I am a historian of the United States in the world.
"In much of North America, to say nothing of the Caribbean or the lands of Central and South America, Europe's colonial empires were as firmly ensconced as ever, and there were quite a few people, including quite a few on land claimed by the United States, who wished to keep things that way. Because Americans were founding a nation among nations, they were doing so, at least in part, on someone else's terms."- Eliga Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth (2012), p. 2
"Capitalism, that is, required as an indispensable premise the existence of the worker free to sell his labor. We are not concerned here with the extent to which this bourgeois 'freedom' was real, only with its juridical form."- Manuel Moreno Fraginals, El ingenio (1964), p. 6
"They want to send me abroad, as a Consul or a Minister. I said I didn't want any of the pie. God knows I am mean enough and lazy enough, now without being a foreign consul." - Mark Twain to Jane Clemens, 2/6/1868