We were taught that Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ America.  As one historian remarked, this was hardly a revelation – ‘news’ – to the sixty million people living there – even though it sparked astonishment in all of Europe.

But the advent of white people, and their diseases, from Europe caused a human disaster that has no parallel.  ‘Virgin-soil’ epidemics devastated a population that had no immunity to these diseases.  By 1650, the original population of about 60 million in 1492 had shrunk to 6 million. 

This was a far greater catastrophe for the American continent than the Black Death had been for Europe.  It was what one historian called a ‘largely unwitting exercise in biological ethnic cleansing’ that had profound global consequences’.

And it is hardly ever mentioned when Europeans or Americans contemplate the ‘cost’ of the creation of the nation that we know as the United States.