America's Gift
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With the blossoming of Aboriginal communities throughout the Americas, this book recalls the full significance of the contact made between Europe and the Americas, mistakenly called the "New World." In fact, history books allude to the "discovery" of America, a term that is both erroneous and Eurocentric. Both of these expressions refer not to the Americas as they had existed for millennia, but to the relatively recent epoch when Europe found out about them. Some people try to correct this impression by speaking of "contact," while others use the harsher terms "invasion" and "conquest." We cannot change history by rewriting it, but we can try understand it better. Whatever words are used, the world was never the same after 1492. The encounter of two old worlds gave rise to a truly new world on both sides of the Atlantic.
"From questions of astronomy to the food on our the table," the Colombian intellectual German Arciniegas wrote "America began transforming Europe the moment European explorers set foot on American soil. And what a transformation it was - to the degree that Europe came to be, after America, quite simply, another Europe." In other words, Europe became a new world in the true sense of the term.
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