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Zusatztext “An imaginative! intelligent and sprightly volume that! in the space of some two hundred pages! races through the history of the Western hemisphere–from prehistoric times to the present.” –The Washington Post Book World “This wonderfully sharp and provocative book should become essential reading for anybody interested in the history of America.” –The Times Literary Supplement (London) “Fernández-Armesto can personalize broad historical trends without sinking into triviality. . . . History written at its best.” –Booklist Informationen zum Autor Felipe Fernández-Armesto, the Prince of Asturias Professor of History at Tufts University, is the author of several books, including Millennium, Columbus, and Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food. Klappentext In this groundbreaking work, leading historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto tells the story of our hemisphere as a whole, showing why it is impossible to understand North, Central, and South America in isolation without turning to the intertwining forces that shape the region. With imagination, thematic breadth, and his trademark wit, Fernández-Armesto covers a range of cultural, political, and social subjects, taking us from the dawn of human migration to North America to the Colonial and Independence periods to the "American Century” and beyond. Fernández-Armesto does nothing less than revise the conventional wisdom about cross-cultural exchange, conflict, and interaction, making and supporting some brilliantly provocative conclusions about the Americas' past and where we are headed. 1 Americas? America? Americans bicker over the name of Americans. To the chorus in West Side Story, America is a foreign land, where some of them “like to be,” a sentiment apparently inaccessible to them in Puerto Rico. Canadians write to newspapers in the United States complaining that the citizens of one country have usurped the appellation of Americans. The Spanish intellectual Américo Castro was so called because he was born on a boat on the way to Argentina. In much of South America the people of the United States are called norteamericanos, whereas the northernmost Americans are actually Inuit and the United States reaches only the forty-eighth parallel. A character in Barcelona, Whit Stillman’s film about U.S. expatriates trying to cope with anti-Americanism, resents the Spanish term estadounidense because it makes him feel despised as “dense.” Many of the names by which Americans call one another—Anglos, Afros, indios, Latinos, Caucasians—tug at other continents. The privileged names now enjoyed by some minorities—Native Americans, indígenas, First Nations—imply an imperfect sense of belonging in everyone else. No usage suits everybody. Yet America was once “the New World”—pure and simple. It was possible to imagine it as a single category, a single polity, the home of a huge, embracing identity. Pan-Americanism no longer exists, except as piety or rhetoric. Like “Europe,” America is a Humpty-Dumpty continent. It has to be painfully reconstructed after the ravages of nationalism, across the fissures and fractures between which rival identities have formed. This book is an attempt at mental reconstruction of the hemisphere; an effort to see it whole and to trace a common history that embraces all the Americas. American Singularity How many Americas are there? Once, at least in the eyes of beholders who looked at the hemisphere from outside, there was only one. America possessed unity and integ- rity of a sort, long before it was well delineated. The term entered our languages in the singular. Amerigo Vespucci (or, at least, a writer using his byline) reported the first lands known as “America” from the coasts of what are now Venezuela, Guiana, and Brazil. Martin Waldseemüller, the cosmographer who coined the name in Amerigo’s honor on a map and an accompanying treatise i...
