America Was NOT Founded on Imperialism

It is...meaningless to employ terms like ecological imperialism to describe the interaction of the Europeans and the Indians. People of different races and ethnic backgrounds had come into contact with each other globally for centuries, from the Chinese in Southeast Asia to the Mongols in Europe to the Arabs in Africa. Seeds, germs, animals, viruses—all have interacted incessantly around the world for eons. (Even the European honeybee had settled as far west as St. Louis by the early 1700s.) To invoke such language is an attempt to reattach blame to Columbus and capitalism after anthropologists and historians have discovered than North American Indians had choices in how their world was shaped, and made no greater share of right—or wrong—choices than the new arrivals from Europe.

Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, A Patriot’s History of the United States, pg. 421