The United States of America has a reputation as a beacon of freedom and diversity from the colonial period of its history. From the beginning, however, Americans' freedoms were tied to a mixture of religious and ethnic affiliations that privileged some inhabitants of North America over others. Although European ideas of liberty set the tone for what was possible, those liberties looked somewhat different in colonial North America, where indigenous and African peoples and cultures also had some influence. The result was greater freedom for some and unprecedented slavery and dispossession for others, making colonial America a society of greater diversity—for better and for worse—than Europe. Hope this helped
Kai T. Ericson, born in Vienna in 1931, is considered by many
an authority on the catastrophic events and their social fallouts. This American
sociologist studied plethora of disasters, among them the disaster created by
the US nuclear testing. What Kai explains is that, unfortunately, this particular disaster
never had an ending.
