Guns Germs And Steel Summary

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"Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond started off asking us one question. "Why did history unfold differently on different continents? Why has one culture—namely that of Western Europe—dominated the development of the modern world?" Diamond proceeded by telling us that the answer to that question was geography. We watched a portion of this small movie and at the end of class we were asked to compare the movie to chapter 3: Invisible Warriors: The Myth of the White Conquistador. I had to sit down and really think about it. The movie was based on agriculture while chapter 3 was focused on war- so I decided to make my main focal point to be: What is the link between agriculture and war? Along the years farming has made it possible to …show more content…

I finished reading chapter three: Invisible Warriors: The Myth of the White Conquistador, and in the first few paragraphs, Restall sets a scene fairly related to what I was taught to believe . “Thousands of native warriors swarm like bees upon the vastly outnumbered conquistadors, who against all odds fend them off and survive to fight another day” (44). But, as Restall intrigues, “what has so often been ignored or forgotten is the fact that Spaniards tended also to be outnumbered by their own native allies. Additionally, the ‘invisible warriors’ of this myth took an additional form, that of the Africans, free and enslaved, who accompanied Spanish invaders and in later campaigns equaled or exceeded them in number” …show more content…

During this period people excluded roles of native allies and black Africans in recording the conquest. In 1760 an Italian man Friar Ilarione Da Bergamo doesn't mention Africans and contributes the Spanish victory to "superior weaponry , handicapping superstitions of the 'wretched Indians' and the interventions of the providence" (45). They had a war similar to the one in the movie in which they were outnumbered. "The Incans were charging us in such a number that only by miracle of swordplay were we able to drive them back and reform our ranks." (45) Because Europeans were ranked higher than Indians/ blacks they were barely mentioned. We only see a few rare times that they were. For instance, Alvarado mentions native allies once to his letters to Cortes during his invasion of highland Gaugamela in 1524. He says that he wrote two letters to Cortes. "The first making no reference to the native allies, the second mentioning just once, in parentheses, that his force compromised 250 Spaniards "and about five or six thousand friendly Indians". " Cortes basically claimed the support from the natives were a result of his own devised

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