Peter Farb - America Quotes

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A central assumption of this book has been that to examine the experience of humans throughout their 25,000 years on this continent is to hold up a mirror to the culture of Modern America.

Peter Farb
The League [of the Hodenosaunee] favorably impressed the White settlers, and some historians believe it to have been one of the models on which the Constitution of the new United States of America was based.

Peter Farb
What makes the Hohokam noteworthy is the development of irrigation works. The earliest... dates from some 2,000 years ago.... They built dams that redirected the flow of water into irrigation canals, some of them... extending for more than twenty-five miles.... They built flat-topped pyramids and ball courts, where they used rubber balls imported from Central America. The Hohokam may also have been the first to use the technique of etching with acid in their remarkable designs on marine shells.

Peter Farb
Voluntary assimilation, known as Indianization in the Americas, is one response that has occurred at other places and in other times when two cultures collided. An unusual manifestation of it is when the whole dominant culture takes up the ways of the conquered. That does not happen very often, but it did occur when the Hyksos conquered Egypt about 1700 B. C. and when the Romans conquered the Greeks in the second century B. C.

Peter Farb
Perhaps we, who for so long regarded ourselves as bringers of light to the shadowy recesses of North America, will finally admit that there is much about which the Indians can illuminate us.

Peter Farb
At the time of the Europeans discovery of North America, the American Indians already cultivated a wider variety of plants than did the Europeans.

Peter Farb
Within a century or so after the discovery of America, more than fifty new foods had been carried back to the Old World, including maize, turkey, white potato, pumpkin, squash, the so-called Jerusalem artichoke, avocado, chocolate, and several kinds of beans. (Potatoes and maize now rank second and third in total tonnage of the world's crops, behind rice but ahead of what is probably man's oldest cultivated grain, wheat.) The European has turned for relief to drugs and pharmaceuticals the Indians discovered: quinine, ephedrine, novocaine, curare, ipecac, and witch hazel.

Peter Farb
No sooner did the first Whites arrive in North America than a disproportionate number of them showed that they preferred Indian society to their own.... Throughout American history, thousands of Whites exchanged breeches for breechcloths.

Peter Farb