An American Secret

美国秘密

Hidden Brain

社会科学

2017-11-21

21 分钟
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单集简介 ...

All countries have national myths. The story of the first Thanksgiving, for example, evokes the warm glow of intercultural contact: European settlers, struggling to survive in the New World, and Native American tribes eager to help. As many of us learned in history class, this story leaves a lot out. This week on Hidden Brain, we explore a national secret: that from the time Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World until 1900, there were as many as five million Native American people enslaved. We'll learn about this history, and the psychological forces that kept it unexamined for so long.
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单集文稿 ...

  • This is hidden brain.

  • I'm Shankar Vedantam.

  • All countries have national myths.

  • Here in the United States, thanksgiving evokes the warm glow of intercultural contact.

  • European settlers were struggling to make it.

  • In the new world, and native american.

  • Tribes were eager to help.

  • If we were to think a little more deeply and a little more critically, we might remember other stories from history classes.

  • These are tales of exclusion and expulsion of native american tribes pushed out from their homelands as settlers colonized the continent.

  • But there's a third story you might not have heard.

  • Many Native Americans came to know the settlers not through happy thanksgivings or even through war and colonization, but through slavery.

  • We say that there have been 12.5 million Africans forcibly transported across the Atlantic as slaves into the new world.

  • That is a very powerful thing to say.

  • And I wanted to get a rough sense of how indian slavery compared to that.

  • So I came up with a figure of 2.5 to 5 million native Americans enslaved throughout the Americas since Columbus.

  • To people this week on hidden brain, we explore this hidden history and the psychological reasons its remained submerged for so long.

  • Andres Resendiz is a history professor at the University of California, Davis.

  • Hes the author of the other the Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America.

  • Andres, welcome to Hidden Brain.

  • It is a pleasure to be here.