Americas

Oh, thank you so much.

I mean, yes, as you guys can hear by my accent, I am not of Americas.

I am a New Zealander.

We do sound incredibly similar to Australians.

somewhere on the American continent, right? He did not specify Jackson County, Missouri.

And then shortly after he starts teaching that Zion will be all of North and South America.

So Joseph's understanding of Zion continued to shift and expand whether or not we will ever come back and rebuild that city and rebuild a temple there or temple complexes, maybe 24 temples like we talked about.

That would all need to depend upon additional revelation.

While the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does not have any official position about the precise location of the events of the Book of Mormon, readers have offered wise counsel on how members should approach study of the topic.

Beginning in 1830 and throughout the 19th century, most readers assumed that Book of Mormon events took place throughout both North and South America.

It was assumed that South America was the land southward, the narrow neck was within Central America, and North America was the land northward.

An article for the Ohio Observer and Telegraph reported that Oliver Cowdery, Peter Whitmer Jr., Parley P. Pratt, and Ziba Peterson were teaching that Lehi and his family landed on the coast of Chile 600 years before the coming of Christ.

Nineteenth-century publications reflect a surprising variety of opinion among members and church leaders.

Something that always cracks me up is the clap.

When people clap after a sunset.

So where have you seen people clap? Are certain countries more likely to clap than others? I would bet Americans are like a clapping crowd when the sun goes down.

It's a good question.

You remind me of there are certain European cultures where when the plane lands, people clap and it's the same thing.

That's right.

And then in, in North America, it's, it's the United States by far.

United States is so dominant that it, United States could, like, keep on electing Donald Trump for the next year.

It could face plant its way through the next few decades and still win.

Some of these thoughts of mine have seen the light before in other guise.

For kindly consenting to their republication here in altered and extended form, I must thank the publishers of the Atlantic Monthly, the World's Work, the Dial, the New World, and the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

Before each chapter as now printed stands a bar of the sorrow songs, some echo of haunting melody from the only American music which welled up from black souls in the dark past.

And finally, need I add that I who speak here am bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the veil? W.E.B.

Du Bois Atlanta, Georgia February 1, 1903 Chapter 1 Of Our Spiritual Strivings O water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand, all night long crying with a mournful cry, as I lie and listen and cannot understand the voice of my heart in my side, or the voice of the sea.

Their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white, or wasted itself in a bitter cry.

Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison house closed round about us all, walls straight and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to the sons of night, who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil and gifted with second sight in this American world, a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.

And the Trumpian, Hamiltonian vision of America is what you're getting in America right now.

It's the clash of the two Americas personified.

I haven't read that book yet from Matt Erritt, but I eventually will get around to it.

But this is the clash of the two Americas.

And yes, I say the two Americas because we're the same people.

That's another angle of the pitch, but I'm going to keep it pushing.

This is...