Reading Assignment 1

In The Americas: A Hemispheric History, the author presents two different approaches of categorizing America (north and south)--one as the present set of divergent countries and another as a unified super continent encompassing the entire western hemisphere. The preferred categorization is never fully specified, but I believe the author to favor the latter based on his theory that "U.S. hegemony is not the end of history, just another phase of unpredictable durability" (pg. 19). While I agree that a certain amount of commonality is beneficial to such a large land mass, I believe it is the cultural differences that promote new thought and a synthesis of differing ideas; a difference that can only exist with explicitly categorized geographical boundaries for each culture. One example would be how the Olmec civilization influenced a large number of later cultures, as written in chapter 2, and how their civilization was founded on intense city-state competition, making them an ultimately divergent society that harmonized and progressed through diversity.