New World

Amerigo Vespucci was the first person to name the unknown land he sailed to “New World”. In 1503, Vespucci wrote a letter from Portugal to Lorenzo Medici in Spain, and coined the new frontiers: “… and it is lawful to call it a new world…” Of course, this world was new to him, as there were millions of inhabitants already occupying the land, and living in various tribes and in communal settlements. Amerigo’s discovery was later named after him “The American Continent”. In the same letter he stated: “… for I have found a continent in that southern part; full of animals and more populous than our Europe, or Asia, or Africa, and even more temperate and pleasant than any other region known to us...” One may wonder what happened to the population of the natives he mentioned, as there are presently only a few pockets of them spread out in the US, Canada, and Central and South American countries. According to the estimates of some anthropologists, before 1492 voyage of Christopher Columbus, there were more than 100 million natives living in that continent. Notwithstanding that population of all races of the world has increased rapidly since the 15th century, the population of indigenous people has declined dramatically. One estimate in 1976 stated the population of Native Americans as 54 million. Another estimate calculates world population in the year 1500 of 438,428,000 and world population in 1975 of 4,065,408,000 (2003 estimates of Angus Maddison). Accordingly, the population of the world had increased from the year 1500 to the year 1975 by 427% while the population of Native Americans has decreased in the same period by 46%. The reduction was caused by introduction of Europeans’ imported diseases that natives did not have immunity against, such as influenza, plague, and smallpox. But it was also caused by systematic genocide of the natives by the new arrivals (for a detail account of natives’ genocide see Howard Zinn’s "A People's History of the United States").

فرهنگ اختراعات

فرهنگ اختراعات وردزورث برای اولین بار در سال ۱۹۸۸ در فرانسه (با عنوان اختراعات بزرگ بشر) منتشر، و سه سال بعد در سال ۱۹۹۱ در انگلستان ترجمه و چاپ شده است. مطالب کتاب به دَه بخش و هر بخش به چند فصل تقسیم شده، که عنوان فصلها و بخشها به ترتیب حروف الفبای انگلیسی‌ میباشند. این نوشتار چاپ انگلیسی‌ این کتاب را که در سال ۱۹۹۵ در قطع جیبی‌ و در حدود ۲۴۰ صفحه منتشر شده است بررسی می‌کند

The Wordsworth Dictionary of Inventions

This book was originally printed in French in 1988, translated into English three years later by Melanie Hanbury. Source of this writing is the second edition of The Wordsworth Dictionary of Inventions, a slightly over 200 pages pocket edition published in 1995.