I'm Reading More And More All The Time

From American Slavery, American Freedom by Edmund Morgan (1975), as quoted in Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States (2003), p. 25:


If you were a colonist, you knew your technology was superior to the Indians'. You knew that you were civilized, and they were savages. . . . But your superior technology had proved insufficient to extract anything. The Indians, keeping to themselves, laughed at your superor methods and lived from the same land more abundandtly and with less labor than you did. . . . And when your own people started deserting in order to live with them, it was too much. . . . So you killed the Indians, tortured them, burned their villages, burned their cornfields. It proved your superiority, in spite of your failures. And you gave similar treatment to any of your own people who succumbed to their savage ways of life.

But you still did not grow much corn. . . .