Comments by "Winston Smith" (@kryts27) on "Explaining America's Identity in 10 Ethnicities" video.

  1. Very good point. Nieuw Amsterdam, which was renamed New York by later English colonialists was not discussed at all and also the later settlement of Dutch farmers to the state of Iowa.
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  2. Really interesting thing is the without the evils of slavery and later racism and economic oppression, black African people have been arriving in Australia particularly in the last 20 years (very few here before this). Many of them have good jobs and are plutonium-driven to succeed, like my black Zimbabwean friend. The point I like to make is that 1. Africa is an enormous continent and that a person from Nairobi, Kenya would veiw a person from West Africa as would I (a non-Slav) view a Russian. 2. African people or people decended from African ancestry (actually all of Homo sapiens was originally African by DNA tests), and all of them have an enormous difference in experiences, either historically or modern, in stories to tell. I'm not excusing the awful Atlantic Triangle Slave trade, which ended in the 1830s thanks actually to the British Royal Navy which outlawed the trade and policed it, and the brutality of the Southern Slave States (i'm no friend of the Confederate), but experiences are much more than the colour of your skin.
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  3. Sorry, I thought some of the Native North Americans had some copper working skills. From the Great Lakes region they smelted enough copper to make tools like arrowheads and copper jewellery such as torques. They were doing this 7000 years ago, before the Bronze Age in Europe. Like the Celts under the Roman military machine, the Native Americans didn't stand much chance from more numerous invasive peoples from the East who were just starting to industrialise when they were invading the Great Plains. Unlike Australia, which conquest took just over a century, the conquest of the more materially advanced Native Americans by Europeans (helped by inadvertent germ warfare) was a much longer affair; approximately 400 years since when the Spanish first arrived. Adopting the horse for war mobility and hunting (an animal ironically that originally evolved in the America's) provided some war band resistance by the Soiux and Apache's to European invasion.
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  4. Please discuss this more. People of Latin American decent are the fastest growing immigrant group in the United States. Really interested that ancient civilizations, such as the Mayans, are migrating in the America's. In other words, Native American people migrating within the America's. The migration story of Latin Americans are tinged with oppression and tragedy though.
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