Today our children our being taught that the people who lived in the pre-Columbian Western Hemisphere were not “merciless Indian savages” (as Jefferson calls them in the Declaration of Independence), many of whom delighted in torture and cannibalism, but rather spiritually enlightened “native Americans” whose wise and peaceful nobility was rudely destroyed by invading European barbarians; that the Aztecs were not practitioners of human sacrifice and cannibalism on a scale so vast that the mind of the 20th-century American can hardly comprehend it, but rather defenders of an advanced civilization that was destroyed by brutal Spanish conquistadores; and that Africans were not uncultured slave traders and cannibals, but unappreciated builders of great empires.

But just how did these peoples live before they came into contact with Europeans? Although historical myth is ever more rapidly replacing factual history, not only in popular culture but also in our schools and universities, we may still find accurate historical accounts buried in larger libraries or in used book stores.