Quotes About Americas

These results are completely lopsided: it was not the case that 51 percent of the Americas, Australia, and Africa was conquered by Europeans, while 49 percent of Europe was conquered by Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, or Africans. The whole modern world has been shaped by lopsided outcomes. Hence they must have inexorable explanations, ones more basic than mere details concerning who happened to win some battle or develop some invention on one occasion a few thousand years ago.

Spain laid the foundations of this great wealth and evil in the Americas, then quickly became distracted and forgot about it. After introducing the plants, the technology, and the slaves into Santo Domingo, the Spanish dropped the sugar business in favor of hunting for gold and silver. They moved on to Mexico and South America in search of the precious metals

Globalization made the large open spaces of the Americas, its "open frontiers," valuable. Often these frontiers were only mythically open, since they were inhabited by indigenous peoples who were brutally dispossessed. All the same, the scramble for this newly valuable resource was one of the defining processes of the Americas in the second half of the nineteenth century.

these densely settled civilizations interacted in a perverse way with European colonialism to create a "reversal of fortune," making the places that were previously relatively wealthy in the Americas relatively poor. Today it is the United States and Canada, which were then far behind the complex civilizations in Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia, that are much richer than the rest of the Americas.

Our brief review of the history of the Americas begins to give a sense of the forces that shape political and economic institutions. Different patterns of institutions today are deeply rooted in the past because once society gets organized in a particular way, this tends to persist. We'll show that this fact comes from the way that political and economic institutions interact. This

We must continue to deepen our ties to the Americas and the Caribbean, our common work to educate children, fight drugs, strengthen democracy, and increase trade.

More ominously, Native American tribal areas were not included on early European maps of the Americas, giving readers of those maps the impression no one lived there—at least, no one of consequence. No landowners. These are the kinds of blanks that fire Marlow's imagination in Conrad's Heart of Darkness—the blanks that certain minds found to be a call for colonialism and conquest.

Juan de Grijalva, coincidentally the first European to smoke on continental American soil

Europeans usually did not have to capture their own African slaves; African rulers and slave merchants were willing to do it. During the 350 years of the Atlantic slave trade, an estimated 12 to 25 million enslaved people were shipped from Africa for the Americas, of whom some 85 percent survived the terrible six-to-ten-week voyage. About 40 percent went to Brazil, 40 percent to the Caribbean, 5 percent to what would become the United States, and the balance to the rest of Spanish America.

In the early 1800s, both Spain and Portugal disseminated the smallpox vaccine throughout the Americas via the 'arm to arm of the blacks,' that is, enslaved Africans and African-Americans, often children, who were being moved along slave routes as cargo from one city to another to be sold.

The Achilles Heel of the Americas was the lack of cultural confidence typical of new settlers.

At the end of the second Opium War (in which it was joined by France), Britain forced the Chinese to fully legalize both the trade in opium and the shipment of Chinese indentured labourers to the Americas (where they worked as slaves in all but name).

Yes, I'm Delia Maddox," she said, taking his hand in a quick, firm shake. "Grace's sister-in-law and--" "--the ravishing goddess responsible for creating Delia's delectable. The most amazing food in the Americas." Her pretty eyes twinkled at his nickname for her food, but she folded her arms and said, "Only in the Americas? Hmm, I must be slipping.

To this day the historical extent and importance of slavery in any given area in the Americas may very nearly be gauged by the extent and importance of okra, particularly by the degree of acceptance among whites.

The transatlantic transport of all of these various Africans to the Americas qualifies as the quintessential moment of transfiguration, the height of human alienation and disorientation.

In this sense, what Hakluyt foresaw in a colonized America was one giant workhouse. This cannot be emphasized enough.

Canada and the United States are also working at the World Trade Organization and in our own hemisphere with negotiations for a Trade Area of the Americas to try to help countries create a positive climate for investment and trade.