I think we know now that what they taught us in school was…hmm…not always accurate. 1491 is the first book that opened my eyes to just how not accurate. Reporting from archaeology, anthropology, genetics, and ecology, Charles C. Mann upends the European narrative of the Americas as sparsely inhabited wilderness “untrammeled by man,” to quote the US Wilderness Act. In fact, tens of millions of people lived in the Americas, built cities, engineered landscapes, managed forests with fire, created fertile soils like Amazonian terra preta, and developed complex civilizations from the Amazon to the Mississippi Valley. Two decades after it was first published, advances in mapping and sensing have revealed even more signs of humans on the land than the book suggested. If you want one read to expand your take on the once-called New World, this is it.