Esteban Jose Martinez: His Voyage in 1779 to Supply Alta California (review)
indian labor, as well as their lands, welcome these pandemics? Surely the worst European sin (and there were a great many) was not their coming to America five centuries too soon to know what we now know, or think what we now think, about salvation, disease, ecology, or human rights. All readers, and especially teachers in search of unusual “sound bites” that reveal European misdeeds in America, will find some new and arresting material in this book. The author was provoked to assemble this work by inadequate and distorted “traditional textbooks” that marginalized Amerindians while reverently chronicling the transit of European civilization into a savage America. Such texts are approaching well-deserved extinction. One hopes that Sokolow’s audience will include those who were subjected to such distortions and now seek a strong antidote.