including headings The first Americans, The first American farmers, The first American civilizations, The people of north America, Pre-Columbian Indians, ...
The fate of the American Indians varies greatly in different parts of the continent. The regions of the great American civilizations, in central America and down the western coastal strip of south America, are densely po...
Each of these three colonial groups must conduct its own argument with the existing occupants of the land, the American Indians. But for the first two centuries of colonization the Europeans have little more than skirmis...
In the early 19th century the descendants of British settlers in America impose on their neighbours a series of brutally enforced migrations. In the colonial period the British and the American Indians have often fought...
The Argentinian pampas has traditionally been a lawless area, the preserve of wild cattle and horses (descendants of animals which have escaped from Spanish domestic use) and of equally wild gauchos. The only indigenous...
The Maya, occupying the triangle of land framed by the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean, have the longest identifiable history of any American people. Social customs, language and physical characte...
As beasts of burden and transport, camels occupy an important place alongside horses and donkeys. Two small members of the camel family, the llama and the alpaca of south America, are domesticated first - probably before...
In 1823, in western New York state, the 17-year-old Joseph Smith receives a vision. As he describes it, a heavenly being appears to him and identifies himself as Moroni, a prophet from an ancient American people descende...
The most often quoted example of primitive money is shells - in Africa cowries and wampum in America. The small cowrie shell, deriving from the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean, is a treasured item in the civilizatio...
Lower down the social scale are four other equally specific groups. Next in esteem are the mestizos, people of mixed European and American-Indian ancestry; since there were few Spanish women in America in the early decad...
The cocoa tree, the seeds of which are the source of chocolate, is (like tobacco) native to central and south America. Roasted and ground, then flavoured in hot water with vanilla and spices, the seeds are the basis of a...
Penn's profound tolerance and common sense is evident when a woman is brought before him in Philadelphia in 1682 on a charge of witchcraft. He asks her whether she has ridden through the air on a broomstick. There must h...
The prosperity of Chan Chan within its own immediate region is based on elaborate systems of irrigation in the coastal plain, but it also has a large commercial empire. In the 13th and 14th century the influence of the C...
In the 18th century the movement of Europeans to Australia has been associated very specifically with lack of liberty. By contrast the United States of America seems essentially the land of liberty (at any rate for those...
The event of 1492, the biggest turning point in the history of America, has had the Eurocentric effect of defining that history in terms of this one moment. Historians describe the previous American cultures as pre-Colu...
