sumption of decreasing virulence with time is a double-edged sword in NativeAmerican disease history. Recent Native Americans have extreme susceptibility to oftenacute infections such as influenza and tuberculosis (Indian Health Service 1999; Koenig1921; Matthews 1886). Although, as detailed later in this paper, many factors, includingsocio-economic conditions, diet, and other concurrent infections, could be contributing tothis incidence, these factors seem to pale by comparison with disease history. Essentially,current incidence rates account for the absence of crowd infections prior to Columbus andabsence explains the present incidence rate

se diseases, once introduced, severelywinnowed Native American populations.

Since the mid-twentieth century it has been widely accepted that Old World populationsintroduced infectious diseases to Native Americans beginning with the Columbianvoyages of AD 149

"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past," as Rage Against the Machine sang in their 1999 song "Testify." OK, actually it's a quote from George Orwell's 1984, but hey.

These three kinds of rhetoric refer to three different kinds of time. The political orator is concerned with the future: it is about things to be done hereafter that he advises, for or against. The party in a case at law is concerned with the past; one man accuses the other, and the other defends himself, with reference to things already done. The ceremonial orator is, properly speaking, concerned with the present, since all men praise or blame in view of the state of things existing at the time, though they often find it useful also to recall the past and to make guesses at the future.

For of the three elements in speech-making -- speaker, subject, and person addressed -- it is the last one, the hearer, that determines the speech's end and object. [1358b] The hearer must be either a judge, with a decision to make about things past or future, or an observer. A member of the assembly decides about future events, a juryman about past events: while those who merely decide on the orator's skill are observers. From this it follows that there are three divisions of oratory-(1) political, (2) forensic, and (3) the ceremonial oratory of display.