# America, América  ## Metadata - Author: [[Greg Grandin]] - Full Title: America, América - Category: #books ## Highlights - General Washington, the Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda wrote in his journal, was magnificent in his bearing and grace. He embodied virtue, and focused all the New World’s desires for independence into a single flame—a flame, Miranda said, that belonged to all America.[1] ([Location 142](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D9XJTG6F&location=142)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - In New Haven, Yale’s president, Ezra Stiles, gave him a tour of the university. Miranda sat in on a Hebrew lesson, which he enjoyed, and was pleased that Optics and Algebra were taught “simply and naturally.” He was shocked, though, that the university offered no modern-language instruction, a bad omen for educating modern citizens, thought Miranda (who spoke English, French, and Italian, and read Greek and Latin). Nor was he impressed by Yale’s library: “nothing special.” ([Location 168](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D9XJTG6F&location=168)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - Simón Bolívar and Thomas Jefferson could at times sound as if they had fallen into a cataleptic trance as they prophesized the future. “It is impossible not to look forward to distant times,” Jefferson wrote, when the United States will “cover the whole Northern, if not the Southern continent with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms.” Bolívar imagined himself flying “across the years” to a moment when America had united the world under a system of rational laws, with the Isthmus of Panama a planetary capital, binding north and south, linking east and west. Greece and Rome had its laws and philosophies, but, really, asked Bolívar, what was “the Isthmus of Corinth compared with that of Panama?” Miranda conspired with Alexander Hamilton to liberate all South America, believing their escapades would “save the whole world, which is oscillating on the brink of an abyss.” ([Location 234](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D9XJTG6F&location=234)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - And yet. When Jefferson and Adams used the word America, they were referring to the United States. When Bolívar, Miranda, and other Spanish American republicans used the word America, they meant all the Americas. “Our dear Country America, from the North to the South,” Miranda wrote Hamilton. ([Location 240](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D9XJTG6F&location=240)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - The New England social activist Orestes Brownson thought such ideas rubbish. The “name of the country is America,” he wrote in 1865, “that of the people is Americans. Speak of Americans simply and nobody understands you to mean the people of Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Paraguay, but everybody understands you to mean the people of the United States.”[11] ([Location 262](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D9XJTG6F&location=262)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - Brownson was right at least about royal Canadians, who tended not to call themselves Americans to distinguish themselves from their English-speaking republican neighbors. But Mexicans, Brazilians, Peruvians, Chileans, and Paraguayans all thought themselves Americans, as did the Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda. Nosotros los Americanos—We, the Americans—was how early Mexican nationalists called themselves. ([Location 266](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D9XJTG6F&location=266)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - Latin America gave the United States what other empires, be they formal or informal, lacked: its own magpie, an irrepressible critic. Over the course of two centuries, when Latin American politicians, activists, intellectuals, priests, poets, and balladeers—all the many men and women who came after Miranda—judged the United States, they did so from a shared first premise: America was a redeemer continent, and its historical mission was to strengthen the ideal of human equality. ([Location 284](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D9XJTG6F&location=284)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - Demographers today aren’t sure what the size of America’s population was before the arrival of the Spanish. Most estimates fall between fifty and one hundred million inhabitants. ([Location 383](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D9XJTG6F&location=383)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - Yet it wasn’t nature that bedazzled the Spaniards as much as the “great city” of Tenochtitlán sitting below the volcano. “As large as Seville,” Cortés wrote, and more populated than London, with “many wide and handsome streets,” fine noble houses, engineered canals, and a complex hydroponic agricultural system. ([Location 398](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D9XJTG6F&location=398)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - The term encomienda refers to a kind of slavery, but indios encomendados, or commended Indians, weren’t considered private property, or chattel. Rather, they were formally something like wards, members of an existing village or community, who, in exchange for labor, were to receive instruction in Christian doctrine from their overlords, their guardian encomenderos. ([Location 421](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D9XJTG6F&location=421)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - Then, in preparation for a sermon to preach on Pentecostal Sunday in 1514, Las Casas, now thirty years old, came upon this sentence from Ecclesiastes: “To take a fellow-man’s livelihood is to kill him, to deprive a worker of his wages is to shed blood.” No scales fell from his eyes, no repulsion at witnessing babies being torn apart by dogs awakened his consciousness. Rather, he simply reflected quietly on these words from Ecclesiastes and then made a decision to change his life. He abandoned his encomiendas, gave away his riches, and began a life of mendicant poverty and humanist advocacy. ([Location 448](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D9XJTG6F&location=448)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - Las Casas filled page after page with extreme colonial gore. Torture, mutilations, massacres. Spanish conquistadores raped women at will. They broiled captives alive and then fed their corpses to dogs. They chopped off the hands of Indians and then told them to deliver the “letter” (that is, the severed body part) to compatriots hiding in the mountains as a message to surrender or face worse. In Mexico, the Spanish wrapped native priests in straw and then burned them to death. “Boar-hounds” tore children apart. Conquistadores used their swords as spits to roast babies as their mothers watched. They tossed infants into rivers, laughing as they guessed how many times they would bob up for air before drowning. “The Spanish came like starving wolves, tigers, and lions, and for four decades have done nothing other than commit outrages, slay, afflict, torment, and destroy,” Las Casas wrote. ([Location 475](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D9XJTG6F&location=475)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - people lived in Mexico in early 1519, when Hernando Cortés and his army of five hundred men arrived to begin his assault on the Aztec Empire. By 1600—eighty-one years, the length of a long life—only about two million remained.[18] ([Location 509](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D9XJTG6F&location=509)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - Historical analogies could only go so far in one direction before crossing paths with analogies traveling the other way, opposing the Conquest. Las Casas was especially adept at picking apart the myth that Spain was heir to Rome. He pointed out that since the Romans had brutally conquered Iberia centuries before Christ was born, a more precise analogy would equate Native Americans with the Spanish. Both were victims of imperial tyranny. ([Location 562](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D9XJTG6F&location=562)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - if Indians were God’s children, as many insist, then God would not have “left them without a preacher of the Gospel.” The point being that the New World’s people did “know” Christ and must have, at some point, rejected him, making them infidels and legally conquerable.[4] ([Location 568](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D9XJTG6F&location=568)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - According to Father de la Cruz, many believed that “indios americanos weren’t true men with rational souls but rather a monstrous third species of animal, falling between man and monkey and created by God to serve humans.” Settlers spread the lie that “Indians weren’t true humans but savages,” that “there was no more sin in killing them than in killing a field animal.”[*2] Father de la Cruz condemned such ideas as heresy. The only thing “monstrous” about the New World was “the cruelty and greed that the bastard Spanish brought to this land.”[8] ([Location 607](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D9XJTG6F&location=607)) - Tags: [[aqua]]