"大国沉浮"课程介绍(4)

I have to confess that in the 42 years I spent on this planet with my mom I had never once thought of my mom as a pancake eater. Over the years I am sure

I have eaten hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pancakes that mom fixed me but I can't honestly ever recall watching my mom eat a pancake. I mean that's how it's supposed to be; moms make pancakes and the kids eat the pancakes. I'm also sure that mom never taught me how to eat pancakes the way she taught me to tie my shoes or the way she taught me how to drive a car or how to pick out presents for my wife. Still, each and every time I eat pancakes I have to perform this operation on the pancakes and the only way I can explain this is because I can't help behaving like my mother's son.

In much the same way we can say that a nation often behaves the way it does because it can't help factors such as its own ancestry, geographical location and history. The colonists that founded the United States of America were mostly descended from white

Anglo Saxon Protestants. These ancestors had come to the different colonies for various reasons but almost always of their own free will.

Some of them, granted, did come as indentured servants some of them had been brought against their will from

Africa to serve as human slaves. Some of the first

American's ancestors had in fact lived in

North America for centuries; the Indians.

From the early 1800's on people from around the world poured into the United States to become

Americans, throwing their stock into the great