thesis prep portfolio

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


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


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).


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


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.


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).


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,


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).


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


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


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


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).


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).


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 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.


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>.

thesis prep portfolio

Documents

new york fashion week

new talent

street new york

casting internship

event american fashion

new york62 chelsea piers

jacquelyn clifford917

production intern