{"id":1062,"date":"2012-06-11T00:01:47","date_gmt":"2012-06-11T05:01:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jackofharts.com\/?p=1062"},"modified":"2012-07-07T09:58:18","modified_gmt":"2012-07-07T14:58:18","slug":"book-of-civilizations-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/?p=1062","title":{"rendered":"Book of Civilizations &#8211; America"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hello, my name is Charles.\u00a0 America has a long history of civilizations dating from the last Ice Age to modern times.\u00a0 We have pyramids and roads as old as Egypt, and many of our cultures have been the largest and most powerful nations of their time.\u00a0 Our history is far longer and far greater than most people realize.\u00a0 Never underestimate either our history or our future.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Book of Civilizations<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>America<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>America has a long history of civilization on our shores.\u00a0 The Andes Mountains of South America were home to civilizations as old as Egypt.\u00a0 We have the caves of El Abra where humanity sheltered during the Ice Age.\u00a0 There are the pyramids and aqueducts of grand Norte Chico.\u00a0 We can still see the pictures of animals carved into the landscape by the Nazca, but only from the air.\u00a0 And then there was the grand Incan Empire, the largest nation in the world of its time.<\/p>\n<p>In Middle America, the Olmecs are the oldest known civilization.\u00a0 They came from Africa to trade and built an amazing culture with some of the greatest pyramids on the American continents.\u00a0 Artifacts show that they traded with people from Asia to Australia to Africa for thousands of years until volcanic eruptions covered much of their lands with ash and forced them to abandon their land not long before Christ was born.\u00a0 Their ballgame continues to be played to this day.<\/p>\n<p>In North America, the Africans settled in California and Louisiana, where they built more pyramids and lived for thousands of years, even meeting the Europeans when we came.\u00a0 And Asians crossed the Bering Straight to settle in modern day Alaska, Canada, and the lower States of America.\u00a0 They built pueblo cities, multi-level houses and apartments surrounding a common plaza.\u00a0 They built the largest buildings in the Americas, carved into the canyon walls where their people could live, safe from their enemies.\u00a0 They spread out over most of North America, and when the Vikings tried to colonize the mainland the Indians made them disappear.\u00a0 They even went into the Middle America where they founded many of the strongest post-Olmec civilizations.<\/p>\n<p>And then the Spanish found the Americas in 1492.\u00a0 A Catholic nation, they were operating under Papal edict to enslave every black man they found.\u00a0 Catholic teaching said that Ham dishonored his father Noah by seeing him naked and drunk, so all of his descendents wore black skin in shame had deserved to be enslaved to their betters.\u00a0 Historians do not know how fully the Conquistadors actually believed this, but they did seek to destroy, enslave, and take the gold from the people who looked like they had African ancestry.\u00a0 And when the other Indians declined to convert to Catholicism, the Conquistadors attacked those avowed heathens as well.<\/p>\n<p>In their effort to get rich, the Conquistadors brought with them the most powerful weapon ever known to mankind.\u00a0 Smallpox was a tiny little bug that had ravaged Europe for thousands of years.\u00a0 The Indians of America had no experience with it, no immunity at all, and it whipped through their civilizations like a fire.\u00a0 From 1500 to 1600 AD, between eighty and ninety percent of the people who lived in the Americas died to smallpox and the other bugs that the Spanish brought with them.\u00a0 The most populous nations in the world, the Inca and Maya, never had a chance against those smallest of enemies.\u00a0 The survivors did what they could to rebuild, but the bugs had killed so many of them that the rest of them were reduced to wandering in the remnants of once great civilizations.\u00a0 Even now we are finding evidence of them beneath the surface of the earth, lost towns and cities covered by centuries of dust and the debris of time.<\/p>\n<p>Other European nations followed the Spanish of course, which is why we are here now.\u00a0 Some of them looked for riches in the \u201cNew World,\u201d and they often either purchased or took what they could from the Indians.\u00a0 Others came for different reasons entirely.\u00a0 The Pilgrims, seeking to escape religious persecution for their Congregationalist beliefs, came to Plymouth Rock in 1620 and founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony.\u00a0 That colony became one of the largest and most powerful colonies in the New World, with Boston one of the best ports on the western shore of the Atlantic.<\/p>\n<p>The Congregationalists believed that each Congregation should be in charge of itself, with no Papal-like authority over them.\u00a0 This religious view filtered into their political views, where they thought the various colonies of England should be independent of the King of England as well.\u00a0 Many of the great names we remember from the founding of the United States of America, Adams, Hancock, and Franklin as quick examples, all hailed from the Congregationalist Churches of the time.<\/p>\n<p>Many others came to America looking for freedom of religion as well, Baptists, Presbyterians, Quakers, and Lutherans.\u00a0 And many Church of England adherents supported their separatist brothers and sisters, bringing in more names to the Revolution that would change America.\u00a0 Washington, Madison, and Hamilton.\u00a0 Black Robed Regiments spread throughout the colonies, preaching that all men were created equal, with no need for a King to rule them, and some died for it.\u00a0 England tried to maintain control of the colonies by stamping down on their supporters, shutting down colonial governments in favor of governors loyal to the king, and initiating a military occupation of Boston.\u00a0 The people\u2019s protests became more outspoken and they often dressed up as Indians, a common practice for protestors of the time since Indians were known to have a much freer lifestyle than the colonists.<\/p>\n<p>The Continental Congress appealed to the King to relax his occupations.\u00a0 Instead, in 1775, the king\u2019s forces tried to arrest their most vocal opponents Samuel Adams and President John Hancock, sparking the \u201cshot heard round the world\u201d and the shooting stage of the American Revolution.\u00a0 General George Washington liberated Boston before losing New York to a British counterattack.\u00a0 He regained American momentum by crossing the Delaware on Christmas and surprising the Hessian mercenaries working for the King.\u00a0 The war lasted many more years, with the British calling in their Indian allies to raid the Colonists.\u00a0 The Colonists called on their own Indian allies and raided in response.\u00a0 By the end of the Revolution the British-allied Indian nations lay in ruins.<\/p>\n<p>The Nineteenth Century saw three American worlds coming to grip with a post Revolutionary continent.\u00a0 In the first world, there were the Indians, both Asian and African lineages, who saw their power diminished.\u00a0 In the second world, the culture wars waged between those who believed that freedom truly <em>was<\/em> the right of all mankind, no matter the color of their skin, and those who believed that it was the White Man\u2019s Manifest Destiny to rule all of America.\u00a0 The two worlds crashed together when President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, authorizing the government to move all Indians to the other side of the Mississippi River.\u00a0 While officially voluntary, the relocations rarely were in practice.\u00a0 In the third world of politics, the States and the Federal Government fought for control of the entire United States of America.<\/p>\n<p>In the end, all three worlds collided in the American Civil War.\u00a0 Nobody won the war.\u00a0 Some simply survived, and the United States that stumbled out of the war was far from united.\u00a0 Slavery was finally and irrevocably ended in America, but the age of Segregation would thrive for a century.\u00a0 The Indians fought on both sides, some rising to the ranks of General, but the government continued to remove them from their lands in the decades after.\u00a0 And the Federal Government gained firm control over the States, dictating that America was no longer a voluntary Union of Independent States for a united foreign policy, but that it could and would dictate domestic policies to them as well.<\/p>\n<p>The Twentieth Century saw America uniting again, in a time of prosperity that could surely see no end.\u00a0 It also saw Europeans fighting a war that America sent her sons to die in.\u00a0 And then the First Great Depression brought the nation to its knees, followed by a Second World War against forces who killed based on race and culture.\u00a0 America came out of that war, more united and powerful than ever, and marched forward into a Cold War with Russia, confident that none could stop them.<\/p>\n<p>Then America found Vietnam.\u00a0 Ironically, Vietnam wasn\u2019t the center of the war.\u00a0 It was for the men and women who fought in it, but in America Vietnam was a boogieman, an idea that those who grew up in a land finally at peace with itself could not comprehend.\u00a0 They wondered why we were fighting against a socialist system that brought equality to everyone.\u00a0 Some of them retreated into communes and tried to just not think about the crazy hateful world outside their borders.\u00a0 Some went on the attack, reviling those who fought against the future, and crying out for a second revolution against both the political and cultural rulers of America.<\/p>\n<p>First outside, and then inside the government, the revolutionaries fought for an America where the government provided everything that everyone needed to live, and government spending on social programs skyrocketed.\u00a0 There wasn\u2019t enough money to spend so we left the gold standard behind and began printing money on paper and just saying it had value.\u00a0 It actually worked for a long time, but as the Twentieth Century blurred into the Twenty First Century the breaks in the economy were becoming visible.<\/p>\n<p>That was when the Islamic Jihad brought the towers of the World Trade Center down and introduced America to a new world.\u00a0 It was a world where death and pain were not on the other side of an ocean, comfortably away from our little worlds.\u00a0 It could bring down our own friends, or own family, and the Americans allowed the federal government to take even more powers, all in the name of security.\u00a0 But even though they ran martial law in the airports, the government never did secure the borders of the nation.<\/p>\n<p>While Mexican drug gangs crossed the border with impunity, terrorizing all Americans in the Southwest, the government strip-searched Americans in the airports and said that everything was secure.\u00a0 No terrorists could harm us.\u00a0 The government spent more money in social programs, giving us more \u201crights\u201d to a television and a phone and a computer, and using those devices to spy on our every thought, our every desire.\u00a0 America even helped fund the installation of a permanent manned International Space Station in Martian orbit.\u00a0 All of the new money was printed by the central banks, as reliable as a house of cards against a swift wind.<\/p>\n<p>In the end, the wind came, foreign governments stopped buying the debt that towered over our economy, and the government simply defaulted on it.\u00a0 The house of cards came tumbling down, and even some of the States fell into chaos.\u00a0 The Federal Government effectively ceased to exist for the everyday person.\u00a0 The alphabet soup agencies and the focus group named programs that told us all what to do just stopped because they didn\u2019t have the money to even buy the gas it took to travel.<\/p>\n<p>The government could not pay to deploy the largest military in the world anymore.\u00a0 Officially, they recalled all foreign troops, but they did not have the money to bring the armies back.\u00a0 The marines, and some lucky soldiers, took navy taxis home.\u00a0 They had to abandon all of their heavy equipment.\u00a0 The airlines failed and the rest had to hunker down where they were and hope things did not get too hot.\u00a0 Those in Germany survived well, drinking the best beer on the planet.\u00a0 Those left in Korea and Japan did not fair so well when the balloons went up and China came calling.\u00a0 The military never forgave the government that abandoned them.<\/p>\n<p>The veterans who did get home found a government with no money to pay them.\u00a0 They found devastated economies with no available jobs.\u00a0 They found homes in foreclosure.\u00a0 It was the end of the world.\u00a0 Most military units joined the State Guards or disbanded.\u00a0 They worked with the counties, cities, and in many cases the Indian nations, to maintain effective control.\u00a0 Most of the rural regions survived without too many problems.<\/p>\n<p>The great cities of America did not fare so well as the Second Great Depression fell on them.\u00a0 The jobless and homeless skyrocketed, squatters became the norm, and Islamic Brotherhood cells inflamed the tensions until riots like the Rodney King and G8 riots became the new normal.\u00a0 The cities burned.\u00a0 In Chicago alone, the great fires killed thousands and left millions without even an <em>occupied <\/em>home to go to.<\/p>\n<p>Refugees fled the cities, often finding themselves in environments that they had no experience with.\u00a0 The smart and the lucky found places or people who could teach them how to grow food and survive in an environment in which there was no vast government to provide for them.\u00a0 In the end, nearly a 100 million Americans became destitute, with nowhere to turn.\u00a0 There are no records that say how many people actually died, but estimates run from a few million to fifty million to nearly 100 million people.\u00a0 Of course, Canada experienced a population boom during those years that they attribute to American immigration, so most historians place the outright deaths at the low end of the estimates.<\/p>\n<p>The Southwest United States survived much better than most expected it would.\u00a0 For decades, entire swaths of their land had become no mans\u2019 lands, where drug gangs from Mexico ruled and police and sheriff forces feared to go because they knew the federal government would put them in prison if they shot a drug runner.\u00a0 But with the American federal government no longer arming and supporting the Mexicans, its government had fallen as well and Mexico was in even worse chaos than most of America.<\/p>\n<p>With the feds out of the way, the revitalized State Guards of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and the surviving parts of California decided it was high time to deal with the chaos south of the border for good.\u00a0 The four States began to patrol and cross the border on a regular basis, and their air, land, and sea forces began to target every drug cartel they could find, anywhere within range of their weapons.\u00a0 With Texas oil wells and refineries supporting them, the range the States could control turned out to be impressive indeed.\u00a0 Also, looking for more money to operate, they decriminalized most of the drugs and taxed them.\u00a0 Historians still argue to this day what was more responsible for the general end of the drug cartels, but the result of their actions was an end to the drug war that had plagued them for generations.<\/p>\n<p>The United States of America did not of course completely fail.\u00a0 The federal government still existed.\u00a0 With the power of the purse stripped of it by its own actions, it simply lacked the power to enforce any laws.\u00a0 The surviving States that sent representatives to Washington D.C. decided to arrange things so it would stay that way.\u00a0 The complete collapse of the federal structure gave them clarity of vision of what had happened in previous decades, and the State representatives voted to dismantle the federal government programs in their entirety.\u00a0 They also passed bills to repeal the sixteenth and seventeenth amendments.\u00a0 The surviving States passed them in a matter of months.<\/p>\n<p>The surviving States banded together to bring order to the areas of America in chaos, sending troops to deal with gangs or unfriendly military units in their jurisdictions.\u00a0 They also began programs to rebuild governments in the States that collapsed and voted to begin considering official recognition of Indian Nations sovereignty in recognition of the de facto situation many of them were in already.\u00a0 The reforms and rebuilding efforts would take years, and sometimes decades.\u00a0 California for example was not fully reunited under State authority until 2095.<\/p>\n<p>In the meantime, America finally returned to the global stage in 2061, when they helped organize a flotilla of Canadian and British warships to protect Australia from a Chinese invasion force.\u00a0 The effort proved successful, limiting Chinese expansion for the first time since the Second Great Depression began.\u00a0 Within a year the four nations signed the Western Alliance into existence, and began working to pull each other out of the rut they were all in.\u00a0 Other European nations soon began asking for inclusion as well, and the new Alliance began to grow.<\/p>\n<p>Cape Canaveral launched a ship into space in 2063 for the first time since the Depression began.\u00a0 It was a publicity stunt of course, but it did what the American States needed it to do.\u00a0 It showed to the world that America was back and capable of flying on its own.\u00a0 They even began testing mobile Orbital Elevators on the equator, looking for cheaper methods of pushing freight into space.\u00a0 The Mexican States, many Indian Nations, and islands in the Caribbean began asking to join the United States, and by the end of the century most of America from southern Mexico to Alaska flew the flag of the United States.<\/p>\n<p>When China performed the first hyperspace jump in 2105, Americans followed within a few years and the Great Space Race began.\u00a0 To support the race, America helped Africa build an Orbital Elevator at Port Harcourt.\u00a0 Panama quickly saw an opportunity and asked for aid in building an Orbital Elevator next to the Panama Canal.\u00a0 After years of negotiations, Panama requested inclusion in the United States of America and American began building the Panama City Orbital Elevator.\u00a0 Panama became America\u2019s path to the stars, and one of the primary methods of pushing the original modules of the new Alliance Station in high earth orbit into space.<\/p>\n<p>America and the Western Alliance cooperated to colonize over a dozen worlds during the Twenty Second Century, but America colonized half a dozen on its own as well.\u00a0 These core worlds, most within fifty lightyears of Earth, became the center of both American and Western Alliance power.\u00a0 We sent NASA missions to explore the bubble of clear space around us, and found that The Walls of The Terran Bubble as we now call it were truly impassable.\u00a0 In 2205, we finally found a way through, and that was the year the Peloran made Contact with us.\u00a0 That was the year that we finally met intelligent alien races.\u00a0 That was the year we found out they looked just like us.\u00a0 That was unexpected.<\/p>\n<p>In the century since, America and the Western Alliance have placed colonies throughout the Terran Bubble, and we even have a handful outside The Bubble.\u00a0 Independence was the first and is still the largest colony outside The Wall.\u00a0 The united America that we are now is one of the greatest nations in all the worlds.<\/p>\n<p>That is why another alien race, the Shang attacked, us in 2304.\u00a0 They destroyed our largest naval yard when they hit Yosemite, and they killed almost our entire federal government when they hit Washington D.C.\u00a0 They wanted to break us, but our States are used to working without federal interference.<\/p>\n<p>Yosemite hurt but we have other factories.\u00a0 D.C. simply angered us and answered their demands to surrender with warships and guns.\u00a0 With our allies in the Western Alliance at our side, we will teach the Shang to regret their attack.\u00a0 America will live on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hello, my name is Charles.\u00a0 America has a long history of civilizations dating from the last Ice Age to modern times.\u00a0 We have pyramids and roads as old as Egypt, and many of our cultures have been the largest and[&hellip;]<a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/?p=1062\">&darr; Read the rest of this entry&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-of-civilizations","uentry","postonpage-1","odd","post-author-charles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1062"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1062\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1149,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1062\/revisions\/1149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}