11 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2016
    1. What roles do sugar and slavery play in the expansion of European empires?

      Sugar was becoming very popular in Asia and was quickly discovered by the Europeans. The Portuguese had to find new land to grow the sugar cane because it was required to have the right conditions to grow. This is when the Portuguese found the Guanches, an African tribe in order to take care of the sugar cane. This helped the Portuguese become very wealthy.

    2. What were the three major crops developed in the Americas? What impact did they have?

      The three major crops were corn, beans and squash which all had nutritional needs that sustained the cities and civilizations.

    3. They ruled their empire through a decentralized network of subject peoples that paid regular tribute–including everything from the most basic items, such as corn, beans, and other foodstuffs, to luxury goods such as jade, cacao, and gold–and provided troops for the empire.

      The Spanish was trying to take control over North and Central America. They were taking away valued goods from the Native Americans and made money off of it.

    4. Sugar, a wildly profitable commodity originally grown in Asia, had become a popular luxury among the nobility and wealthy of Europe. The Portuguese began growing sugar cane along the Mediterranean, but sugar was a difficult crop.

      The Portuguese found that sugar was a high profitable crop that they can get wealthy off of and decided to take action in the market with it. They enslaved Africans during the time they grew crops so they could make a higher profit in the business.

    5. Native Americans passed stories down through the millennia that tell of their creation and reveal the contours of indigenous belief.

      Native Americans were the first group of people to be in North America, long before Columbus and the Europeans came. How could they take credit for finding this land first?

    6. The last global ice age trapped much of the world’s water in enormous continental glaciers. Twenty thousand years ago, ice sheets, some a mile thick, extended across North America as far south as modern-day Illinois and Ohio.

      The ice age across North America left many people to panic on how they were going to survive these harsh temperatures. They had to find many ways to stay warm and finding food was tough because they would be trapped from going out in the cold.

  2. Jun 2015
    1. Yet for those that still yearn for the safe tether of a synthetic text,

      Doesn't this project also radically depart from the traditional textbook format and industry in less than "safe," but equally exciting ways?

    2. But in the oft-cited lines of the American poet Walt Whitman we find as good an organizing principle as any other:

      I really love this idea as the "yawp" as an organizing principle for a collaborative, open textbook. Given his own obsessively iterative composition of Leaves of Grass Whitman really is a great analogy for this project.

    1. John Muir, a naturalist, writer, and founder of the Sierra Club, invoked the “God of the Mountains” in his defense of the valley in its supposedly pristine condition.

      The "Gods of the mountains" line was a piece of Muir's larger metaphor for the holiness of natural places that figured those who would develop them as "temple destroyers." Here's the full quote from Muir's defense of the Hetch Hetchy in his book The Yosemite.:

      These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.

      Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.

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    2. giving readers an unflinching view of urban poverty.

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      Recent scholars have critiqued Riis's work despite its effective advocacy for tenement reform. His photography certainly exposed the problem of urban poverty, but also exposed the personal lives of the poor to a largely wealthy audience.

    1. Altamont revealed a darker side of American culture, one in which drugs and music were associated not with peace and love but with violence, anger, and death.

      How does this mess, though, relate directly to the "unraveling" of American promise signified by the late 60s. Was Hunter killed because he was black? Or because he was high? Or because the Angels were drunk?