Rosa Medina

This book is full of false information, and it's a travesty schools use it. For example, it describes Columbus as, "[hoping] to convert them 'to our Holy Faith by lover rather than by force'," which is obviously false given that he enslaved, mutilated, and dismembered natives. Another example is about the comparison between the Spanish and Aztec armies, "But these two factors were magnified by a third element--the glue that held it all together--which was a western ay of combat that emphasized group cohesion of free citizens. Like the ancient Greeks and Romans," much of the militaries of most Greek states and the Romans were slaves, not free citizens, in fact, one of the most well known Greek civilizations, the Spartans, could in no way be described as having free citizens as their military. A final example is the poor comparison between the Spanish and Amerindians, including a seeming lack of understanding of the fact that there is a difference between the bartering system the Amerindians used and the wealth-based economy the Spanish had. All of my examples are just in the first chapter of this book and it's already a terrible excuse for a historical source, which it should surprise no one given the author thinks it's ironic that a monarchy wanted to expand, "Ironically, one of the smallest of the new monarchical states, Portugal, became the first to subsidize extensive exploration in the fifteenth century."