What Vespucci reported discovering was rather difficult to believe. “I have found a continent more densely peopled and abounding in animals than our Europe or Asia or Africa,” he wrote. (Location 469)
Note: First time I’ve considered how extraordinary this must have been. The sf trope is meaningful.
In Virginia, George Mason began to have doubts about slavery, sending to George Washington, in December of 1765, an essay in which he argued that slavery was “the primary Cause of the Destruction of the most flourishing Government that ever existed”—the Roman republic—and warning that it might be the destruction of the British Empire, too. (Location 1791)
The best and most expedient strategy, Paine understood, was to argue not from precedent or doctrine but from nature, to insist that there exists a natural right to revolution, as natural as a child leaving its parent. “Let us suppose a small number of persons settled in some sequestered (Location 1975)
A NATION HAS borders but the edges of an empire are frayed. (Location 4688)
Populism’s racism and nativism rank among its longest-lasting legacies. (Location 6554)
McKinley ran a new-style campaign; Bryan ran an old-style campaign. Bryan barnstormed all over the country: he gave some six hundred speeches to five million people in twenty-seven states and traveled nearly twenty thousand miles. But McKinley’s campaign coffers were fuller: Republicans spent 7million;Democrats,300,000. (Location 6734)
PROGRESSIVISM HAD ROOTS in late nineteenth-century populism; (Location 6943)
Populists generally wanted less government, Progressives wanted more, seeking solutions in reform legislation and in the establishment of bureaucracies, especially government agencies. (Location 6950)
Thenceforth all workers were required to work at that rate or lose their jobs.47 Taylor, though, had made up most of his figures. After charging Bethlehem Steel two and a half times what he could possibly have saved the company in labor costs, he, too, was fired.48 Nevertheless, Taylorism endured. (Location 7287)
but what actually happened was a lot worse: by the end of the decade, managing public opinion would become a business, in the form of “public relations.” (Location 7677)
Note: In this reading it is the modes of public relations that have chamged and atomised - our understanding is now constituted differently
During the 1920s, Americans’ faith in progress turned into a faith in prosperity, fueled by consumption. “A change has come over our democracy,” a journalist reported. “It is called consumptionism. The American citizen’s first importance to his country is now no longer that of citizen but that of consumer.” (Location 7760)
“We assume we have to get a voter’s attention seven times to make a sale,” Whitaker said. (Location 8628)
Polls don’t represent the people, one congressman wrote; Congress does: “Polls are in contradiction to representative government.” (Location 8780)
