"Investments..., Credit..., Property, Commodities and Capital"

"In 'Benito Cereno,' Melville retold these events with some significant ­changes. Omitting what Grandin calls 'Delano’s nearly yearlong hounding' of the Spaniard for what he considered his due compensation for the rescue, he emphasized Cereno’s lingering shock and Delano’s impenetrable insouciance. He focused on the leader of the slave rebellion, whose corpse, after his trial and hanging, was decapitated, with the head impaled on a spike in the main plaza of Lima so all could contemplate his 'voiceless end.'"


Andrew Delbanco in The New York Times reviews Greg Grandin’s Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World.

If Adventure Has a Name

"Carbon dating by a German and Peruvian excavation team indicates that the circular plaza is at least 5,500 years old, dating to about 3,500 BC, said Cesar Perez, an archaeologist at Peru's National Institute of Culture who supervised the dig.
"That would make it older than the Great Pyramid of Giza."

Patrick J. McDonnell in the Los Angeles Times reports the discovery of the ruins of Peru's Sechin Bajo, "the oldest known urban settlement in the Americas."