Time remains unchanging– it’s the single most reliable notion embedded in the history of
everything. Whether it’s the first time something ever
happens, whether certain events decide to
repeat themselves; no matter how much we collectively detest it, time goes on. This can be seen
in the greatest victories and pitfalls in human history. We are the witnesses of progressive change
in political pursuits and independence. We live life day to day, bearing in mind the former
atrocities of civil and foreign wars whose outcomes have inadvertently guided us to where we
are today. Our technology, monetary systems, and sciences are the results of an industrial age
long before the technological boom we were all privy to. The large cities we have settled in rose
from small farming towns that used to welcome the migrations of families that may even be
distantly related to our own. Even in the present, studying the paths of revolution then are
relevant reflections of the assemblies we see marching in the streets now, whose purposes and
intentions are not much different than they were a century ago. So what has
changed? In order to
understand the way we exist in the Americas now, we must first study the history of the
pathways that lead to these changes in the first place.
As the colonies in America continued to grow, the need for farming grew significantly.
Suddenly, the seventeen colonies expanded due to the Louisiana Purchase. The Louisiana
Purchase of 1803 increased the territory of the United States by roughly 828,000 square miles.
The Louisiana Territory, as it was known as at the time, stretched from the Mississippi River to
the Rocky Mountains and from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border. According to the film
on the Louisiana purchase, The French sold the Louisiana Territory for about 15 million dollars,
or four cents an acre. Eventually, the newly sold area would become six states and a portion of
nine others. Although the Louisiana Purchase was a long time ago, the effects can still be felt
today. The purchase made America a transcontinental nation as well as a world power by
expanding the country. Aside from colonizing what is now known as the United States, the
impact of the colonizers can be felt in other parts of America.
In many ways, history can be considered messy and convoluted– it’s far from clean-cut
or black-and-white. There are many gray areas– reformations and revolutions, progression and
regression; complicated and unending cycles of poverty and isolation existing in the same plane
of the rich and powerful. Marshall Eakin covers these concepts in The History of Latin America.
He outlines the different trajectories of Latin American countries and how each nation made
changes in their institutions that were the foundations of the systems put in place today.
Countries such as Brazil and Colombia (part of an abundance of other countries) have
