Camilla Townsend

Parallel histories of workers in two port cities, Baltimore and Guayaquil, illustrate divergent paths in the development of the Americas.   The United States and the countries of Latin America were all colonized by Europeans, yet in terms of economic development, the U.S. far outstripped Latin America beginning in the nineteenth century. Observers have often tried to account for this disparity, many of them claiming that differences in cultural...

"Five hundred years ago, in November 1519, Hernando Cort©♭s walked along a causeway leading to the capital of the Aztec kingdom and came face to face with Moctezuma. That story--and the story of what happened afterwards--has been told many times, but always from the point of view of the Europeans. After all, we have been taught, it was the Europeans who held the pens. But the Native Americans were more intrigued by the Roman alphabet than the Spaniards...

"The Lenape (or Delaware) people were pushed out of the New Jersey region in colonial times, embarking on a two-hundred year odyssey that eventually brought them to Indian Territory, soon to be the State of Oklahoma. On the Turtle's Back: Stories the Lenape Told Their Grandchildren presents the stories that they decided to write down in the early 1900s, when their language was still fully vibrant, but they were beginning to fear for the future. Two...