Locke read “Josephus de Acosta” closely. He agreed with the Jesuit’s “great conjecture” that large parts of the New World were pristine, inhabited not by the storied Aztecs or the cultured Inka but by artless peoples whose simplicity offered a window back in time to what Europe was like before written records and political society. In the beginning, all was America. Not Tenochtitlán or Cuzco, those wondrous cities that bewitched Cortés and Pizarro. Not what Tenochtitlán became—the densely populated Mexico City, the great metropolis of the Catholic Spanish Empire. But America, empty and unclaimed.

— America, América by Greg Grandin