The bones of our story

 I’m enjoying conversations with friends about Ken Burns’s new series on the American Revolution.

We Americans are so swamped with the received text of this story — layers and layers of self-serving myth — that it’s hard to find bedrock for a foundation.

I’d suggest this: Imagine you’re a biologist looking at how life changed on the continent from 1492 to 1776. Imagine all the new plants and animals that arrived on ships — crops grown in North America for the first time, new livestock, new pests. Imagine the weed seeds that hid in sacks of grain, giving North America new thistles as well as new wildflowers. And of course there are new microbes, including smallpox.

A biologist might say that the environment itself had changed.

Let’s say the place changed.

Now imagine that you’re doing a population survey on one species: homo sapiens.

• The part of the story we are told: Myriad Europeans — English, Spanish, French, Dutch, German — came in waves to settle a new land.

• The part that we gloss over: The waves of enslaved Africans were even bigger. Africans were dragged from their homeland to be exploited because few wealthy Europeans wanted to pay workers the market rate.

• The part we can’t grasp: From 1492 to 1776 the total population of North America declined. All those waves of immigrants, willing and enslaved, couldn’t make up for the losses. All those ships were carrying microbes along with everything else. There was no immunity in the original populations.

Those are the bones of the story — our story.

It’s not that hard to imagine a different one, a story with less greed, cruelty, inhumanity.

• Source and note: One of the historians who is interviewed in Burns’s series is Alan Taylor. I’ve admired his work since seeing American Colonies; London: Penguin Books, 2002.