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Ross Douthat

By Ross Douthat

Opinion Columnist

On a recent snowbound day I took up “Conquistadores,” Fernando Cervantes’s history of the European arrival in the New World, and found myself meditating on the period in the early 1500s when the Americas had been discovered by Europeans but nobody in the European world quite understood what that discovery meant.

In that moment, all kinds of possibilities lay open, from the moderate to the........

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