[FrankR]

Projecting today's culture into yesteryear, in order to try and justify today's culture, is absurd.

It was a very, very different time, a different culture.

The learned study other cultures today - like islam - and reach out to try to understand and accept their weird ways; then they look back at our own history and try to condemn people of those times because they thought differently than we do today...go figure.

[Eva]

You’re right, it was a very different time because the population of the country was so small. It was impossible for different cultures to shut themselves off from the rest of the people. Oh, yeah, we had our “Germantowns” and Dutch enclaves, but Muslims and other smaller minorities had to get along. They wouldn’t have been in America if they didn’t want to get along.

Europe, itself, was very multi-cultural, at least among the educated classes because education was based on books written mostly by Romans and Greeks. Much of the university education in Europe was conducted in Latin so that students from all over the world could read and understand the same books.