The history of South America is the study of the past, particularly the written record, oral histories, and traditions, passed down from generation to generation on the continent in the Earth's western hemisphere and (chiefly) southern hemisphere. South America has a history that spans a wide range of human cultural and civilizational forms. While millennia of independent development were interrupted by the Portuguese and Spanish colonization drive of the late 15th century and the demographic collapse that followed, the continent's mestizo and indigenous cultures remain quite distinct from those of their colonizers. Through the trans-Atlantic slave trade, South America (especially Brazil) became the home of millions of people in the African diaspora. The mixing of races led to new social structures. The tensions between colonial countries in Europe, indigenous peoples and escaped slaves shaped South America from the 16th through the 19th Centuries. With the revolution for independence from Spanish crown during the 19th century, South America underwent yet more social and political changes among them nation building projects, European immigration waves, increased trade, colonization of hinterlands, and wars about territory ownership and power balance, the reorganization of Indian rights and duties, liberal-conservative conflicts among the ruling class, and the subjugation of Indians living in the states frontiers, that lasted until the early 1900s.
Read more about History Of South America: European Colonization, 17th and 18th Centuries, Independence and 19th Century, Recent History
Famous quotes containing the words south america, history of, history, south and/or america:
“Indeed, I believe that in the future, when we shall have seized again, as we will seize if we are true to ourselves, our own fair part of commerce upon the sea, and when we shall have again our appropriate share of South American trade, that these railroads from St. Louis, touching deep harbors on the gulf, and communicating there with lines of steamships, shall touch the ports of South America and bring their tribute to you.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)
“The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“In the far South the sun of autumn is passing
Like Walt Whitman walking along a ruddy shore.
He is singing and chanting the things that are part of him,
The worlds that were and will be, death and day.
Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end.
His beard is of fire and his staff is a leaping flame.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“America is the world’s living myth. There’s no sense of wrong when you kill an American or blame America for some local disaster. This is our function, to be character types, to embody recurring themes that people can use to comfort themselves, justify themselves and so on. We’re here to accommodate. Whatever people need, we provide. A myth is a useful thing.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)