Distance Calculation Quotes
Although most people of old many of the ancient world understood the spherical earth over a thousand years before Galileo was persecuted by the Roman Catholic Church for stating that fact. See {590334} for another ancient view. Note that Strabo talks of seamen who tried to circumnavigate the earth so it was a generally held view of the sophisticated at the time of Christ.
D. H. Hill. These are very important historical quotations in that they illustrate something that is not well known by most of us. In the decades before the Civil War there was a strong cultural enmity on the part of most Southerners of the Northern countrymen. It was so gross and overt that problems like this in a Southern college Algebra Text were not only published but used un schools throughout the South. Northerners were depicted in many of the Southern Cultural examples as duplicitous, greedy, dishonorable, cowardly, radical, irreligious, and extremist. The North did not have a very favorable view of Southerners who were perceived as uneducated, reactionary, anti-modern, lazy, hypocritical, cruel and backward – much implied by the acceptance of slavery. However the Northerners were not overt about their biases. These kinds of derogatory school problems were not acceptable. However the Northern bias was in some ways worse as it made most Northerners quite condescending when interacting with Southerners. After the Civil War, Southern education, culture, science and industry did not develop at the same pace as the North and the condescension continued well into the 20th century, at the end of which the South began to close the historical gap.
