Jill Lepore's political history of the United States makes fascinating reading, brilliantly weaving personal stories with social and cultural ones, and allowing them to coalesce around central political questions: by what right does anyone rule over others, and how? The tale's in the telling but there are bits that I keep remembering on their own, each an education, or a reuducation. Here's a macro- one and a micro-.
Between 1500 and 1800, roughly two and a half million Europeans moved to the Americas;they carried twelve million Africans there by force; and as many as fifty million Native Americans died, chiefly of disease. Europe is spread over about four million square miles, the Americas over about twenty million square miles. For centuries, geography had constrained Europe's demographic and economic growth; that era came to a close when Europeans claimed lands five time the size of Europe. Taking possession of the Americas gave Europeans a surplus of land; it ended famine and led to four centuries of economic growth, growth without precedent, growth many Europeans understood as evidence of the grace of God. (16-17)
[At the 1787 Constitutional Convention George] Washington, almost as striking at fifty-five as he'd been as a young man, was unanimously elected president. (His beauty was marred only by his terrible teeth, which had rotted and been replaced by dentures made from ivory and from nine teeth pulled from the mouths of his slaves.) (120)
Between 1500 and 1800, roughly two and a half million Europeans moved to the Americas;they carried twelve million Africans there by force; and as many as fifty million Native Americans died, chiefly of disease. Europe is spread over about four million square miles, the Americas over about twenty million square miles. For centuries, geography had constrained Europe's demographic and economic growth; that era came to a close when Europeans claimed lands five time the size of Europe. Taking possession of the Americas gave Europeans a surplus of land; it ended famine and led to four centuries of economic growth, growth without precedent, growth many Europeans understood as evidence of the grace of God. (16-17)
[At the 1787 Constitutional Convention George] Washington, almost as striking at fifty-five as he'd been as a young man, was unanimously elected president. (His beauty was marred only by his terrible teeth, which had rotted and been replaced by dentures made from ivory and from nine teeth pulled from the mouths of his slaves.) (120)
