Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet XLVI
Here's an excerpt from a book I read earlier this month, "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus Book," by Charles C. Mann:
Europeans had been visiting New England for at least a
century. Shorter than the natives, oddly dressed, and often unbearably
dirty, the pallid foreigners had peculiar blue eyes that peeped out of
the masks of bristly, animal-like hair that encased their faces. They
were irritatingly garrulous, prone to fits of chicanery, and often
surprisingly incompetent at what seemed to Indians like basic tasks. But
they also made useful and beautiful goods—copper kettles, glittering
colored glass, and steel knives and hatchets—unlike anything else in New
England. Moreover, they would exchange these valuable items for cheap
furs of the sort used by Indians as blankets. It was like happening upon
a dingy kiosk that would swap fancy electronic goods for customers’
used socks—almost anyone would be willing to overlook the shopkeeper’s
peculiarities.
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