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EMAIL: Dear Maxwell Frey, Please consider the enclosed copy of my resume for the internship position in the departments of either art or footage. My education, in addition to the experiences I have from previous internships make me a good candidate for these fields. While an intern at SLAM magazine, I regularly updated the photography archive,and Filemaker. I also researched new talent, art for upcoming issues, assisted in casting for editorial shoots, and helped the crew on set. While a production intern at The Media Place, I researched crew members for out of state shoots, took part in casting, contributed to the general office "work flow", and delivered packages throughout Manhattan. While a student at F.I.T., I learned the Adobe creative suite, chose the talent for my own shoots, and learned the importance of deadlines and time management. My motivation for working with the Onion News Network I would very much appreciate an opportunity a meeting with you at a time of your convenience to discuss this matter further. Thank you for your consideration. Sincerely, Jacquelyn Clifford
Human ResourcesLynn Kressel Casting New York62 Chelsea Piers, # 304 New York, NY 10011-1015
Dear Hiring Manager,
Please consider the enclosed copy of my resume for a casting internship during the summer of 2011. As my resume indicates, I have previous experience in casting and production. I believe my prior knowledge and skills will allow me to make a positive contribution at Lynn Kressel. I am already familiar with the proper etiquette and professional procedure required in production, including communication within the office or contacting an outside agency or provider. Practical lessons and hands on training from F.I.T. taught me the value of working efficiently within a team to meet deadlines, and the importance of effective com-munication. And as a fan of the work that Lynn Kressel has done on shows such as Law and Order SVU, and the movie Human Trafficking, I would welcome the opportunity to further my experience in casting there. I would appreciate the opportunity to meet you at your convenience. Please feel free to call or email anytime with questions. I can be reached by email at [email protected] or by telephone at 917-515-5102.
Thank you for your consideration.
Sincerely,
Jacquelyn Clifford917.515.5102
JACQUELYN [email protected] 917.515.5102 www.jacquelynclifford.com
The Radio & Television Broadcast Network A Division of the Fashion Institute of Technology’s Student Association Fashion Institute of Technology Seventh Avenue at 27th Street New York, New York 10001
May 23, 2011
Dear Park Avenue Floratique, My name is Jacquelyn Clifford and I am a part of WFIT at the Fashion Institute of Technology, the school’s Official Radio and Television Broadcast Network. After extensively covering New York Fashion Week, including the Nanette Lepore show, we are on to our next endeavor. WFIT is hosting an event “American Fashion” on May 9, 2010, for which I am serving as an Event Publicist. The free event for FIT students will feature Joe Zee of ELLE Magazine, Amy Odell of New York Magazine’s ‘The Cut,’ and Jenna Sauers of Jezebel.com. to discuss the future of fashion and it’s relation to FIT students who are the future fashion leaders. It is projected that over 350 guests will arrive. In addition to the event, we will be hosting a raffle for all students who are in attendance at the event. As Event Publicist, one of the tasks I am in charge of is obtaining prizes for this raffle. We would like to ask for your donation in Flowers to include in the raffle. Participating in this event with WFIT and the Fashion Institute of Technology will be greatly beneficial to the sponsoring company, garnering attention and relationships amongst the fashion savvy students of New York City. Please join us in bringing the community together through fashion at this great event. With the long hours and hard work we have been putting into planning “American Fashion” we are in ecstatic anticipation and we believe that your participation will help make the event exactly what we envisioned. Sincerely, Jacquelyn Clifford WFIT Event Publicist Fashion Institute of Technology Seventh Avenue at 27th Street New York City, NY 10001 330.618.9688 [email protected] www.wfitnyc.com www.youtube.com/wfitnews
(Malin + Goetz), Sales Associate August 2009 - Febuary 2010 New York, New York Sole operating employee of retail stores in New York City. Daily responsibilites included opening and closing procedures such as handling the security system, counting cash and reporting credit totals. Assisted new and existing customers find product, and contributed to client capture.
SLAM Magazine, Photo Intern August - December 2008 New York, New York
Responsible for art research, making contact with several sources such as; magazines, newspapers, and several stock sites for requested art work, archiving, booking, contacting photo-agencies, modeling agencies, stylists, and photogragraphers. I also have experience working on set.
Mediaplace, Production Intern June - August 2008 New York, New York
Responsible for taking still photographs on set, used Final Cut Pro to capture video, and researched the crew for both still and video shoots.
W27 (FIT) Newspaper, Photographer September 2007 - present New York, New York Photographer. Worked in InDesign on all photo layouts. Con- tributed editorial content relating to New York culture.
-Both Mac and PC Platforms.-Adobe Photoshop, Bridge, InDesign,Flash, and Dreamweaver.-Organization, Research, and Archiving.-Microsoft Office, and I’Work ’09.-Knowledge of Technical Photography: -Large Format, medium format, and 35 MM. -Strobe Systems. -Lighting styles, and techniques.-Sales.-Final Cut Pro.
Art, film, cooking, rock climbing, New York City, music, web design, comedy, yoga, eco-friendly living, animal rights, nutrition, healthy eating, and movies.
Fashion Institute of Technology - B.F.A. Photography, Spring 2012Minor: Italian, Art History Institute of Integrative Nutrition - Certified Health Counselor, Summer 2009
JACQUELYN [email protected] 917.515.5102
education
experience
www.jacquelynclifford.com
skills
interests
WFIT Student Television Studio, Treasurer Elect September 2010 - Present New York, New York
Responsible for capturing stills and video, digitizing media, editing footage, and casting news anchors for various events.
LIFE.COM, Photography Intern December 2010 - May 2011 New York, New York
Responsible for researching archival and current media for web galleries, clerical office duties, scanning negatives, and mantaining gallery upkeep on the site’s digital tool.
-Dean’s List.-Photographers Forum Magazine finalist 2011.
honors
Single Cell: Mass Destruction J. Clifford Page #1
Single Cell: Mass Destruction By Jacquelyn Clifford
Throughout history the biggest villain to human kind has been disease. It takes
lives, ruins nations, and before recent breakthroughs in modern science would sweep
through civilizations and kill mass amounts of people. When Europeans first discovered
America they had a hidden unknown biological weapon, their own germs. As soon as
they came into contact with the indigenous population they spread their germs,
immediately and swiftly killing off the natives. While the Europeans who conquered
America did have superior weapons, their germs may have played the key role in their
conquest. Germs severely weakened the strength and size of the native population,
allowing for them to be easily defeated and removed. The factors that allowed for this
to happen were: Europeans had immunities from living with domesticated animals (who
carried diseases) in close quarters for thousands of years, they had no means of
sanitation (soap, antibacterial lotion), no knowledge of germs, no vaccination, and the
natives lived in close quarters with each other allowing germs to spread quickly
(Warick).
The way of life for the Native Americans and the Europeans could not have been
more different. The Europeans had adapted to live in an environment with many
contagions and thus developed immunities. They were exposed to these contagions
from domesticating animals and then living with them in close quarters. The Europeans
had many domesticated animals, which included the cow, sheep, goat, horse, pig, and
chicken. Europeans often lived close to their animals, sleeping near them in the same
buildings, eating their meat, and drinking their milk. The only large animal the Native
Americans had was the llama, which did not live in close proximity to the humans who
Single Cell: Mass Destruction J. Clifford Page #2
kept them, was rarely used for meat, and did not provide humans with milk. European
diseases which are believed to have originally come from domesticated animals include
smallpox, plague, influenza, typhus, measles, and more. Native Americans had never
been exposed to these diseases, and had no similarly deadly diseases to infect
Europeans, because Native Americans had not had similar exposure to domesticated
animals (Diamond).
These diseases proved devastating to Native American populations. By some
estimates, half or more of Native Americans who contracted smallpox died. Entire
populations were nearly wiped out by European diseases. Some of these populations
were destroyed even before they had met a single European. The story of the fall of the
Inca Empire is an important example of the importance of disease in aiding European
conquest (Mann).
In the year 1520, a Spanish ship brought a smallpox-infected man to the Aztec
Empire in Mexico. This disease helped the Spanish in their ongoing war of conquest
against the Aztecs by rapidly killing huge numbers of natives. But the disease also
spread south, and eventually reached the Inca Empire in South America, before the
Incas had met any Europeans. The Inca Emperor and his designated heir died in the
years 1525-1527, along with up to half of the Incan population. Within a few years, up
to 90% of the Incas would be dead. After the death of the Emperor, two of his sons
fought for control of the Empire because there was no designated heir. By the time the
Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro arrived in 1532, the Incan population had been
decimated by disease and civil war. Even after Pizarro’s attack, continuing internal
conflicts among the Inca further reduced opposition to the Spanish. Smallpox and other
Single Cell: Mass Destruction J. Clifford Page #3
European diseases continued to further reduce the Native American population in the
former Inca Empire in the decades ahead until it was only a small fraction of its former
size. This ensured that the Inca rebellions could not succeed (Mann). An estimated
93% of the population in the former Inca Empire died as a result of various European
diseases (Lovell).
One of the key lessons of the story of the Inca is that the mass death started
even before Europeans arrived. By the time Pizarro began his attempt at conquest, half
the Inca population may have been gone. Similar outbreaks of deadly diseases may
have spread throughout North and South America many years before any Europeans
arrived. By the time Europeans did attempt to settle in the Americas, they found
continents that had been largely emptied, and the Europeans often believed that they
had always been nearly empty. But the continents had not always been this way– there
had been many more people before the disease outbreaks (Mann).
Estimates of the size of the population of the Americas before the year 1492
vary, but some serious scholarly estimates put the population at over 100 million
people. If those estimates are accurate, then more the 90% of the native population
died over the next several hundred years, mostly due to European diseases (Mann).
Some native populations, such as the Arawak on the island of Santo Domingo, were
completely exterminated after they were discovered by Europeans (Jones). The size
and sophistication of other large Native American populations, such as the Beni tribe in
South America, have only recently been discovered through modern scientific research–
European colonizers never even knew they had existed (Dobyns).
Single Cell: Mass Destruction J. Clifford Page #4
The destruction of native populations not only allowed European conquest, but
also aided settlement. When English and French sailors visited New England in the
early 1600s, they described a land that was densely populated by Native Americans.
European attempts to colonize or settle that land were easily repulsed. But then
shipwrecked French sailors triggered a massive outbreak of disease, which wiped out
up to 95% of the native population of New England. When the Pilgrims landed, they
settled in what had been a Native American village named Patuxet, and renamed it
Plymouth. The Pilgrims lived in the abandoned Native American homes, and subsisted
on food that the former inhabitants had stored. All around them, other Native American
villages were filled with dead bodies. Because of disease, it had become possible for
the English to colonize Massachusetts (Mann).
Why were these diseases so devasting to Native Americans? One possible
reason is that they had no acquired immunity and were not genetically adapted
(Thornton). Another is that Native Americans tended to be more genetically
homogenous than people who were not from the Americas, which allowed diseases to
adapt themselves towards defeating a common immunological profile (Jones). Perhaps
the most important reason is that the diseases spread as “virgin-soil epidemics”. This
meant that almost all of the population was infected at once because no one was
immune. In such an epidemic, because almost everyone is sick, there is hardly anyone
left healthy enough to care for the ill. Fires go out; people go hungry and thirsty; seeds
aren’t planted in time or crops aren’t harvested. When everyone is sick at the same
time, diseases can be much more deadly. Native Americans also had no cultural
immunity: they did not know about contagion or practice quarantining the sick, instead
Single Cell: Mass Destruction J. Clifford Page #5
continuing to live among them. Their medical treatments (such as plunging a patient
into a frigid lake) were often more harmful than helpful. Without any experience in
dealing with diseases, Native Americans were far less effective in treating them. Adding
all of these factors together can lead to over 90% of a population dying in a single
epidemic. And when an epidemic of one disease is followed by an epidemic of a
different disease, an already weakend population is even more vulnerable (Crosby).
Putting all of these effects together, diseases from Europe had a devasting effect
on the peoples of the Americas, and aided greatly in the European conquest and
settlement. Some of the disease outbreaks were written about by Europeans who saw
them as they happened. Other epidemics have only recently been discovered by
modern scientific research. But in all of these places, the effects were real. The
outbreaks of multiple diseases, one after another, killed huge numbers of people in a
way history had never seen before. The Americas became ruled and settled by Europe,
and most Native Americans disappeared. The world would never be the same again.
Single Cell: Mass Destruction J. Clifford Page #6
Works Cited
Crosby, Alfred W. “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America.” The William and Mary Quarterly 33.2 (1976): 289-299. Web. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1922166>. Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999. Print. Dobyns, Henry F. “1491: In Search of Native America.” Journal of the Southwest 46.3 (2004): 441-461. Web. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/40170298>. Jones, David S. “Virgin Soils Revisited.” The William and Mary Quarterly 60.4 (2003): 703-742. Web. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/3491697>. Lovell, W. George. “‘Heavy Shadows and Black Night’: Disease and Depopulation in Colonial Spanish America.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82.3 (1992): 426-443. Web. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/2563354>. Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. New York: Vintage Books, 2005. Print. Thornton, Russell. “Aboriginal North American Population and Rates of Decline, ca. a.d. 1500‐1900.” Current Anthropology 38. 2 (1997): 310-315. Web. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/204615>. Warrack, Gary. “European Infectious Disease and Depopulation of the Wendat-Tionontate (Huron-Petun).” World Archaeology 35.2 (2003): 258-275. Web. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/3560226>.
How the Americas Were Won J. Clifford Page #1
How the Americas Were Won By Jacquelyn Clifford
How did the Europeans conquer America? Everyone knows that
Christopher Columbus discovered a New World in the year 1492. But not
everyone knows how the Spanish, Portuguese, English, and other European
countries conquered the American continents. It may seem obvious to an
average person that such a conquest would have been easy– after all, weren’t
the Native Americans primitive and few in number? Weren’t they easily pushed
aside? But the truth is that the story is more complicated than that.
Some scholarly estimates put the size of the population of the Americas in
the year 1491 at over 100 million. This was more than the population of Europe.
The Native Americans had sophisticated, well-organized governments, with large
standing armies. They had cities that were larger and grander than any in
Europe. They had sophisticated aqueducts, plumbing, canals, bridges, and
farmed terraces. Looking at this without the benefit of hindsight, it isn’t obvious
that the Europeans would be able to conquer and destroy the American societies
(Mann).
The story of the battle of Cajamarca can help us understand how and why
the Europeans were able to conquer America. At Cajamarca, in the year 1732,
the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro led a force of 170 Spanish soldiers,
against the army of the new Inca Emperor, which had 80,000 soldiers. The
Spanish were completely surrounded by a huge army. Yet they won an
astounding victory, massacring huge numbers of Inca soldiers, and capturing the
Inca Emperor (Diamond).
How the Americas Were Won J. Clifford Page #2
This was possible because of the many advantages the Spanish held.
The Spanish had guns and cannons. They had horses and were skilled riders.
They had metal armor. They had metal swords. The Incas had never seen any
of these things before, did not know what to expect, and did not know how to
fight them. The Incas’ weapons were clubs, and they wore cloth armor. These
things were useless against the steel-clad, steel-armed Spanish. The Incan
people had also recently been devastated by an epidemic of smallpox and other
European diseases, which spread to their civilization even before they had met
any Europeans, and which led to an Incan civil war that had weakened the
Incans militarily before the Spanish arrived. The Spanish also knew exactly what
to expect, and had detailed plans. Pizarro had modeled his conquest of the
Incas on the detailed written account of the earlier Spanish conquest of the
Aztecs, which was led by Hernán Cortés. By contrast, the Incas never even
knew that the Aztecs existed, and had no system of writing. So when you add
these factors together, it seems obvious why, in an immediate sense, the
Spanish were able to conquer the Incas (Diamond). But that only leads to the
interesting question: why did the Spanish have guns, germs, and steel, and not
the other way around? Why didn’t advanced Incas conquer primitive Spanish?
The Spanish came from Europe, and Europe should really be thought of
as a larger continent of Eurasia. It really isn’t accurate to describe “Europe” and
“Asia” as two separate continents, because they are connected over a large
area, and there is no natural difference between territory that might be marked as
“Europe” and “Asia”. North Africa really should be thought of as part of Eurasia,
How the Americas Were Won J. Clifford Page #3
because it is geographically connected, has a similar climate, and is separated
from the rest of Africa by the natural barrier of the Sahara Desert, which is very
difficult to cross (Diamond).
Eurasia had the best plants in the world for farming and domestication.
And in fact, most of those plants lived in the “fertile crescent” stretching across
modern-day Israel, Syria, Turkey, and Iraq. Those plants included the wild
ancestors of wheat, barley, and pulses. These plants were very easy to
domesticate, requiring only a single mutation, and the wild form was so useful
that it would have been obvious to humans to take advantage of them. They
were also fairly high in protein. No other place in the world had such useful
potential food crops. Rice was harder to domesticate and farm, and it had less
protein than wheat. Corn would one day be domesticated by Native Americans.
But its natural form was completely useless, and so it likely took thousands of
years for people to turn corn’s wild ancestor into something that was worth
actively cultivating. And even then, it had less protein than wheat. Africa had no
useful wild grains, nor did New Guinea or Australia. The plants that did exist
there, and were eventually domesticated, were not as useful or productive as the
crops that humans first cultivated in the Fertile Crescent. And the failure of non-
Eurasian people to domesticate better crops was not because those people did
something wrong, but simply because the wild plants available were not as good.
Even in modern times, scientists have not been able to domesticate any other
crops that are very useful (Diamond).
How the Americas Were Won J. Clifford Page #4
The story of animals is similar. Eurasia had the wild ancestors of cows,
horses, sheep, goats, pigs, chickens, and more. Animals are very useful to
people in a variety of ways. They can plow fields, can eat plants growing on
fallow fields, and their waste can fertilize fields. They provide meat (important for
protein), hides, and milk. Horses were devastating weapons for war until modern
times, and could also be used for rapid transportation of long distances. Outside
of Eurasia, there were few useful domesticated animals. The only animals
domesticated in the Americas were the llama and the turkey. Neither could be
used to pull a plow or in warfare, and they were generally much less useful than
Eurasian animals. Native Americans had chronic protein deficiency. Africa was
even worse. It might seem like Africa has many animals to choose from, but for
various reasons, they could not be domesticated. For example, zebras seem
very similar to horses, but they have a very different temperament. Zebras are
fearful and vicious towards humans, while horses are not. Even modern
experiments have not been able to domesticate zebras. There simply weren’t
any useful animals anywhere in the world that could be domesticated but were
not (Diamond).
With better crops and animals, Eurasian civilizations were able to flourish.
They were able to develop much larger populations much earlier because of their
farming. With large populations, people could specialize in various occupations.
Some people could be metal workers, others could be bureaucrats. Writing
became much more useful when people had to keep track of food supplies,
debts, commercial activity, the victories of kings, and more. And once writing
How the Americas Were Won J. Clifford Page #5
and other technologies developed, it could easily spread east or west along
Eurasia, so that all civilizations in Eurasia were able to build upon the
technological achievements of each other (Diamond).
With the best plants and animals on Earth, and the ability to easily
transport and start farming those plants and animals over a huge continent,
Eurasians started with a huge advantage. But even then, it took thousands of
years for highly-populated Eurasian civilizations to develop all of the
technologies– including large ships, guns, and steel weapons– that Pizarro had
at Cajamarca, and that the Inca never had. The Native American populations
had become large by the time of the conquest, but because advanced agriculture
had developed thousands of years later in America than in Eurasia, the Native
Americans did not have the time to develop similarly sophisticated technology
(Diamond). And they also did not develop similarly virulent contagious diseases.
Throughout history the biggest villain to human kind has been disease. It
takes lives, ruins nations, and before recent breakthroughs in modern science
would sweep through civilizations and kill mass amounts of people. When
Europeans first discovered America they had a hidden unknown biological
weapon, their own germs. As soon as they came into contact with the
indigenous population they spread their germs, immediately and swiftly killing off
the natives. While the Europeans who conquered America did have superior
weapons, their germs may have played the key role in their conquest. Germs
severely weakened the strength and size of the native population, allowing for
indigenous peoples to be easily defeated and removed. The factors that allowed
How the Americas Were Won J. Clifford Page #6
for this to happen were: Europeans had immunities from living in close quarters
with domesticated animals who carried diseases, while Native Americans had no
means of sanitation (soap, clean water), no knowledge of germs, no vaccination,
no biological immunity, and they lived in close quarters with each other allowing
germs to spread quickly (Warick).
The way of life for the Native Americans and the Europeans could not
have been more different. The Europeans had adapted to live in an environment
with many contagions and thus developed immunities. They were exposed to
these contagions from domesticating animals and then living with them in close
quarters. The Europeans had many domesticated animals, which included the
cow, sheep, goat, horse, pig, and chicken. Europeans often lived close to their
animals, sleeping near them in the same buildings, eating their meat, and
drinking their milk. The only large animal the Native Americans had was the
llama, which did not live in close proximity to the humans who kept it, was rarely
used for meat, and did not provide humans with milk. European diseases which
are believed to have originally come from domesticated animals include
smallpox, plague, influenza, typhus, measles, and more. Native Americans had
never been exposed to these diseases, and had no similarly deadly diseases
with which to infect Europeans, because Native Americans had not had similar
exposure to domesticated animals (Diamond).
These diseases proved devastating to Native American populations. By
some estimates, half or more of Native Americans who contracted smallpox died.
Entire populations were nearly wiped out by European diseases. Some of these
How the Americas Were Won J. Clifford Page #7
populations were destroyed even before they had met a single European. The
story of the fall of the Inca Empire is, once again, an important example of how
the Europeans conquered the Americas. The story of the battle of Cajamarca
goes far beyond the horses, weapons, and armor of the Spanish. They also had
invisible, microscopic allies, who had attacked the Inca even before the Spanish
(Mann).
In the year 1520, a Spanish ship brought a smallpox-infected man to the
Aztec Empire in Mexico. This disease helped the Spanish in their ongoing war of
conquest against the Aztecs by rapidly killing huge numbers of natives. But the
disease also spread south, and eventually reached the Inca Empire in South
America, before the Incas had met any Europeans. The Inca Emperor and his
designated heir died of disease sometime during the years 1525-1527, along
with up to half of the Incan population. Within a few years, up to 90% of the
Incas would be dead. After the death of the Emperor, because there was no
designated heir, two of his sons fought for control of the Empire. By the time the
Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro arrived in 1532, the Incan population
had been decimated by disease and civil war. Even after Pizarro’s attack,
continuing internal conflicts among the Inca further reduced opposition to the
Spanish. Smallpox and other European diseases continued to further reduce the
Native American population in the former Inca Empire in the decades ahead until
it was only a small fraction of its former size. This ensured that the Inca
rebellions could not succeed (Mann). An estimated 93% of the population in the
former Inca Empire died as a result of various European diseases (Lovell).
How the Americas Were Won J. Clifford Page #8
One of the key lessons of the story of the Inca is that the mass death
started even before Europeans arrived. By the time Pizarro began his attempt at
conquest, half the Inca population may have been gone. Similar outbreaks of
deadly diseases may have spread throughout North and South America many
years before any Europeans arrived. For example, it’s believed that pigs that the
explorer Hernando de Soto left in the Southern United States spread themselves,
and the diseases they carried, far and wide, destroying native populations before
any European settlers arrived. By the time Europeans did attempt to settle in the
Americas, they found continents that had been largely emptied, and the
Europeans often believed that they had always been nearly empty. But the
continents had not always been this way– there had been many more people
before the disease outbreaks (Mann).
Estimates of the size of the population of the Americas before the year
1492 vary, but some serious scholarly estimates put the population at over 100
million people. If those estimates are accurate, then more the 90% of the native
population died over the next several hundred years, mostly due to European
diseases (Mann). Some native populations, such as the Arawak on the island of
Santo Domingo, were completely exterminated after they were discovered by
Europeans (Jones). The size and sophistication of other large Native American
populations, such as the Beni tribe in South America, have only recently been
discovered through modern scientific research– European colonizers never even
knew they had existed (Dobyns).
How the Americas Were Won J. Clifford Page #9
The destruction of native populations not only allowed European
conquest, but also aided settlement. When English and French sailors visited
New England in the early 1600s, they described a land that was densely
populated by Native Americans. European attempts to colonize or settle that
land were easily repulsed. But then shipwrecked French sailors triggered a
massive outbreak of disease, which wiped out up to 95% of the native population
of New England. When the Pilgrims landed, they settled in what had been a
Native American village named Patuxet, and renamed it Plymouth. The Pilgrims
lived in the abandoned Native American homes, and subsisted on food that the
former inhabitants had stored. All around them, other Native American villages
were filled with dead bodies. Because of disease, it had become possible for the
English to colonize Massachusetts (Mann).
Why were these diseases so devasting to Native Americans? One
possible reason is that they had no acquired immunity and were not genetically
adapted (Thornton). Another is that Native Americans tended to be more
genetically homogenous than people who were not from the Americas, which
allowed diseases to adapt themselves towards defeating a common
immunological profile (Jones). Perhaps the most important reason is that the
diseases spread as “virgin-soil epidemics”. This meant that almost all of the
population was infected at once because no one was immune. In such an
epidemic, because almost everyone is sick, there is hardly anyone left healthy
enough to care for the ill. Fires go out; people go hungry and thirsty; seeds
aren’t planted in time or crops aren’t harvested. When everyone is sick at the
How the Americas Were Won J. Clifford Page #10
same time, diseases can be much more deadly. Native Americans also had no
cultural immunity: they did not know about contagion or practice quarantining the
sick, instead continuing to live among them. Their medical treatments (such as
plunging a patient into a frigid lake) were often more harmful than helpful.
Without any experience in dealing with diseases, Native Americans were far less
effective in treating them. Adding all of these factors together can lead to over
90% of a population dying in a single epidemic. And when an epidemic of one
disease is followed by an epidemic of a different disease, an already weakend
population is even more vulnerable (Crosby).
Putting all of these effects together, diseases from Europe had a
devasting effect on the peoples of the Americas, and aided greatly in the
European conquest and settlement. Some of the disease outbreaks were written
about by Europeans who saw them as they happened. Other epidemics have
only recently been discovered by modern scientific research. But in all of these
places, the effects were real. The outbreaks of multiple diseases, one after
another, killed huge numbers of people in a way history had never seen before.
When you add the effects of disease to the superior weapons, horses, and
other technology of the Europeans, it becomes clear why the Europeans were
able to defeat and conquer the Native Americans. This happened despite the
fact that many Native Americans live in well-organized, highly-populated, and
complex societies. The Americas became ruled and settled by Europe, and most
Native Americans disappeared. The world would never be the same again.
How the Americas Were Won J. Clifford Page #11
Works Cited
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