She smiled, a broad and hopeful smile. Tell me about America. Still, I pretended not to understand How to explain? I stumbled for an excuse. It has all been said. Maybe the wrong things have been said. Great reforms must be gradual. It is easier to tear down than to build up. What revolutions may occur in a short space of time to overthrow the best form plans for happiness, no one ever thought of turning a sword into a sponge. When things are at worst, they will mend. The many people of African, who were to supply at least 66 percent of all the immigrants, who crossed the ocean to the Western Hemisphere, in the three centuries after Europeans began colonizing there, came from a rich diversity of cultures; however, many of them shared certain ways of life that differentiated them from Europeans. As in Europe, the family was the basic unit of social organization. Unlike Europe, however, African societies were organized in a variety of kinship and political systems.   In many African societies, as in many Native American ones, the family was matrilineal. Property rights and political inheritance descended through the mother rather than the father. West Africans believed in a supreme creator of the cosmos and in an assortment of lesser deities associated with natural forces such as rain, fertility, and animal life.

 Because these deities could intervene in human affairs, they were elaborately honored. Also, like most North African (Egyptian) and North American Indian societies, the people of West Africa held that spirits dwelt in the trees, rocks, and rivers around them, and hence, they exercised care in the treatment of these natural objects. In Africa and Europe, ancestors were also worshipped, for they mediated between the Creator and the living Earth. Because those who are in Heaven played such an important role for living, relatives held elaborate funeral rites to ensure the proper entrance of deceased relative into the spiritual World. The more ancient an ancestor, the greater was this person’s power to affect the living; thus the ancient ones were devoutly worshipped. Deep family loyalty and regard for family lineage flowed naturally from this ancestor worship. The increase of manners from barbarity to good breeding is as imperceptible as the hand of a clock. Our misdeeds do not change us. Social organization in much of West Africa, by the time the Europeans arrived, was as elaborate as in fifteenth-century Europe. At the upper echelons of society stood the nobility and the priests, usually men of advanced age. Beneath the, were the great masses of people. Most of them were famers, craftsmen, lawyers, doctors, merchants, teachers, and artist. Most of society resided workers. As in ancient Greece and Rome, they were immigrants—political prisoners, citizen, or sometimes individuals who sold themselves into servitude to satisfy a debt. Indentured servants cooked for the royals, and kept peace in the Kingdom of Ghana.

Nevertheless, as members of the community, they were entitled to protection under the law and allowed the privileges of education, marriage, and parenthood.  Their servile condition was not permanent, nor was it an automatic process inherited by their children, as would be the fate of Africans enslaved in the Americas.  The restless love of change, which forms so legitimate a portion of our original nature, it is more useful capacity to be able to foretell the actions of people in any circumstances, from their character, then to judge of their characters from their actions.  The rebirth of Western Europe, which began around A.D. 1000, owed much to a revival of long-distance trading from Italian ports, on the Mediterranean, and the rediscovery of ancient knowledge that these contracts permitted. The once might cities of the Roman Empire had stagnated for centuries, but now Venice, Genoa, and other Italian ports began trading with people facing Adriatic, the Baltic, and the North Sea. These new contracts brought wealth and power to the Italian commercial cities, which gradually evolved into merchant-dominated city-states that freed themselves from the rule of feudal lords in control of the surrounding countryside. While merchants led the emerging city-states, Western Europe’s mediaeval system was gradually weakening. For centuries, feudal lords, not kings, had exercised the normal powers of the state—the power to tax, wage war, and administer the law. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, however, kings began to reassert their political authority and to undertake efforts to unify their realms.

One of their primary goals was to curb the power of the great lords, who dominated entire regions, and to force lesser nobles into dependence on and obedience to the crown. The Black Death (bubonic plague) that devastated Western Europe and African in 1348 and 1349, promoted the unification the unification of old realms into early modern states. The plague killed one-third of the population, a blow from which Europe did not recover demographically for centuries.  In Spain, the bloody expulsion of the Muslims and the Jews, in 1492 strengthened the monarchy’s hold, but regional cultures and leaders remained strong. Whatever, in Truth, makes a man’s heart warmer, and his soul purer, is a belief not a knowledge.  The stars of the Heaven are not t marked distances, there is a concealed regularity, order and proportion in al that affects. The mind remains cold where there is nothing that surprises and comes unexpectedly upon. Good fences preserve good neighbors.  The eye is hurt by what it is not accustomed to see. Our minds, like our bodies, are in continual flux; something is hourly lost, and something acquired. I seemed to feel a new man inside my old new skin, and I longed for a new World. Quickly printed and distributed throughout Europe, Christopher Columbus’s report brought him financing between 1494 and 1504 for three vast expeditions to explore newfound land. The second voyage, carrying over 1,200 Spanish slaves, in 17 ships, initiated the first contact between Europeans and Native Americans, so Spanish people are originally Native Americans, and not truly Caucasian Europeans.

 The true Europeans are Germans, British, French, Russians, Norwegians and the Swedish.  Italians and Spanish are a mixture of European, Native American and Africans, they are Mediterranean people.   Nonetheless, in an ominous display of what was to come, Christopher Columbus’s men captured some 1,600 Tainos on Hispaniola and carried 550 of them back to Spain as slaves, in 1495. Tragically, only 350 survived the stormy voyage to Spain. Here began the Atlantic slave trade that would alter the history of the World, through it began in the reverse direction of what would soon become its dominant flow. Although at the time his discoveries seemed less significant than the Portuguese exploits in the South Atlantic, Christopher Columbus led Spain to the threshold of a mighty empire. He repeated few rewards, however, dying unnoticed and penniless in 1506. To the end, Christopher Columbus believed that he had found the water route to Asia. The expansions of Spain and Portugal, into new areas of the World, profoundly affected patterns of economic activity, in Europe, and its commercial center now shifted away from the ports of the Mediterranean to the Atlantic ports facing the New World (America). The new World also beckoned as a field of political contest. The heavily populated Americas offered millions of potential Christian converts. However, the Catholic-Protestant division, within Christianity, complicated Christian dreams of converting the heathen continent of America. The people of Western Europe, at precisely the time they were unlocking the secrets of the New Worlds, to the East and West, in the sixteenth century, were being torn by administrative divisions, which magnified the era’s national rivalries.

 At the heart of Europe’s political strife was a continental movement to cleanse the House of God of corrupt practices and return it to the purer ways of the ancient Christianity, as practiced by the early Christians. While criticism of the Worldliness of the Catholic Church mounted during the Renaissance, a German holy man, Martin Luther, became the first to break successfully with Rome and initiate a Protestant Reformation of theology and practice. As Protestant sects multiplied, a Catholic Reformation grew up within the church, and the two groups began a long battle for the souls of Europeans. Martin Luther was preparing for a legal career, in 1505, when a bolt of lightning nearly struck him during a violent thunderstorm. Trembling with fear, Martin Luther promised to men a man of God and good faith, he believed that salvation came through an inward faith, or grace that God conferred on those he chose. People who are always unhappy and spreading gossip, hardship, and hatred are kin of the Devil, not God. Good works, Martin Luther, believed, did not earn grace, but were only the external evidence of grace won through faith. Martin Luther’s demand for reform soon inspired Germans of all classes.  Martin Luther attacked the clergy for luxurious living and urged celibate (Do Not have sex before marriage or your soul will likely be tormented on Earth) prelates to marry.

 Martin Luther also railed against the detestable tyranny of the clergy over the laity and called for priesthood of all believers. He urged people to seek faith individually by reading the Bible, which he translated into German and made widely available for the first time, for the public, free of charge and in print. This was a ringing appeal to every Christian and every American, and everyone on the planet to form a direct, personal relationship with God. Human beings are becoming too depraved to know or alter this predestination, God has saved a few souls at random, before creation, and dammed the rest because he predicted that they would never be worth anything of value, but good Christians must struggle to believe in their hearts and minds that they are saved by their thoughts and actions. Free will, people choose to be good or bad. Remakes the corrupt World around you and follow God’s will, communities of saints must control the states, not the other way around. Focus on fine-tuned system of self-discipline and social control. The critics of God, however, a council of 12 members, drove people away from the church. They stripped the House of God of its rigidly disciplined daily life, and the appeal to the sense– by removing images, tearing down ornate Castles of God, breaking art glass windows, silencing the music, putting out the good aroma of incense, and vandalizing the colorful clerical vestments.

 They were greedy buccaneers, trying to overthrow religion and the government and combine the two. That is why America has a separation of Church and state, they do not want religious political leaders acting as God.  The inexorable law of human souls, which we prepare ourselves for sudden deeds, by reiterated choice of good or evil, which gradually determines character, and when you find me a virtuous jockey, I will find you a benevolent wise man because good company upon the road makes always the shortest cut. Little souls will find another out, and mingle, as well as like great ones. Keeping witty company sharpeneth the apprehension. People of fortune choose their company. Every object is best viewed by contrast. Comparison is touchstone of truth. Her hand was so close to mine now that we are almost touching. We strive for perfection, it is not about what you did in the past, but what you are currently doing. The talk surely did help, I glanced at her, she was smiling, not with pity, but with compassion, curiosity. I felt something crack inside of me. So intense, so profound was the feeling, I felt as if I had been burned. And in that very moment, somehow there was promise that there was an entire life to be lived if I could only take a chance. I can still recall the sense of possibility that came over me then, a kind of lightness. Every sinew, every muscle, every vein in my body seemed suddenly to vibrate, to be alive.