 | |
| Author | Ronald Wright |
|---|---|
| Subjects | Colonisation |
| Genre | Non-fiction |
| Publisher | Houghton Mifflin |
Publication date | 1992 |
| Pages | 320 |
| Award | Gordon Montador Award |
| ISBN | 0-395-56500-6 |
Stolen Continents is a 1992 non-fiction book by Ronald Wright that covers the colonial theft of land between 1492 and 1990. It specific focuses on activities directed towards the Maya, Inca, Aztec, Cherokee, and Iroquois peoples.
The book won the Gordon Montador Award in 1993.
Stolen Continents covers the period 1492 to 1990 and documents five examples of the colonial theft of land from Maya, Inca, Aztec, Cherokee, and Iroquois people. [1] [2] Wright breaks each example into three stages: initial contact, violent struggles, and modern resistance. [1] The book uses contemporary accounts from native peoples. [1]
The writer T. F. Rigelhof described the book as "remarkable" and "essential reading." [3] The archaeologist Brian M. Fagan was critical of what he saw as Wright's prioritisation of indigenous perspectives, which he claimed made the book unbalanced. [4]
Stolen Continents won the Gordon Montador Award in 1993. [5]
The human history of the Americas is thought to begin with people migrating to these areas from Asia during the height of an ice age. These groups are generally believed to have been isolated from the people of the "Old World" until the coming of Europeans in the 10th century from Iceland led by Leif Erikson, and in 1492 with the voyages of Christopher Columbus.
During the Age of Discovery, a large scale colonization of the Americas, involving a number of European countries, took place primarily between the late 15th century and the early 19th century. The Norse explored and colonized areas of Europe and the North Atlantic, colonizing Greenland and creating a short-term settlement near the northern tip of Newfoundland circa 1000 AD. However, due to its long duration and importance, the later colonization by the European powers involving the continents of North America and South America is more well-known.
The Spanish colonization of the Americas began in 1493 on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola after the initial 1492 voyage of Genoese mariner Christopher Columbus under license from Queen Isabella I of Castile. These overseas territories of the Spanish Empire were under the jurisdiction of Crown of Castile until the last territory was lost in 1898. Spaniards saw the dense populations of indigenous peoples as an important economic resource and the territory claimed as potentially producing great wealth for individual Spaniards and the crown. Religion played an important role in the Spanish conquest and incorporation of indigenous peoples, bringing them into the Catholic Church peacefully or by force. The crown created civil and religious structures to administer the vast territory. Spanish men and women settled in greatest numbers where there were dense indigenous populations and the existence of valuable resources for extraction.
In the history of the Americas, the pre-Columbian era, also known as the pre-contact era, spans from the initial peopling of the Americas in the Upper Paleolithic to the onset of European colonization, which began with Christopher Columbus's voyage in 1492. This era encompasses the history of Indigenous cultures prior to significant European influence, which in some cases did not occur until decades or even centuries after Columbus's arrival.
Miguel León-Portilla was a Mexican anthropologist and historian, specializing in Aztec culture and literature of the pre-Columbian and colonial eras. Many of his works were translated to English and he was a well-recognized scholar internationally. In 2013, the Library of Congress of the United States bestowed on him the Living Legend Award.
The calendrical systems devised and used by the pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica, primarily a 260-day year, were used in religious observances and social rituals, such as divination.
Population figures for the Indigenous peoples of the Americas before European colonization have been difficult to establish. Estimates have varied widely from as low as 8 million to as many as 100 million, though many scholars gravitated toward an estimate of around 50 million by the end of the 20th century.
James Churchward was a British writer, inventor, engineer, and fisherman.
Ronald Wright is a Canadian author who has written books of travel, history and fiction. His nonfiction includes the bestseller Stolen Continents, winner of the Gordon Montador Award and chosen as a book of the year by The Independent and the Sunday Times. His first novel, A Scientific Romance, won the 1997 David Higham Prize for Fiction and was chosen a book of the year by the Globe and Mail, the Sunday Times, and The New York Times.
Victor Wolfgang von Hagen was an American explorer author, archaeological historian, naturalist and anthropologist who traveled in South America with his wife. Mainly between 1940 and 1965, he published a large number of widely acclaimed books about the ancient people of the Inca, Maya, and Aztecs.
A Short History of Progress is a non-fiction book and lecture series by Ronald Wright about societal collapse. The lectures were delivered as a series of five speeches, each taking place in different cities across Canada as part of the 2004 Massey Lectures which were broadcast on the CBC Radio program, Ideas. The book version was published by House of Anansi Press and released at the same time as the lectures. The book spent more than a year on Canadian best-seller lists, won the Canadian Book Association's Libris Award for Non-Fiction Book of the Year, and was nominated for the British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. It has since been reprinted in a hardcover format with illustrations and also in Kindle and EPUB digital formats.
Attakullakulla was an influential Cherokee leader and the tribe's First Beloved Man, serving from 1761 to around 1775. His son was Dragging Canoe, the first leader of the Chickamauga faction of the Cherokee tribes.
Mesoamerica, along with Mesopotamia and China, is one of three known places in the world where writing is thought to have developed independently. Mesoamerican scripts deciphered to date are a combination of logographic and syllabic systems. They are often called hieroglyphs due to the iconic shapes of many of the glyphs, a pattern superficially similar to Egyptian hieroglyphs. Fifteen distinct writing systems have been identified in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, many from a single inscription. The limits of archaeological dating methods make it difficult to establish which was the earliest and hence the progenitor from which the others developed. The best documented and deciphered Mesoamerican writing system, and the most widely known, is the classic Maya script. Earlier scripts with poorer and varying levels of decipherment include the Olmec hieroglyphs, the Zapotec script, and the Isthmian script, all of which date back to the 1st millennium BC. An extensive Mesoamerican literature has been conserved, partly in indigenous scripts and partly in postconquest transcriptions in the Latin script.
Kids Discover is an educational publisher that produces high-interest nonfiction reading for children ages 6–14. The company was founded by Mark Levine in 1991, and is family owned and operated. Ted Levine serves as the company's President and CEO.
This is a chronological list of significant or pivotal moments in the development of Native American art or the visual arts of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Earlier dates, especially before the 18th century, are mostly approximate.
Daniel Karl Richter is an American historian specializing in early American history, especially colonial North America and Native American history before 1800. He is the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania and the Richard S. Dunn Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. His book Facing East from Indian Country was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2002.
Indigenous American philosophy is the philosophy of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. An Indigenous philosopher is an Indigenous American person who practices philosophy and draws upon the history, culture, language, and traditions of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Many different traditions of philosophy exist in the Americas, and have from Precolumbian times.
The history of libraries in Latin America dates back to before the conquest of the continent by the Spanish. Although the indigenous peoples of Mexico, Central America, and South America had developed a written language and, in some cases, created libraries and record depositories of their own, library history of the continent tends to focus on post-conquest institutions. This article will discuss the history of libraries in Latin America.
The Gordon Montador Award was a Canadian literary award, presented by the Writers' Trust of Canada to honour non-fiction writing on social issues. Created in 1991 in memory of book editor and publisher Gordon Montador, the award was presented until 1999, when it was superseded by a reorganization of the Writers' Trust Awards. The Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, presented for the first time in 2000, encompassed much of the same subject area; although the Cohen award was never formally stated by the organization to be an official replacement for the Montador award, no new winner was ever announced for the Montador award after the Cohen award was introduced.