Quotes About Americas

Maize and the milpa slowly radiated throughout the Americas, stopping their advance only where the climate grew too cold or dry. By the time of the Pilgrims, fields of mixed maize, beans, and squash lined the New England coast and in many places extended for miles into the interior. To the south, maize reached to Peru and Chile. Maize was a high-status food there even though Andean cultures had developed their own agricultural system, with potatoes occupying the central role.

way of saying this is that when Columbus sailed more people lived in the Americas than in Europe.

Meanwhile, the first recorded zero in the Americas occurred in a Maya carving from 357 A.D., possibly before the Sanskrit

Having grown separately for millennia, the Americas were a boundless sea of novel ideas, dreams, stories, philosophies, religions, moralities, discoveries, and all the other products of the mind. Few things are more sublime or characteristically human than the cross-fertilization of cultures. The simple discovery by Europe of the existence of the Americas caused an intellectual ferment. How much grander would have been the tumult if Indian societies had survived in full splendor!

what scientists call zoonotic disease was little known in the Americas.

Its most recent iteration, released in 2009, estimates that between 1500 and 1840, the heyday of the slave trade, 11.7 million captive Africans left for the Americas—a massive transfer of human flesh unlike anything before it. In that period, perhaps 3.4 million Europeans emigrated. Roughly speaking, for every European who came to the Americas, three Africans made the trip.

Spanish merchants doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled the price and still sold their goods in the Americas for a third the cost of Spanish textiles. Incredibly, they sold silk from China—silk that had crossed two oceans!—in Spain for less than silk produced in Spain.

In the year 800, traditional estimates say that about 90 percent of our species lived in the temperate belt of Africa and Eurasia, somewhere north of the equator, and another 6 percent lived in sub-Saharan Africa, mostly along the perimeter of the continent. The Americas supposedly had about 3 percent of the world's population, although that number is pretty speculative and much disputed.

Measles and TB evolved from diseases of our cattle, influenza from a disease of pigs, and smallpox possibly from a disease of camels. The Americas had very few native domesticated animal species from which humans could acquire such diseases.

Denali, the glory of Alaska, soars to more than twenty thousand and is one of the most compelling mountains in the Americas.

By the seventeenth century the thaler had become a unit of currency all over central Europe. It had also been copied in Habsburg Spain, whose taleros or 'pieces of eight' circulated throughout the Americas. They were known in English as 'dollars'.

the land written by Amerigo Vespucci after his visit in 1502.

It might seem an abstraction to say that the Age of Liberty was also the Age of Slavery. But consider these figures: of the known 10,148,288 Africans put on slave ships bound for the Americas between 1514 and 1866 (of a total historians estimate to be at least 12,500,000), more than half, 5,131,385, were embarked after July 4, 1776.

Columbus was above all an explorer, and his historic achievements opened the Americas to trade and the eventual English settlements, settlements which grew into the most successful bastion of freedom and prosperity in human history, the United States of America.

In reconstructing African civilisations, the concern is to indicate that African social life had meaning and value, and that the African past is one with which the black man in the Americas can identify with pride.

Peppers are an ancient food in the Americas, and the remains of wild peppers dating back to 7000 B.C. have been found in human coprolites — fossilized excrement — uncovered 150 miles south of Mexico City.

Early on, those who participated in the Atlantic slave trade employed Christianity, a religion that arguably promoted a gospel of liberation, to justify enslaving others. This Christian justification of the enslavement of Africans continued as long as slavery lasted in the Americas.

According to geologists, about 100 million years from now, Asia and the Americas will smash together to form one giant supercontinent. The good news: Maybe all those jobs that went over there will finally come back.

The high command sent the order to kill Che at 11:50 a.m. "Guevara was executed with a burst of shots at 1:15 p.m.," Rodriguez radioed to Tilton. "Guevara's last words were: 'Tell my wife to remarry and tell Fidel Castro that the Revolution will rise again in the Americas.' To his executioner he said, 'Remember, you are killing a man.

Christianity might work on other continents and with other human beings; Yoeme did not dispute those possibilities. But from the beginning in the Americas, the outsiders had sensed their Christianity was somehow inadequate in the face of the immensely powerful and splendid spirit beings who inhabited the vastness of the Americas. The Europeans had not been able to sleep soundly on the American continents, not even with a full military guard.

There was not, and there never had been, a legal government by Europeans anywhere in the Americas. Not by any definition, not even by the Europeans' own definitions and laws. Because no legal government could be established on stolen land.

the north–south axes and ecological barriers within Africa and the Americas retarded the diffusion of crops and domestic animals. The history of writing illustrates strikingly the similar ways in which geography and ecology influenced the spread of human inventions.

Here, the results of recent molecular biological studies are illuminating in linking germs to the rise of food production, in Eurasia much more than in the Americas.

The grimmest examples of germs' role in history come from the European conquest of the Americas that began with Columbus's voyage of 1492. Numerous as were the Native American victims of the murderous Spanish conquistadores, they were far outnumbered by the victims of murderous Spanish microbes.