviously you can't go back and run a, you know, an experiment or something, but it seems very likely, doesn't it? I mean, consider the Pueblo who lived in the. You know, in the Southwest, in what is now New Mexico. The Spaniards come in, you know, in the early 17th century, in 16. Oh. I can't remember if it was 1607 or 1608 or 1609, but right about there and between then and about 1680, the Spaniards are just terrible. They enslave, they exploit, they do, you know, and then there's this huge revolt in 1680 in which the Pueblo kick out the Spaniards. But during that time, something like 50 Spanish, excuse me, Pueblo villages disappeared. They're just not there because their entire populations either died or were enslaved or just fled to another place for. For protection. And so we can say there something like 2/3 of all the Pueblo died. But how do we disentangle the impacts of multiple waves of disease, multiple waves of slavery, and just multiple waves of famine and just plain old mistreatment?
[23:27]
A
Did any of the native nations do better than the others? Were there any that. That give us an example.
[23:35]
B
Well, you know, and they better for time than others. But, for example, a number of the nations in Mexico allied with the Spaniards because they didn't like the Triple Alliance. In particular, there was a nation called Tlaxcalan that had been fighting the Triple alliance for just decades. And when the Spaniards came, they joined up and said, let's get these guys. Empires are never very popular with their subjects, right? And they prospered. They became an independent state. They weren't formally incorporated into Mexico until 1857. If you look at old maps of Santa Fe, there was a Spanish colony and a Tlaxcalan colony, you know, right across the river, the Santa Fe river, from. From each other. And in fact, during this Pueblo Revolt, one of the first things the Pueblo did was kick out all these guys from central Mexico. So that would be an example. Another way of doing well was the Comanche or the Numenu as their. Which is a closer version of their name. They pretty clearly realized that these colonists were bad news. And so they did these appalling staged stage massacres, you know, show violence to, you know, scare the living crap out of them. And they created this area called Comancheria that Europeans basically weren't welcome in, and they staved off the European advance for a couple hundred years. So, you know, there, there's all kinds of people who struggled and survived. And then when you go to reservations today, you know, it's, you'll see people who quite commonly tell you, you know, you guys threw everything you had at us and we're still here. And they very much are.
[25:24]
A
You know, this is, this is kind of. Well, let's talk about this for a minute. Like, at what point does this stabilize or does it ever stabilize?
[25:33]
B
Well, you know, human societies aren't well known for stable, being stable. So one way to think about it is that about 1900 was the absolute nadir, the bottom. And there were just, I don't know, something, geez, I don't know, something like a quarter million native people in North America, something like that. And now there's millions. So the populations have been on the rise. And in fact, some of the most rapidly increasing people in North America are native people. And the difference in native societies, you know, in North America between when I was a kid growing up in the Pacific Northwest and you know, you would see just terrible things on there was, you know, real abject poverty. And today is just enormous. Now I'm not going to say that there's no problems in, in Native America. No, no person would, would, would, would say that. But the difference between now and 50 years ago is absolutely incredible.
[26:37]
A
People may not realize we've had Catherine Oliverius on here. Do you know Catherine's work?
[26:43]
B
Yeah.
[26:44]
A
She talks about how malaria drove the transatlantic slave trade and plantation economies. Do you want to touch on that? Because it feels kind of related to this.
[26:56]
B
Sure. I mean, and it's something I actually cover in, in the book 1493 a little bit. And so those diseases were carried by mosquitoes. Malaria and yellow fever were the two big mosquito borne diseases. Both of them are carried by specific types of mosquito. So malaria is carried by mosquitoes in the genus Anopheles. And it turns out there's four members of that genus already here. The one in the eastern part of the United States is Anopheles quadramaculatis. And all you had to have was a person with malaria coming here gets bit and the mosquito is ready to transmit it to other people. And so the east coast of the United States, kind of below Washington or Baltimore, through Florida and Louisiana, just became rife with malaria. Now people from West Africa, typically in those days, both had genetic mutations against malaria, several of them not just sickle cell, and also had often had it as a child, which confers mild cases, which can confer some immunity. And so Just bear in mind it's something like, you know, 90, 95% of the population over there. Now you have an English guy and he's coming over. He won't have those mutations, he won't have those. And the way, if you're a plantation owner, you need labor. Native people don't want to do it. You know, there is a robust Indian slave trade, but they know the countryside better than you do. They escape. So you're not allowed to enslave English people, but what you are allowed to do is have indentured servants. You pay for their passage, they work for you for seven years or five years, and then you have to let them go and do it. Or you can bring in slaves. The slaves are more expensive than the indentured people, but they don't have the option of leaving and you don't have to pay them, which is since. And we're just going to sort of skip all the moral objections here, we're just looking at this like in a cold hearted, you know, economic way, because obviously on a moral level they're not the same. But the, the plantation owner, it looks at this and says on top of that, when the English person gets here, he's going to get malaria and has to go through a process of what they call seasoning. And seasoning means for, you know, five to months to a year, that guy's sick in bed with malaria and not doing anything for you. When you look like this, it really tilts the scales in favor of slavery. You know, a slave is a better bargain for you, again, strictly speaking, economically than the indentured servant. And so it gives a big nudge towards slavery. Yellow fever comes in on top of that. Yellow fever is a disease that if you get it when you're a child, it's like chickenpox, you know, you're fine, you get it when you're an adult. And it's very high mortality. I've seen figures like 75%. It's a death sentence. And it is carried by a particular type of mosquito, Aedes aegypti. And it gets brought over to the Americas probably in water casks for, for, for ships. And so there's these recurrent waves of yellow fever. And this is one reason these Caribbean colonies in particular have a tiny number of, you know, slave owners there and then a vast supply of freshly brought over Africans because they're working on the, on a sugar plantation. Europeans, they've had yellow fever. They're immune. They're genetically superior in this way. The Europeans are you know, trying to, you know, not to get sick the entire time. They're, they're there. And again, this also puts the thumb on the scales and really is an impetus for the Atlantic, the transatlantic slave trade.
[31:20]
A
This is just fascinating. Charles, I really appreciate your time today. I've been talking with Charles C. Mann. He's a journalist and author, including of the book 1491 New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus and 1493 Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Both books are excellent. His new podcast is Everyday Abundance, which he co hosts with Virginia Postrel. Charles, thanks for joining us today on American History Hotline.
[31:49]
B
Oh, it's my pleasure talking with you.
[31:54]
A
You've been listening to American History Hotline, a production of iHeart podcasts and Scratch Track Productions. The show's executive producer is James Morrison. Our executive producers from iHeart are Jordan Runtal and Jason English. Original music composed by me, Bob Crawford. Please keep in touch. Our email is americanhistoryhotlinemail.com if you like the show, please tell your friends and leave us a review in Apple Podcasts. I'm your host, Bob Crawford. Feel free to hit me up on social media to ask a history question or to let me know what you think of the show. You can find me at bobcrawford Bass, thanks so much for listening. See you next week.

Summary6 min read

American History Hotline

Episode: "Why Did Disease Devastate Native Americans—but Not European Colonists?"

Host: Bob Crawford
Guest: Charles C. Mann (author of 1491, 1493, podcaster)
Date: August 5, 2026

Episode Overview

In this episode, host Bob Crawford and guest expert Charles C. Mann answer a listener’s question: Why did disease decimate Native American populations so catastrophically, while European colonists seemed largely spared? Mann, with rich historical and scientific context, unpacks the origins of epidemic diseases, explains differences in immunity, details how pandemics enabled conquest, and highlights the entanglement of disease, colonial violence, and survival.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Rich, Urbanized Americas Before Colonization

[02:08–04:17]

Misconceptions: The Americas before 1492 were far from sparsely populated or “primitive.”
Major Societies:
- New England: Small villages, consolidating into larger groups.
- Mississippi Valley: Tens of thousands in ceremonial urban centers with pyramids.
- Southwest: Pueblos with dense, multi-story dwellings.
- Mesoamerica: The “Aztec” (Triple Alliance) Empire and the Purepecha Empire.
- Andes: The Inca Empire—spanning a distance comparable to Stockholm–Cairo.
- Amazon: Recent archaeology uncovers extensive urban complexes.
Quote: “If you were an alien coming from Mars, it wouldn’t have seemed that different from something in Western Europe or Asia.” (Mann, 04:12)

2. Disease in the Americas Pre- and Post-Contact

[04:17–08:40]

Disease Types:
- Most deadly diseases (“the big killers”) are zoonotic—originating from animals and jumping to humans.
- Examples: Smallpox (possibly from camels), flu (poultry), tuberculosis (complicated history).
Why Didn’t Native Americans Have These Diseases?
- Few domesticable animals in the Americas—no sheep, cattle, goats or their analogs except llamas/alpacas in the Andes.
- Less animal-human contact meant few zoonotic diseases developed in the Americas.
- Contrast: Eurasia, Africa, and Europe had centuries of close contact with livestock, allowing deadly diseases to emerge and circulate.
Quote: “It was as if they brought all those diseases over, and then all the suffering and death those diseases had caused over the centuries in Europe, Asia, and Africa were compressed into a couple hundred years here in the Americas.” (Mann, 08:15)

3. The First Epidemics and Their Massive Toll

[08:51–14:36]

Initial Epidemics:
- Likely the first to arrive was malaria (possibly via African slaves as early as Columbus’s second voyage).
- The most devastating was smallpox, arriving with Spanish forces in the Caribbean, then Mexico.
- Densely populated areas (like central Mexico) facilitated rapid spread—up to 30–40% mortality.
Conquest Enabled by Plague:
- Epidemics preceded and destabilized empires: Smallpox caused chaos during Cortez’s conquest and in the Inca Empire, killing leaders and crippling societies.
Immunity Differences:
- Europeans had acquired immunity from childhood exposure, so adult colonists generally survived; their children, however, died at similar rates as Natives.
Quote: “Their kids would not have been [immune]... but they themselves were this sort of lucky generation in this way.” (Mann, 14:05)

4. Pilgrims, the “Great Dying,” and Colonial Myths

[14:36–19:39]

The “Great Dying” (1616–1619):
- Major depopulation happened just before Pilgrim arrival; Pilgrims settled in cleared and abandoned Native villages.
- Epidemics might have arrived via earlier French shipwreck survivors; the disease was possibly viral hepatitis.
Misinterpretations & Spiritual Readings:
- Both colonists and Natives lacked modern medical understanding; epidemics seen as spiritual signs or punishments.
- Colonists like William Bradford interpreted plagues as God’s favor—“Please God, to sweep them away.” (Mann, 20:35)
Scale of Loss:
- In New England, the death toll 1616–1619 was catastrophic locally, but the oft-quoted “90%” death rate refers to the cumulative loss over centuries (1520–1850) through entangled waves of disease, mistreatment, slavery, and violence.

5. Structural Violence, War, and Survival

[19:39–25:24]

Disease & Colonialism Intertwined:
- Disease decimation was compounded by forced labor, war, displacement, and the destruction of Native societies.
- Example: The Pueblo suffered huge losses, losing ~2/3 of their number due to disease, slavery, and violence.
Survivors and Adaptation:
- Some groups, like the Tlaxcalans, benefited by allying with Spaniards and remained independent for centuries.
- The Comanche created a defensive territory—Comancheria—and successfully resisted European encroachment for generations.
Quote: “You guys threw everything you had at us and we’re still here.” (Mann, 25:17, paraphrasing contemporary Native sentiment)

6. Population Rebound, Persistence, and Shifting Fortunes

[25:24–26:37]

Population Trends:
- Native population reached its low point (~250,000 in North America) around 1900; since then, numbers have rebounded to several million.
- Significant cultural and social revitalization in recent decades.

7. Disease and the Economics of Slavery

[26:37–31:19]

Mosquito-Borne Disease and Labor Choices:
- Malaria and yellow fever, brought over from Africa and transmitted by local mosquitoes, became endemic in the American South and Caribbean.
- West Africans had acquired or genetic immunity to malaria and yellow fever; English indentured servants did not—leading to high death rates.
- Plantation owners chose African slaves (a grim economic calculation) over English indentured servants.
Quote: “A slave is a better bargain for you, again, strictly speaking economically, than the indentured servant. And so it gives a big nudge towards slavery.” (Mann, 30:38)
Yellow Fever’s Deadliness:
- “I've seen figures like 75%. It’s a death sentence.” (Mann, 30:55)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

“There’s a big difference in the burden of disease between one hemisphere and the other.” (Mann, 07:43)
“If you have camels in the Middle East, a camel disease has the maximum opportunity to jump into the human disease through mutation... that’s where, presumably, smallpox came from.” (Mann, 05:05)
“Native people don’t want to do [plantation labor]... There is a robust Indian slave trade, but they know the countryside better than you do. They escape.” (Mann, 28:35)
“Neither Europeans nor Native people had a modern understanding of disease... disease was a supernatural thing—a reward or punishment by God.” (Mann, 20:15)
“The difference between now and 50 years ago is absolutely incredible.” (Mann, 26:22, on modern Native society resilience)

Timeline & Timestamps

| Topic | Timestamps | |------------------------------------------|----------------| | Ancient American civilizations | 02:08–04:17 | | Pre-contact disease ecology | 04:17–08:40 | | Arrival/impact of smallpox, malaria, etc.| 08:51–14:36 | | Immunity differences explained | 13:14–14:36 | | The Great Dying, Pilgrims, & epidemics | 14:36–19:39 | | Moral & spiritual interpretations | 20:00–21:43 | | War, violence, and population loss | 22:07–25:24 | | Surviving nations & adaptation | 23:26–25:24 | | Native population nadir & recovery | 25:24–26:37 | | Disease, slavery, & plantation economy | 26:37–31:19 |

Overall Tone & Final Thoughts

Charles C. Mann weaves together science, history, and storytelling—offering context, humility about what’s unknown, and a recognition of Native survival amid catastrophe. The episode debunks myths, highlights the entanglement of disease and colonization, and underscores that both devastation and resilience shape American history.

For Further Study

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (Charles C. Mann)
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (Charles C. Mann)
Everyday Abundance podcast (Mann & Virginia Postrel)

Useful for Listeners Who Haven't Tuned In

This summary offers a full arc: from what America was like before European arrival and how germs proved more lethal than guns, to how the different experiences of disease shaped the fates of both the colonists and Indigenous Americans, including through the lens of economics, spirituality, and long-term resilience.

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Transcript45 lines

[00:00]
A
Do we know what kind of diseases were found in America before the Europeans?
[00:06]
B
Now, this is going to require a little bit of a nerdy response because
[00:13]
A
you are in the right place. You've reached American History Hotline. You ask the questions, we get the answers. Leave a message. Hey there, American History Hotliners. Bob Crawford here. Thrilled to be joining you again for another episode of American History Hotline. It's the show where you ask the questions and the best way to get us a question is on our website. That's americanhistoryhotline.com americanhistoryhotline.com Today's question comes from Christian. He writes, I've never really understood why disease wiped out so many of the native people but not the colonists. Was it because indigenous people had no exposure to the diseases like smallpox, or is that an oversimplification? Thanks for the question, Christian. I love it. And we found the perfect expert to answer it for you today. Joining me now is Charles C. Mann. He's a journalist and author, including the book 1491 New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. His new podcast is Everyday Abundance, which he co hosts with Virginia Postural. Charles, thanks for joining us today.
[01:30]
B
Very happy to be here. And that's like a great question from Christian.
[01:34]
A
Excellent question. Let's dive into it. Okay. Big fan of your book. I want to get to Christian's question, but first, let's start with America. Before Europeans arrived. People might have a few questions about the nomadic tribes that existed at that time, but there were actually massive metropolitan areas here. Right. What was America like before the 1490s in a population sense.
[02:08]
B
So when you say the Americas, you're talking about a whole continent. So imagine if you were somehow in an airplane, you know, flying over the Americas, and we'll start in New England because that's where I live. And what you would have seen were small groups of villages that were rapidly consolidating into larger groups but were still mostly small groups of villages. Then if you went to the Southwest, you would see societies getting bigger and bigger, but until you got to the Mississippi Valley, and you would see tens of thousands of of ceremonial centers with big pyramids in them, kind of like the pyramids in Egypt. If you went into the actual Southwest itself, you would see the Pueblo societies who lived in these kind of giant apartment buildings, if you like, you know, very packed together. Groups of people go further south and you get into really large societies. That most famous of which is called the Aztec Empire. That's a name, is a 19th century invention. It was really an alliance of three different groups of people. And so maybe a better name is the Triple Alliance. That had this empire right up north of them was Purepecha, who had their own empire. Then there's lots and lots of Maya kingdoms. You go further south into the Andes and you have the Inca, this very rapidly rising imperial power, had the, in some ways, the largest empire in the world at the time. It stretched. Their Inca road network stretched over a distance that's equivalent between Stockholm and Cairo all along the spine of the Andes. And then if you curved into the Amazon. This is a very exciting story in archeology that's just being discovered. You know, now you would find all kinds of urban complexes up and down the tributaries of. Of the Amazon. So it was really a crowded, bustling, thriving place that, you know, if you were an alien coming from Mars, it wouldn't have seemed that different from something in Western Europe or Asia.
[04:18]
A
Do we know what kind of diseases were found in America before the Europeans?
[04:23]
B
Yes. Now, this is going to require a little bit of a nerdy response because
[04:31]
A
you are in the right place, okay.
[04:33]
B
Because the instant you talk about types of diseases, you start getting into medical terminology, okay? And so a big difference. There's in diseases are. There are two types that are called zoonotic and then, you know, just everything else. And zoonotic diseases are the ones that were originally animal diseases and they mutated and do what scientists call jumping the species barrier and became human diseases. So. And almost all of the big killers in human history are those. And so you think of smallpox, which originally was probably camelpox. You think of tuberculosis, actually. Tuberculosis, a peculiar thing. So let's set tuberculosis aside, you know, flu, which originally came from poultry, and on and on.
[05:21]
A
Charles, can we put SARS into this category?
[05:24]
B
Yes, yes, exactly. And very probably Ebola and quite possibly Covid, of course, that's a big sars.
[05:33]
A
That's part of sars, right?
[05:35]
B
Yeah, Right. It's a different. But, yeah, it's a different kind of. So all of these are zoonotic, you know, generally zoonotic diseases. And understandably, people contract diseases from animals they spend a lot of time with. And so if you have camels in your. In the Middle East, a camel disease has the maximum opportunity to. To jump into the human disease through mutation. And that's where, you know, presumably smallpox came from. Now, by a quirk of evolutionary history, that would require further nerding out, and I'm happy to do it if you want.
[06:11]
A
Look, Charles. Michael. Charles, I'm going to interrupt for A joke, but a real, real joke. My goal is for people to listen to this show and do better on Jeopardy.
[06:22]
B
Okay, so. So by a quirk of evolutionary history, there were very few domestic, domesticable animals in the Americas. So we didn't have cattle, we didn't have horses, we didn't have goats, we didn't have sheep. Well, or their analogues. Except in the Andes, there were. There was llamas and kunas and so forth, but only up in the Andes and most of the rest of the continent, there just weren't candidates for domestication. And so you could say, well, what about deer? Or something like that? And all attempts that people made to domesticate deer, they just wouldn't do it. They just batter themselves. The same thing is true for bison. Now, with modern technology, you can do these kinds of things. But, you know, up in the great bulk of human history, there weren't these kinds of animals in the Americas. And as a result, people didn't spend much time around them. Whereas European and Asian and African farmers were constantly with their cattle and their horses and their sheep and their goats and so forth. We. We over here, meaning Americans, were not. And the result was that there is a great buildup of zoonotic diseases in Europe, in Asia and Africa, and next to none here. You know, there's a couple of significant exceptions, tuberculosis being the big one. And that was actually an old World disease that came to South America, probably carried by seals. So it was a human disease that became a seal disease that became a human disease because people in Tierra del Fuego ate the seals. I mean, that's the thought. It's still tricky knowing this, to be sure, but that's the general theory now, anyway, the point is that there's a big difference in the burden of disease between one hemisphere and the other. And if you want to think about it, what Columbus did and the people who followed him, it was as if they brought all those diseases over, and then all the suffering and death that those diseases had caused over the centuries in Europe, in Asia and Africa were compressed into a couple hundred years here in the Americas.
[08:40]
A
Okay, so let's go there. So Europeans start coming over in big waves in the early 1600s. What diseases or illnesses did they bring with them?
[08:52]
B
It may be that the first was malaria, and malaria is a fascinating disease. And they brought over some African slaves. And it's quite possible that as early as 1493, in Columbus's second voyage, they brought over malaria, but the big one was smallpox. And you say this originally comes from Camels? Yeah, possibly. It's, you know, there's a lot of. This is the kind of thing that there's a lot of argument about. I believe camels is the current reigning theory, but one of the things about theories is that they get disproven from time to time as people have new discoveries. But probably camels, it gets much more virulent for reasons that aren't completely clear a few hundred years before Columbus. And so this virus, virulent type of smallpox, is the type that is brought into the Americas and it comes with Cortez. Cortez. Hernan Cortez is the guy, the conquistador who's in the Caribbean, in the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean. He gets a small expedition, sails to Mexico and proceeds to invade the Aztec Empire, or the Triple Alliance. To make a long and complicated and fascinating story very short. His initial foray doesn't work out. I gather you had Matthew Restall here. He probably told you about how the story that we hear about these small band of people conquering, you know, the, the mighty Aztecs isn't really what actually happened. I won't add any much more onto that, except to say that the Spaniards are initially beaten back, they come back, they get a whole ton of native allies. But what really helps them is that as they get some reinforcements from the Caribbean, they bring in smallpox. And smallpox sweeps through Mesoamerica, which is this highly populated, densely populated region between sort of just north of Mexico City and Central America. It's one of the most densely packed places in the world. Densely populated urban places are just great for spreading disease. And nobody's ever seen smallpox or even any diseases like it. And as a result, it just cuts through this area. Untreated smallpox kill something like 30 or 40% of its victims. And you. We had enormous havoc in the United States from just having, you know, 1 million, which is a third of 1% of our people die from COVID Now imagine, you know, a hundred times that many, one out of every three people or one out of every four people around you dying very rapidly. And Cortez and his allies walk in while the chaos is happening. And so I would argue that that disease is a key reason for the Spanish victory in the conquest of the Aztecs or the Triple Alliance.
[12:07]
A
So is this the, the first European caused epidemic in America? Would you say that
[12:15]
B
if. Sorry, it's possible. There is a smaller one in the Caribbean in the 1490s, in 1493, but this is certainly the first major one. And it seems like it spread south and into the Inca empire. And when, shortly after that, the Spaniards went into the Inca empire, they discovered that it had just been ravaged by a disease that sounds like smallpox that had actually killed the emperor, much of his court, and led to a successional war, civil war. And the Spaniards walked into this place, that empire that had been ravaged by successional civil war and disease, and it made it very easy for them to horn their way in.
[13:00]
A
So these diseases come from Europe, from Europeans. Did the outbreaks affect the native populations the same as European settlers, or did European settlers have built up immunity at this point to these diseases?
[13:15]
B
Yeah, so there's two kinds of immunity. There's genetic immunity. And an example of that is that people in Central and West Africa have lived with malaria for so long that their bodies have built up various genetic defense mechanisms against it. The most famous is sickle cell anemia, which is. And people with one copy of this particular gene have differently shaped red blood cells that are hard for the parasite to invade, which is what malaria does. It invades your red blood cells. So that's genetic immunity. The other kind of immunity is acquired immunity. And that's when, if you get chickenpox and you survive it, you get. You're immune for a long time. Same thing with measles and so forth. And most Spaniards at the time had had, you know, these. These childhood diseases, one of which at the time was smallpox. And as a result, they were immune to these epidemics. Now, the interesting thing is that their kids would not have been right because they wouldn't have acquired immunity. And so the settlers kids died at the same rate as, as. As native people, but they themselves were this sort of lucky generation in this way.
[14:37]
A
Thinking about the great dying of 1617-1619, thinking about the pilgrims, right? Talk about this. The pilgrims bringing illness and the great dying.
[14:48]
B
So the pilgrims probably didn't bring the illness, but there are people, you know, Europeans who came to the. To the coast, to the New England coast. There are French people.
[14:57]
A
Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait. I got to stop you just for clarity. So you're saying the pilgrims didn't bring these diseases?
[15:05]
B
No, not that great dying. Okay, that happened just before they arrived. So there were various ships that came there. The Pilgrims are important because they created the first long lasting permanent settlements in New England. But lots of traders had been there, including famous people like La Salle, the French explorer. And they. If you have a disease and you're on a long flight, on a long trip, the disease will, they say, burn itself out. Everybody will get sick and neither die or survive. And if the trip is long enough, the disease will burned itself out and won't be present. And so one of the tricks about in those days is that it took something like six weeks to cross the the Atlantic. And so somebody had to come on with an early stage of the disease. And then there had to be a passenger who didn't have it and so forth. And there's. There had to be enough people who hadn't had the disease to have a chain of infection that would let you have a fresh case when you came on land. And that eventually happened both for the Spaniards in, you know, 1519 and for new England when it seems like a French crew shipwrecked in, I believe, 1616 on Cape Cod and somebody had an illness. There's been a speculation that it was viral hepatitis that infected people, again, who had no experience with this kind of communicable disease. And it spread through all of coastal New England. It was barred around Buzzards Bay, which is the big bay in Rhode island, because the Narragansett and the people, you know, the, to their east in Cape Cod didn't get along. So that there was a kind of a natural frontier and probably the same thing to the north, where the Abenaki and the, and the various peoples of Massachusetts also had some issues. So all along coastal Massachusetts, this terrible disease came. And that was what the Pilgrims sailed into. They sailed into a place that had been recently emptied, if you, if you follow, and they established their town right on top of an abandoned native village. Abandoned because of disease.
[17:29]
A
This is American History Hotline. I'm your host, Bob Crawford. Today my guest is Charles C. Mann. He's a journalist and author, including the book 1491 New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. He also wrote 1493 uncovering the new World Columbus created. His new podcast is Everyday Abundance, which he co hosts with Virginia Pastro. We're talking about disease in the early days of Europeans arriving in America, who got sick, who didn't. Why. Remember, send us your burning questions about American history. You can do that on our website, americanhistoryhotline.com that's americanhistoryhotline.com now back to the show. I've seen numbers saying that 90% of the native population in America died between 1616 and 1619. That's a scale I can't imagine. Is that true or. And do we have firsthand accounts of what that period was like?
[18:34]
B
So that's not true because that's too short of a period of time. Okay, that would the 1616 to 1619. That was in New England, in coastal New England. And, you know, we don't know what percentage, but there were a bunch of villages that were abandoned because everybody died. And when the Pilgrims landed, and they first landed on. On Cape Cod, they found graves and bodies everywhere and they saw that there had been a catastrophe. Was it 90%? Was it 60%? Was it. We don't know, but it was terrible. What we can say is that between, say, 1520 and say about 1850, something like 90% died. But that was. All these things were entangled with each other. And one thing that's important is that people are more likely to die of disease if they're in poor health and they've been mistreated.
[19:40]
A
Right.
[19:40]
B
And there's an awful lot of mistreatment and slavery and so forth that made populations very vulnerable. So when historians talk about this, they say, yes, disease, you know, killed all these people, but was entangled with the colonial history, which in many cases was not good, shall we say?
[20:00]
A
No, it was terrible. In fact, how did the Pilgrims interpret the massive die off of the native population in their time? Like I've seen it referred to as a wonderful, quote, unquote, wonderful plague.
[20:16]
B
Yeah. So you have to remember that neither Europeans nor native people had a modern understanding of disease. For both of them, you know, disease was a supernatural thing. It was, you know, it was a reward or punishment by God. It had to do with whether you had been good or bad. You know, it had to do with whether your society was operating right. It was very much a moral thing. And so both sides kind of interpreted when they saw that the disease disproportionately affected one side more than the other. It was hard for them not to draw spiritual lessons from that and say, you know, we must have done something wrong, or conversely, we must have done something right. And, you know, the idea that they could have brought it was just sort of dimly present, you know, the idea. And so you see things like in. Of Plymouth Plantation, I think it is. William Bradford, the governor, talks about it. Please God, to sweep them away. I think that language is in there and also in his letters. And so they saw it as this celestial event that showed that they were being favored. And, you know, today, now that we know about bacteria and so forth, this seems appalling. But. But it was really very much of the time.
[21:43]
A
You mentioned the other factors, right. In the life of the. In the existence of the native populations. Would they have fared better, do you think, ultimately, if they weren't also involved in warfare with European settlers and being displaced from their homes and having their social structures destroyed.
[22:07]
B
Well, it seems. I mean, obviously you can't go back and run a, you know, an experiment or something, but it seems very likely, doesn't it? I mean, consider the Pueblo who lived in the. You know, in the Southwest, in what is now New Mexico. The Spaniards come in, you know, in the early 17th century, in 16. Oh. I can't remember if it was 1607 or 1608 or 1609, but right about there and between then and about 1680, the Spaniards are just terrible. They enslave, they exploit, they do, you know, and then there's this huge revolt in 1680 in which the Pueblo kick out the Spaniards. But during that time, something like 50 Spanish, excuse me, Pueblo villages disappeared. They're just not there because their entire populations either died or were enslaved or just fled to another place for. For protection. And so we can say there something like 2/3 of all the Pueblo died. But how do we disentangle the impacts of multiple waves of disease, multiple waves of slavery, and just multiple waves of famine and just plain old mistreatment?
[23:27]
A
Did any of the native nations do better than the others? Were there any that. That give us an example.
[23:35]
B
Well, you know, and they better for time than others. But, for example, a number of the nations in Mexico allied with the Spaniards because they didn't like the Triple Alliance. In particular, there was a nation called Tlaxcalan that had been fighting the Triple alliance for just decades. And when the Spaniards came, they joined up and said, let's get these guys. Empires are never very popular with their subjects, right? And they prospered. They became an independent state. They weren't formally incorporated into Mexico until 1857. If you look at old maps of Santa Fe, there was a Spanish colony and a Tlaxcalan colony, you know, right across the river, the Santa Fe river, from. From each other. And in fact, during this Pueblo Revolt, one of the first things the Pueblo did was kick out all these guys from central Mexico. So that would be an example. Another way of doing well was the Comanche or the Numenu as their. Which is a closer version of their name. They pretty clearly realized that these colonists were bad news. And so they did these appalling staged stage massacres, you know, show violence to, you know, scare the living crap out of them. And they created this area called Comancheria that Europeans basically weren't welcome in, and they staved off the European advance for a couple hundred years. So, you know, there, there's all kinds of people who struggled and survived. And then when you go to reservations today, you know, it's, you'll see people who quite commonly tell you, you know, you guys threw everything you had at us and we're still here. And they very much are.
[25:24]
A
You know, this is, this is kind of. Well, let's talk about this for a minute. Like, at what point does this stabilize or does it ever stabilize?
[25:33]
B
Well, you know, human societies aren't well known for stable, being stable. So one way to think about it is that about 1900 was the absolute nadir, the bottom. And there were just, I don't know, something, geez, I don't know, something like a quarter million native people in North America, something like that. And now there's millions. So the populations have been on the rise. And in fact, some of the most rapidly increasing people in North America are native people. And the difference in native societies, you know, in North America between when I was a kid growing up in the Pacific Northwest and you know, you would see just terrible things on there was, you know, real abject poverty. And today is just enormous. Now I'm not going to say that there's no problems in, in Native America. No, no person would, would, would, would say that. But the difference between now and 50 years ago is absolutely incredible.
[26:37]
A
People may not realize we've had Catherine Oliverius on here. Do you know Catherine's work?
[26:43]
B
Yeah.
[26:44]
A
She talks about how malaria drove the transatlantic slave trade and plantation economies. Do you want to touch on that? Because it feels kind of related to this.
[26:56]
B
Sure. I mean, and it's something I actually cover in, in the book 1493 a little bit. And so those diseases were carried by mosquitoes. Malaria and yellow fever were the two big mosquito borne diseases. Both of them are carried by specific types of mosquito. So malaria is carried by mosquitoes in the genus Anopheles. And it turns out there's four members of that genus already here. The one in the eastern part of the United States is Anopheles quadramaculatis. And all you had to have was a person with malaria coming here gets bit and the mosquito is ready to transmit it to other people. And so the east coast of the United States, kind of below Washington or Baltimore, through Florida and Louisiana, just became rife with malaria. Now people from West Africa, typically in those days, both had genetic mutations against malaria, several of them not just sickle cell, and also had often had it as a child, which confers mild cases, which can confer some immunity. And so Just bear in mind it's something like, you know, 90, 95% of the population over there. Now you have an English guy and he's coming over. He won't have those mutations, he won't have those. And the way, if you're a plantation owner, you need labor. Native people don't want to do it. You know, there is a robust Indian slave trade, but they know the countryside better than you do. They escape. So you're not allowed to enslave English people, but what you are allowed to do is have indentured servants. You pay for their passage, they work for you for seven years or five years, and then you have to let them go and do it. Or you can bring in slaves. The slaves are more expensive than the indentured people, but they don't have the option of leaving and you don't have to pay them, which is since. And we're just going to sort of skip all the moral objections here, we're just looking at this like in a cold hearted, you know, economic way, because obviously on a moral level they're not the same. But the, the plantation owner, it looks at this and says on top of that, when the English person gets here, he's going to get malaria and has to go through a process of what they call seasoning. And seasoning means for, you know, five to months to a year, that guy's sick in bed with malaria and not doing anything for you. When you look like this, it really tilts the scales in favor of slavery. You know, a slave is a better bargain for you, again, strictly speaking, economically than the indentured servant. And so it gives a big nudge towards slavery. Yellow fever comes in on top of that. Yellow fever is a disease that if you get it when you're a child, it's like chickenpox, you know, you're fine, you get it when you're an adult. And it's very high mortality. I've seen figures like 75%. It's a death sentence. And it is carried by a particular type of mosquito, Aedes aegypti. And it gets brought over to the Americas probably in water casks for, for, for ships. And so there's these recurrent waves of yellow fever. And this is one reason these Caribbean colonies in particular have a tiny number of, you know, slave owners there and then a vast supply of freshly brought over Africans because they're working on the, on a sugar plantation. Europeans, they've had yellow fever. They're immune. They're genetically superior in this way. The Europeans are you know, trying to, you know, not to get sick the entire time. They're, they're there. And again, this also puts the thumb on the scales and really is an impetus for the Atlantic, the transatlantic slave trade.
[31:20]
A
This is just fascinating. Charles, I really appreciate your time today. I've been talking with Charles C. Mann. He's a journalist and author, including of the book 1491 New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus and 1493 Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Both books are excellent. His new podcast is Everyday Abundance, which he co hosts with Virginia Postrel. Charles, thanks for joining us today on American History Hotline.
[31:49]
B
Oh, it's my pleasure talking with you.
[31:54]
A
You've been listening to American History Hotline, a production of iHeart podcasts and Scratch Track Productions. The show's executive producer is James Morrison. Our executive producers from iHeart are Jordan Runtal and Jason English. Original music composed by me, Bob Crawford. Please keep in touch. Our email is americanhistoryhotlinemail.com if you like the show, please tell your friends and leave us a review in Apple Podcasts. I'm your host, Bob Crawford. Feel free to hit me up on social media to ask a history question or to let me know what you think of the show. You can find me at bobcrawford Bass, thanks so much for listening. See you next week.