WW Chapter 18: Political Transformations

Diversity is taken for granted in much of the United States. We've come to accept that, like a great big salad bowl, the American identity is composed of distinct layers that cohabitate but retain their individual characteristics. It's arguably the world's largest experiment in cross-cultural exchange and one of the few places where national unity is based on common values rather than shared history or ethnicity.

As this chapter showed, similar attempts at cross-cultural exchanges occurred in the early modern era, but those hardly seemed reciprocal. Europeans eager to reach the Americas had countless motives: wealth, power, religious zealotry, or merely escape. The natives who inadvertently received them had little say in the matter. Yet those exchanges proved devastating even as they laid the groundwork for the kind of multiculturalism we've come to expect from western society.

Our historical hindsight might have us shaking our fists or merely shrugging at the outcome of these events, but it's undeniable that new worlds upon worlds were created as a result; new races of people emerged; new languages were spoken; from the violence of their initial meeting arose an entirely new way of life with implications well into the 21st century.