The History of the History

History is in just a bunch of names and dates and facts.

It's the collection of all the stories throughout human history that explained how and why we got here.

Welcome to the History Unplugged Podcast, where we look at the forgotten, neglected, strange, and even counterfactual stories that made our world what it is.

I'm your host, Scott Rank.

Around 11 or 1200, a few centuries before Columbus arrived in the Americas, one of the largest cities on the continent was Cahokia.

At a peak population between 25 and 50,000 people.

Cahokia's population consisted of farmers who grew large amounts of corn and craft specialists who made beautiful pots and jewelry and fine clay figurines.

But one of the most amazing things about the city were the large earth and mounds.

And if you look at these mounds, don't think of a big hill, think of a huge trapezoid that can still be seen today and were encountered by explorers from the new world with complete confusion.

They found dozens of these mounds and the biggest was in Cahokia and building it was nearly as impressive as building the great pyramid of Giza.

That's because the mounds stood over 100 feet tall and took an estimated 22 million cubic feet of earth.

The earth and clay was brought in by baskets and the entire structure may have been built as quickly as two years based on soil samples and plant remains in the strata.

We don't know how it was built. It's almost as mysterious as how the great pyramids of Giza were built.

So it probably took a very organized society and a very charismatic leader to be able to pull it off.

So to build something like this and to maintain a population this large required a strong central government and the leader who ran it may have been considered a deity.

And we don't know this because there aren't written records left behind so we have to rely on archaeology.

But the most interesting thing about Cahokia or at least so those who don't know about it is that this wasn't an Aztec or Inkin or Mayan city one of the civilizations that we think of when we think of the pre-Columbian Americas.

This city sat in what is now southern Illinois across the Mississippi River from modern day Saint Louis.

Now when people think of the North Americas before Columbus they imagine tribes living in neolithic conditions that you'd see in Eurasia about 10,000 BC.

And any advanced civilization was in Mexico or Central America or South America.

But Cahokia at the height of its population was bigger than any city in what would become the United States up until the 1780s when Philadelphia grew beyond 40,000 people.

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