The rediscovery of North America
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The rediscovery of North America
(The Thomas D. Clark lectures, 1990)
University Press of Kentucky, c1990
Available at 2 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Description and Table of Contents
Description
" The Spanish incursion into the New World, with its brutal destruction of indigenous peoples and their cultures and its material exploitation of much of two continents, reverberates in our history down to the present century. So contends prize-winning writer Barry Lopez in this beautifully written book. "The quest for personal possessions," he observes, "was to be, from the outset, a series of raids, irresponsible and criminal, a spree, in which an end to it was never visible... in which an end to it had no meaning." In this luminous essay, written five hundred years after the Spanish conquest, Lopez reexamines the attitudes that informed that event and that have underlain the entire European settlement of America. "The assumption of an imperial right conferred by God, sanctioned by the state, and enforced by the militia, the assumption that one is due wealth in North America," he writes, is apparent in the journals of people on the Oregon Trail, in the pronouncements of nineteenth-century industrialists, and in the political rhetoric of our own day. But, for Lopez, coming to grips with this terrible legacy opens new possibilities. "This violent corruption needn't define us. We can take the measure of the horror and assert that we will not be bound by it." We can "rediscover" our continent -- not as a source of income but as a home, a place in which we are to find our strength and character, and in which certain moral courtesies and obligations obtain. We can develop a philosophy of place will enable us, finally, to take up a true residence in our homeland. Here is a voice for our time.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Henry Adams and the Decline of the Republican Tradition
Democracy
Democracy and Esther
Henry Adams' Democracy
The Flowers of Freedom or the New Tyranny
Henry Adams
The Politics of Scientific History
Mont Saint Michel and Chartres
History, Science, and Politics
Henry Adams and "the Burden of History"
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