In this chapter, we develop a comprehensive model where we include assessments of each campaign event (e.g., September debate) and issue (e.g., election integrity, worries about COVID-19) when predicting overall evaluations of Biden and Trump in November as well as changes in feeling thermometer scores from September to November. These models show that views about the first presidential debate and attitudes toward major campaign issues (i.e., election integrity, COVID-19, social justice protests) explain views of the candidates in November and predict shifts in evaluations over the length of the campaign. Finally, we estimate changes in vote preference from September to November and we find that elements of the campaign (e.g., views about the presidential debate, support for social justice protests) produce important changes in vote preferences. In other words, we find strong evidence that the 2020 campaign mattered.

Does the South American continent have a future? Between gross exploitation by European and Asian countries, corrupt and incompetent local governments, many in thrall to foreign interests, environmental degradation, overpopulation and weak economies plus widespread looting of archaeological sites to supply European and North American museums, the future does not seem very bright.

It was 1971 and Los Angeles Times editor Nick Williams had what he called a “terribly uneasy feeling.” In a letter to one of the paper’s Washington correspondents, he wrote of his suspicion that journalism had “lost credibility … with an alarming percentage of the people.” If the plummet continued, Williams fretted, journalists will have “destroyed or weakened a keystone of our Constitution.”1

The internet has remade both the media and the social institutions that surround the media. Speech was not cheap in the twentieth century. News organizations had to buy newsprint, paper, distribution networks, transmitters, spectrum licenses – all kinds of things that cost much more than a Facebook page – if they wished to reach an audience. But the few news organizations that could cover these costs held a safe market position, and from this perch, they wielded a great deal of epistemic and moral authority in their communities. They became “gatekeepers” with the power and the responsibility to decide what information, and what claims, were fit to print. Much of media law, and particularly First Amendment law, seems to have developed around the assumption that news organizations could and would play this gatekeeping role, and that the government should therefore rarely need to.

South America was cut off from Eurasia for some 15,000 years and is generally ignored by North Americans and Europeans in any manner but superficial tourism. Yet the separate development of such features of civilization as agriculture, monumental architecture, conquest states and elite art allow us to test our own, Eurasian centric views, of what is a civilization and how do they arise.

Metal working in South America has at least two independent foci: the Altiplano of Peru/Bolivia and the closely related coastal technologies, with an emphasis upon hammered and joined sheet metal ornaments and the very different, casting oriented, traditions of the northern Andes. These latter features gold and gold alloys whereas the Peruvian traditions also used different kinds of bronze.

Presidential debates are now a fixture in the landscape of fall campaigns for the presidency. They attract worldwide media attention, as well as the interest of tens of millions of potential voters, and are held in close proximity to Election Day. In 2020, the first general election debate was a donnybrook. In this chapter, we show that citizens develop clear opinions about who won the debate and who performed well; more people viewed Biden as the winner of the first debate and his performance ratings were significantly higher than Trump’s ratings, except among Republicans. We also demonstrate that people who have low tolerance for conflict develop significantly more negative views of Trump’s performance and are significantly more likely to consider Biden the winner of the debate. Furthermore, people’s level of racism and conspiratorial thinking shape views of Trump’s and Biden’s performances during the first presidential debate. Finally, evaluations of the candidates’ performance in the debate as well as people’s views of who won the debate influence overall evaluations of Trump and Biden and produce significant changes in the ratings of Trump and Biden from September to October.

Intercontinental contact in Pre-Columbian times consisted of movement up and down the Central America corridor—to some extent. In later prehistory canoe travel along the eastern coast of Central America was extremely important, whereas the hypothesis of Mexico-South American contact via rafts on the west is a sentimental fallacy.

Because no ancient South American society had writing, all histories must be dated by archaeological mean, including radiocarbon dating. Before this was available various schemes of relative dating were proposed, most concocted on a lack of data and ethnocentric principles.

The geography of South America is extremely varied with a long range of high mountains, the Andes, along the west coast and the eastern and northern parts of the continent in various tropical forests with enormous river systems, semi-arid deserts, and the cold plains of the Pampas and Patagonia. These fostered the development of a series of extremely distinctive societies, from giant multiethnic conquest states to simple hunters and gatherers.

The northern and eastern lowlands of the South America continent are marked by extreme regional diversity of landforms coupled with the ease of communication (by canoe) over immense distances. In the Amazon proper numbers of autochthonous kingdoms have been delineated where as in the Orinoco plains and those of the Llanos de Mojos in Bolivia cultures features built up residential (islands) connected by long causeways and drain field systems prevailed.

Ceramics manufacture and use followed a very different trajectory in South American than in the rest of the world. The first ceramics in Peru were late and the earliest complex societies were completely aceramic while in the northern Andes extremely early ceramic traditions flourished and multiplied.

The incumbent president consistently and systematically sowed doubts about the integrity of the American electoral process throughout the 2020 presidential campaign. Trump’s campaign tactic had effects on voters. In this chapter, we show that public confidence in the integrity of the election is much lower for Republicans and for people paying attention to conservative news compared to Democrats and consumers of left-leaning news. Further, a propensity to believe in conspiracy theories fuels doubts about the security of the election. In addition, we show that a number of psychological predispositions consistently influence people’s assessments of Biden’s and Trump’s ability to safeguard the election, including people’s level of racial resentment and level of hostile sexism. Finally, people’s confidence in the security of the election is associated with positive changes in overall evaluations of Biden and negative changes in overall evaluations of Trump from September to October.