Word: incas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Take the Incas. Inca civilization, writes Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, was a "pyramidal and theocratic society" of "totalitarian structure" in which "the individual had no importance and virtually no existence." Its foundation? "A state religion that took away the individual's free will and crowned the authority's decision with the aura of a divine mandate turned the Tawantinsuyu ((Incan empire)) into a beehive...
...good history calls for careful distinctions. In the Jesuit weekly America, Rutgers Professor James Muldoon has argued that the National Council of Churches' resolution is unhistorical. The council blamed Europeans for introducing slavery into the various new worlds they encountered, ignoring evidence that the Aztec and Inca empires were also based on forced servitude. The resolution virtually ignores a reality highlighted by the Catholic bishops' pastoral: that the evils condemned by the council were first noted, in angry detail, by early Spanish defenders of Indian rights like the Dominican friar Bartoleme de Las Casas...
...prison massacres bring an end to the violence that is becoming commonplace in Peru. On Wednesday a bomb concealed in a suitcase ripped through the roof of a packed train that was carrying tourists to the ancient Inca city of Machu Picchu. Seven passengers were killed, including one American and three West Germans. As many as 40 other people were injured. Although no one claimed responsibility for the attack, it was widely seen as an attempt by the Shining Path to avenge the deaths of its imprisoned followers...
...exerted an appeal on college audiences: more than 50,000 copies of Lewisiana have been sold, and other volumes are on the way. "Lewis wrote 45 books," proclaims Martin. "And Black Sparrow has reprint rights to all of them. It's like having an exclusive option on the Inca Empire." If North Point represents the classical approach to publishing and Black Sparrow the romantic, William Kaufmann Inc. stands for the technocratic. The two letters most frequently heard at Kaufmann's modest headquarters in Los Altos, Calif., are "AI" (artificial intelligence), the science of making computers "think." In 1980 a professor...
...coca plant is part of the cultural fabric of the northern Andes. Inca nobility chewed the plant, as suggested by the discovery of pre-Columbian statues with bulging cheeks--presumably crammed with coca leaves. The same practice was observed by the explorer Amerigo Vespucci in what is now northern Venezuela during his first voyage around the world...