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Ben Franklin's World is a production of Colonial Williamsburg Innovation Studios.

Native nations have always been and still are diverse and different from each other.

But one of the things I really stress about that period a thousand or so years ago is the presence of very large-scale civilizations,

large-scale agriculture-based cities,

feeding large numbers of people

with pretty prominent religious and political leaders,

quite comparable to other parts of the world

at the same time, including Western Europe.

Hello and welcome to episode 397 of Ben Franklin's World, the podcast dedicated to helping you

learn more about how the people

and events of our early American past have shaped the present-day world we live in.

And I'm your host, Liz Cobart.

The North American continent is approximately 160 million years old, and yet we Americans

tend to focus on what amounts to 3,300 millionths of that history,

which is roughly the period between 1492 and the present. Now, in her new book, Native

Nations, a millennium in North America, Kathleen Duval, a professor of history at the University

of North Carolina Chapel Hill, asks us to widen our view of early North American history to at least

1,000 years. Because long before European colonists and enslaved Africans arrived on the

eastern shores of North America, indigenous Americans had built vibrant cities and civilizations,

and they adapted to a world that was changing even before colonists arrived.

Kathleen believes that we can learn a lot by adding and centering indigenous peoples and histories

...