Episode Details

This week I’m shattering preconceived notions that Indigenous Americans north of Mexico didn’t build cities. That they organized, instead, into only small, nomadic villages. Because, for around 800 years there was a great city, the largest pre-Colombian city north of Mexico, a city that, if you were to have visited in the year 1200, is theorized to have been larger than both London and Paris at that same time. In fact, it held the record for largest city in the now United States for almost 700 years from around 1100 until Philadelphia broke the record in the 1780s. I’m talking about the city of Cahokia which sprawled along the Mississippi River in southern Illinois, a testament to the true scale, potential, and abilities of Indigenous Americans in what is now the United States. Never heard of it? I hadn’t either. Let’s fix that. 

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Sources: 

• “Cahokia: A Pre-Colombian American City” by Timothy R. Pauketat
• Cahokia Mounds Museum Society
• EBSCO “Cahokia Becomes the First North American City”
• Wikipedia “Cahokia”
• Wikipedia “Mississippian Culture”

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