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The First Revolution - What Was Left
In 1492, no one in the Old World had ever tasted a potato, smoked tobacco, or drunk a cup of chocolate — and no one in the Americas had ever seen a horse or a stalk of wheat. Then the wall between the two halves of the world came down, and what rushed through remade the diet of every continent, built and toppled empires, and decided which colonies grew rich and which ones starved.
This episode goes wide before it comes home. The Spanish dream of New World gold that left English colonists digging fool's gold in the Jamestown mud. The sassafras craze — a fragrant root sold as a cure for…
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