President Obama is holding the first ever conference for all of America’s native Indians. Delegates from all 564 tribes have been invited to the White House as the president promised them a better deal.
Estimates of the number of native Americans before the appearance of the white man range as high as 18 million. Then they were killed in wars or by being driven from their lands, but most of all by disease.
With no immunity to the infections brought from Europe, they died in their thousands, from chicken pox, smallpox, measles. In 1618, smallpox wiped out 90% of the Massachusetts Bay native Americans.
A century and a half later, the disease reached the northwest coast, and killed off 30% of the Indians there. In the Puget Sound area, a population of 37,000 was reduced to just 9,000, and epidemics continued on into the nineteenth century. Today, there are about 2 million Indians left in the United States and about 1 million in Canada.
Showing posts with label 1618. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1618. Show all posts
Friday, 6 November 2009
Saturday, 23 May 2009
A dreadful war
This day…..391 years ago saw the wonderfully named defenestration of Prague when the mainly Protestant Bohemians grabbed three of their Catholic king’s henchmen and threw them out of a window at the royal castle. The officials’ fall was broken by a pile of rubbish and they escaped serious injury.
But peace also went out of the window on May 23, 1618, and for the next 30 years central Europe was turned into a battlefield for contending armies. The Thirty Years War, as it became known, began as a fight for mastery between Protestants and Catholics, and ended as a power struggle between Catholic France and Catholic Spain and Austria.
By the time it ended in 1648, the destruction was almost beyond belief. Perhaps 8 million people had been killed or had died from starvation or disease out of a population of 21 million, though some places suffered far worse. Bohemia was said to have lost almost three quarters of its people, while Chemnitz lost perhaps five sixths. A Swedish general declared: “I would not have believed a land could be so despoiled had I not seen it with my own eyes.”
See also my blog of May 20, and A Disastrous History of the World.
But peace also went out of the window on May 23, 1618, and for the next 30 years central Europe was turned into a battlefield for contending armies. The Thirty Years War, as it became known, began as a fight for mastery between Protestants and Catholics, and ended as a power struggle between Catholic France and Catholic Spain and Austria.
By the time it ended in 1648, the destruction was almost beyond belief. Perhaps 8 million people had been killed or had died from starvation or disease out of a population of 21 million, though some places suffered far worse. Bohemia was said to have lost almost three quarters of its people, while Chemnitz lost perhaps five sixths. A Swedish general declared: “I would not have believed a land could be so despoiled had I not seen it with my own eyes.”
See also my blog of May 20, and A Disastrous History of the World.
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