“Joseph Smith… came from nowhere. Reared in a poor Yankee…
“Joseph Smith… came from nowhere. Reared in a poor Yankee farm family, he had less than two years of formal schooling and began life without social standing or institutional backing. His family rarely attended church. Yet in the fourteen years he headed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Smith created a religious culture that survived his death, flourished in the most desolate regions of the United States, and continues to grow worldwide. . . . In 1830 at the age of twenty-four, he published the Book of Mormon…. He built cities and temples and gathered thousands of followers before he was killed at age thirty-eight.”–Richard Lyman Bushman, historian, Joseph Smith Rough Stone Rolling: A Cultural Biography of Mormonism’s Founder, 2005 The developments described in the excerpt best illustrate which of the following?
Read DetailsReading for Questions 1-3 “The Americas were discovered in 1…
Reading for Questions 1-3 “The Americas were discovered in 1492, and the first Christian settlements established by the Spanish the following year…. [I]t would seem… that the Almighty selected this part of the world as home to the greater part of the human race…. [T]heir delicate constitutions make them unable to withstand hard work or suffering and render them liable to succumb to almost any illness, no matter how mild. . . . It was upon these gentle lambs… that, from the very first day they clapped eyes on them, the Spanish fell like ravening wolves upon the fold, or like tigers and savage lions who have not eaten meat for days. . . . The native population, which once numbered some five hundred thousand, was wiped out by forcible expatriation to the island of Hispaniola.” Bartoleme De Las Casas, 1552 Question: An implicatio of Las Casas’ argument is that a major cause of the decline of the native populations in the Americas after 1492 was the:
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