Sublime

The Conquest of the Incas, by John Hemming. The definitive history of Francisco Pizarro’s occupation of Peru, and the starting point for any serious examination of Inca history.

within thirty years of Columbus’s first American landfall, the conquest of the Aztec Empire by Cortés and his company of adventurers signalled that European intrusion into the Americas held a different significance from the piecemeal colonization of Europe’s oceanic periphery or Portugal’s hijacking of Asian trade.

J. Hector

Right before the Princeton battle, Washington informed Philadelphia financier Robert Morris that “we have the greatest occasion at present for hard money to pay a certain set of people who are of particular use to us . . . Silver would be most convenient.” 19 Washington considered Morris, a huge man with a ruddy complexion and a genial personality,

He had no university education, but he read Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire three times before he was twenty-five.

From their letters, we can also tell that George and Colonel Fairfax shared copies of Caesar’s Commentaries and a life of Alexander the Great and frequently swapped views on military heroes from antiquity.