Commentary: Why the Transatlantic?

Spanning forty-one million square miles of the earth's surface and connecting four continents, the Atlantic Ocean houses the origins of our current global culture. Within its depths lie legacies of nightmarish atrocities, traces of great human ambitions, and the echoes of enlightened ideas. Traverses back and forth across this giant pool, the epicenter of the so-called 'Age of Exploration,' resulted in unprecedented exchanges of humans, ideas and ideologies, goods and gods, technologies and diseases. The manifold consequences of these transatlantic interactions reverberate with us today.