Felipe Fernández-Armesto

From the eastern Atlantic, the US looks boringly uniform. Yet Alaska is almost as different from Alabama as Turku is from Turkey. If you travel the length of the Mississippi, food, laws, customs and lingo change as surprisingly as along the Danube. Particularism is rife. In two counties in Vermont, there are warrants for the arrest of George W. Bush. In some parts of the South, you must step across a county line to evade laws against alcohol. In Indiana, where I live, every county sets its own time zone and you have to keep adjusting your watch on your way to Chicago. In this land of anomalies, nowhere is odder than Puerto Rico. It is an ‘associated’ state, but not a state of the union.

The most influential Native American visitor to Europe in colonial times was a fiction. The protagonist of L’Ingénu, Voltaire’s novel of 1767, and of a dramatisation by the sage’s acolyte Jean-François Marmontel, was the very model of a noble Huron. He fought the British with distinction, fell in love with an imprisoned French lady and assaulted the Bastille to liberate her. The strikingly prescient central event makes his story excel even the Great Cat Massacre as a prefiguration of the French Revolution. Indeed, the discovery of the natural wisdom of the savage facilitated the philosophes’ esteem for the common man. By empowering the massesthey imperilled themselves – but that is another story.