American Realities with Bill Youngs
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      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
      • Abbreviations
    • The Congregationalists >
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    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
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      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map
  J. William T. "Bill" Youngs, American Realities, Volume One: 
Historical Episodes from First Settlements to the Civil War, Chapter One     
Aztec Pyramid of the Sun (Teotihuacan). Courtesy of the wiki commons


1. The Native Americans
    October 11, 1492



Summary

Picture
American history did not begin with Christopher Columbus in 1492 or with John Smith in 1607. Long before Europeans reached what they called the New World, Native Americans settled the whole of the Western Hemisphere and created hundreds of civilizations, some as large and complex as fifteenth-century European states. They made pottery, built cities, founded empires, wrote poetry, and plotted the course of the sun and the stars. Eventually their lives would be changed by massive invasions of European soldiers and immigrants, but they did not exist simply to interact with Europeans. They began the human story in America long before 1492, and the story of their lives constitutes the first chapter of American history.

Author reads from the Text

Travelers who approached the great Aztec city of Tenochtitlán for the first time must have been struck with wonder. Before them across a long causeway in the middle of Lake Texcoco lay a city of incredible size, home of some three hundred thousand people. On its fringes lay hundreds of small, man-made islands called chinampas, whose rich soil provided much of the city’s maize.
      
Thousands of neat houses, made of adobe or stone and stucco, lined the streets, their whitewashed walls reflecting the bright sun and their flower-dense interior gardens filling the air with incense. Beyond these modest houses were larger buildings where the great lords and high priests lived. The greatest of these dignitaries was the emperor, a man elected from among the members of the royal family by the council of noblemen. He was venerated, almost isolated, by worshipful ceremony — riding from place to place in a litter carried by noblemen or walking on cloths cast before him to keep his feet from touching the ground. He ate his meals behind a gilded screen, shielded from the prying eyes of lesser mortals.


Native American Civilizations



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Chapter 2: The English Background