Johannes de Laet Quotes
The land is excellent and agreeable, full of noble forest trees and grapevines, and nothing is wanted here but the labor and industry to render it one of the finest and most fruitful lands …
Johannes de Laet, *, Dutch Officer of the Dutch East India Company, Report on the Colony of New Amsterdam
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Arguing that Slavery inhibited a society from development ...
Leading English politicians were warning of the cost of occupying Iraq. The political and military effort did not go well either. See {585253}. The development costs were even more massive in the ill-fated George W. Bush, invasion and occupation of Iraq in the early 21st century. The English policy makers like the Bush administration were expecting a more welcoming reaction. See {585250}.
The word “proprietor” at the time meant someone who had title to land. The title was then almost always tied up with the aristocratic titles. “Great proprietors” were therefore nobles who owned and controlled large land holdings. The “improvers” tended to be the businessmen—especially the manufacturers and the transportation magnates. Large landowners could just make money by renting parts of their land to tenant farmers. They needed no capital, no vision, not much skill or talent, and they didn’t have to take any risks.
The emergency was what was called the “Dust Bow” which was a period of severe dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands in the 1930s. Over 350,000 people left the Great Plains. The phenomenon was caused by severe drought combined with a failure to apply dry land farming methods to prevent wind erosion. What makes this quotation important is that it illustrates a remarkable practice of Mrs. Roosevelt that no other first lady as every done. Here the First Lady of a sitting President was overtly whipping up public opinion to complain that the government, led by her husband, was doing nothing to cope with a national emergency. This was very common and Mrs. Roosevelt was way out ahead of the President and his administration on most issues of the day. The President seemed to like the idea and it may have been one of the great public strategies of a Presidency. The First Lady would publicly advocate major reforms. The President could then observe the public reaction, judge the newspaper and pundit pronouncements, see how different special interests reacted. Then he could decide to embrace the reform or ignore it saying that it was just the opinion of his very independent wife. FDR had a very strong ego and had no problem with his wife publicly criticizing him.
Cahokia was a very large Native American city just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. In 1250, its population was about 15,000, comparable to that of London or Paris during the same period. At the time of the American Revolution, it was larger than New York, Boston of Philadelphia having 40,000 inhabitants at its peak. Tiahuanaco was a large city—30,000 at its peak—in Bolivia. The very ability to create and sustain such large communities shows that the Indians of the Americas were not simply hunter-gatherers but were very sophisticated in manipulating their environment and organizing large numbers of people.
Joannes or Johannes De Laet (Latinized as Ioannes Latius) was a Dutch geographer and director of the Dutch West India Company. Philip Burden called his History of the New World, "...arguably the finest description of the Americas published in the seventeenth century" and "...one of the foundation maps of Canada". De Laet was the first to print maps with the names Manhattan, New Amsterdam (now New York City) and Massachusetts.
