Charles C. Mann

Not only are utilities switching from coal and oil to gas, but also trucking, schoolbuses, garbage trucks, and even taxi fleets.

— Charles C. Mann

“Farmers learned to plant fallow fields with clover, which recharges the soil with nutrients.”

— Charles C. Mann

The human propensity is to believe that flukes of good fortune will never come to an end.

— Charles C. Mann

Japanese maps tend to come in two varieties: small, schematic, and bewildering; and large, fantastically detailed, and bewildering.

— Charles C. Mann

There are serious worries about unconventional gas and oil, especially those concerning the environment.

— Charles C. Mann

“Anything goes now, apparently,” Fiedel told me. “The lunatics have taken over the asylum.”

— Charles C. Mann

A world with a sudden limit on air travel would be tremendously different from the one we live in now.

— Charles C. Mann

“Colón’s signal accomplishment was, in the phrase of historian Alfred W. Crosby, to reknit the seams of Pangaea.”

— Charles C. Mann

“That was why archaeologists and anthropologists had come across the ruins of complex societies throughout Mesoamerica and the Andes, but saw only…

— Charles C. Mann

Artificial lighting, air-conditioning, and automobiles, all powered by fossil fuels, swaddle us in our giddy modernity. In our ergonomic chairs and acoustical-panel…

— Charles C. Mann

“The varieties are not like islands, carefully apart,” Perales explained. “They are more like gentle hills in a landscape—you see them, they…

— Charles C. Mann

“Monte Albán is today a decorous sprawl of walls and pyramids enveloped by a lush lawn (this last is an import from…

— Charles C. Mann

Americans are willing to cheer on politicians who denounce bureaucratic overreach and job-killing red tape in abstract terms. But they turn out…

— Charles C. Mann

A whole bunch of big technological shocks occurred when Asian innovations - paper, gunpowder, the stirrup, the moldboard plow and so on…

— Charles C. Mann

Historically, large-scale global trade has served two functions: 1) the exchange of goods between willing sellers and buyers described in Econ 101…

— Charles C. Mann

“In the classic successional course, each suite of plants replaces its predecessor, until the arrival of the final, “climax” ecosystem, usually tall…

— Charles C. Mann

“The second myth is that in its appetite for death as spectacle the Triple Alliance was fundamentally different from Europe. Criminals beheaded…

— Charles C. Mann

“Most of the salt occurred in the sediments on the swamp bottoms. To make the water potable, the Maya laid a layer…

— Charles C. Mann

“In contemporary hunting and gathering societies, anthropologists have learned, gathering by women usually supplies most of the daily diet. The meat provided…

— Charles C. Mann

“The Olmec were but the first of many societies that arose in Mesoamerica in this epoch. Most had religions that focused on…

— Charles C. Mann

“Chestnut was especially popular—not the imported European chestnut roasted on Manhattan street corners in the fall, but the smaller, soft-shelled, deeply sweet…

— Charles C. Mann

In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great’s expanding Russia,…

— Charles C. Mann

“Carrying their flints and torches, Native Americans were living in balance with Nature—but they had their thumbs on the scale. Shaped for…

— Charles C. Mann

“What happened in 1518 and 1519 is not. In those years, according to Bartolomé de Las Casas, a missionary priest who lived…

— Charles C. Mann

“Mesoamerica would deserve its place in the human pantheon if its inhabitants had only created maize, in terms of harvest weight the…

— Charles C. Mann

“The portraits were intended to parade their fellows like specimens in a zoo. Yet at the same time most show the castizos,…

— Charles C. Mann

“Early farming villages worldwide were much less authoritarian places than later societies. But the Indians of the eastern seaboard institutionalized their liberty…

— Charles C. Mann

“Menaced by environmental problems, torn by struggles between the tiny coterie of wealthy Spaniards at the center and a teeming, fractious polyglot…

— Charles C. Mann

“With its federal government that can supersede state and local law, its dependence on rule by the majority rather than consensus, its…

— Charles C. Mann

“In Mesoamerica, timekeeping provided the stimulus that accounting gave to the Middle East. Like contemporary astrologers, the Olmec, Maya, and Zapotec believed…

— Charles C. Mann

“The monks explain that they have been sent by “the one who on the earth is the greater speaker of divine things,”…

— Charles C. Mann

“the king was talking with Bartolomé de las Casas, a fiery Dominican priest who had just completed Brief Account of the Destruction…

— Charles C. Mann

“Criminals beheaded in Palermo, heretics burned alive in Toledo, assassins drawn and quartered in Paris—Europeans flocked to every form of painful death…

— Charles C. Mann

There are several types of greenhouse gasses, but carbon dioxide is the most important.

— Charles C. Mann

The embrace of a new technology by ordinary people leads inevitably to its embrace by people of malign intent.

— Charles C. Mann

“It is always easy for those living in the present to feel superior to those who lived in the past.”

— Charles C. Mann

“mounting a sustained war. Unhappily, these intriguing speculations”

— Charles C. Mann

Compared with U.S. cities, Japanese cities bend over backward to help foreigners. The countryside is another matter.

— Charles C. Mann

The Japanese drive on the left side of the road. Most streets literally do not have names.

— Charles C. Mann

“After 1492 the world’s ecosystems collided and mixed as European vessels carried thousands of species to new homes across the oceans.”

— Charles C. Mann