Bernal Diaz del Castillo Quotes
We saw … shrines in these cities that looked like gleaming white towers and castles: a marvelous sight.
Bernal Diaz del Castillo, *, Spanish Captain of Cortez’s Expedition to the new world, Description of the Aztec Capital of Tenochtitlan
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This is a counter-intuitive fact which surprises almost everyone. Note that he does not claim that the entire world population could all live in New York, but the enormous amount of indoor space is clearly illustrated by the fact that all could fit in to the city.
Clinton also was the Masonic Grandmaster of New York State. The 10 Masonic Lodges in New York at the end of the Revolution had grown to 100 by 1806. 20 years later, there were 500 in New York alone and Freemasonry was flourishing throughout the new nation.
Nations come and go—are born and die, but generally the cities remain as part of the new state or empire.
The major motivation of the French for their many voyages to North America was to find a Northwest Passage to the Orient. Settlement came as an afterthought, and even then to develop a base in Canada for future exploration.
See {621891} for a similar view.
Spengler and some others viewed with alarm the urban migration that had come with the industrial revolution. That migration was relatively minor compared to what took place in the remainder of the 20th century. In most developed coutries the rural population has become very small and the urban and suburban totally dominant.
Moses became the greatest “builder” the world had ever known. The Bridges and tunnels into New York, the highways in the city and Long Island, the development of Fire Island and the World Trade Center were all his work. Babbitt was a very large building and construction contractor. The Cold War was ongoing and his reference to civilian defense was an absurd notion of the 1950s that building bomb shelters in cities and homes could protect the civilian population in the event of nuclear attack. This was actually an official government position and program.
This quotation is notable because it illustrates some of the ideas about cities that were suggested at the time. The growth of the suburbs was the largest of the changes that actually tool place.
He was contrasting the English efforts in the New World and the French. New France was the term for the early French North American areas much of which was in Canada. This classic view argues for the superiority of a capitalistic and individualistic development model over a planned one organized from the top down,
In most of the world there has been a continual migration into cities.
Burke was one of the few in England who predicted economic and commercial success of America.
Bernal Díaz del Castillo was a Spanish conquistador, who participated as a soldier in the conquest of Mexico under Hernán Cortés and late in his life wrote an account of the events. As an experienced soldier of fortune, he had already participated in expeditions to Tierra Firme, Cuba, and to Yucatán before joining Cortés. In his later years he was an encomendero and governor in Guatemala where he wrote his memoirs called The True History of the Conquest of New Spain. He began his account of the conquest almost thirty years after the events and later revised and expanded it in response to the biography published by Cortes's chaplain Francisco López de Gómara, which he considered to be largely inaccurate in that it did not give due recognition to the efforts and sacrifices of others in the Spanish expedition.
