Columbus Day!

[intheknow]

I played the part of Columbus in a play when I was 12 and I still cherish the memory. I had one line:

I claim this land for the King of Spain!

Of course, I don't know if Columbus actually said those words, but I did have a great costume complete with a page-boy wig and some flouncing silky shorts. I didn't feel like a courageous advernturer, being dressed in tights.

Here are some other thoughts about Columbus Day:
Let’s take back Columbus Day — VOICES for REASON

Let’s take back Columbus Day
October 12, 2009 by Tom Bowden

At Brown University, the faculty voted earlier this year to ditch Columbus Day in favor of “Fall Weekend.” In years past, Berkeley, California made a similar move to “Indigenous Peoples Day,” and South Dakota now marks “Native American Day.” Even where the Columbus name has been kept, virtually all enthusiasm for celebrating the holiday has disappeared.

Why does an embarrassed, guilty silence descend on the nation each Columbus Day? Because people don’t know how to celebrate the blossoming of Western civilization over the past five centuries without seeming to rejoice in the misery of American Indians. Modern historians have distorted the facts, finding fault with Columbus, America, and Western civilization for evils and tragedies that they did not create—while extolling mysticism and tribalism, which actually are the causes of history’s darkest chapters.

It was Western philosophers, scientists, statesmen and businessmen who gave mankind the first moral and practical alternatives to such age-old scourges as slavery, racism, warfare, and disease. I’m talking about men like Aristotle, Newton, Locke, Pasteur, and Rockefeller. I’m talking about the scientific method (including medical research), individualism (including the concept of individual rights), and capitalism—all of which combined to liberate humanity from the miserable, stagnant poverty suffered by Indians in the Stone Age, and Europe in the Dark Ages.

By effectively abandoning Columbus Day, we’ve cheated ourselves out of an opportunity to celebrate the core values of Western civilization: reason and individualism. No nation on earth is more entitled to celebrate those values than the United States of America, which is history’s shining example of their life-serving power. It’s time to take back Columbus Day, to reclaim it as a patriotic holiday, an occasion for Americans to honor the great explorer who wrote the first chapter in our nation’s illustrious history.

I’ll be speaking on this topic next week (October 12, 13, and 15) at the Universities of Virginia, Maryland, and Texas; see this link for details. Those interested in even more details may want to consult my book, The Enemies of Christopher Columbus.

[LandJ]

Originally Posted by intheknow

I played the part of Columbus in a play when I was 12 and I still cherish the memory. I had one line:

I claim this land for the King of Spain!

Of course, I don't know if Columbus actually said those words, but I did have a great costume complete with a page-boy wig and some flouncing silky shorts. I didn't feel like a courageous advernturer, being dressed in tights.

Do we get to see a picture

[LandJ]

We're Miami Dolphin fans in this house so we obviously watched MNF last night. Apparantly it's Hispanic Month or something and they choose last night to honor that. At first I thought it was b/c it was Columbus Day and since Columbus was claiming our country in the name of Spain that was why. But then I realized 99.9% of the hispanics/latinos/however we refer to them down there are NOT from Spain. In fact, the few true Spainiards I know do NOT like to be lumped into the same category as those from other Spanish speaking countries.

I started to realize we, as a nation, would just rather celebrate everyone and everything except our own true heritage. Don't get me wrong.....I'm the first one standing in line every February when we have the Scottish Festival since that's my own ancestry (I'm first generation American on my Dad's side). But really....I don't expect the federal gov't to have a day for me or to have MNF make a special deal over my heritage. And actually, I think it's fine that they did that. But they did pick an odd day to do it.

[robine]

I bet you were a cute little thing


Anyway...

some people feel good about themselves and their oh so evident open mindedness when dissing Columbus.

[BC-Maura]

Another perspective:

"JAMES CARROLL
Columbus and the American problem
By James Carroll | October 12, 2009
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS occupies a place of primacy in the American pantheon, yet little is known about his driving motivation - and its significance for the challenge that America faces today. Columbus, as every American schoolchild knows, was on the make for gold, spices, commercial routes to “India,’’ whatever that was. All true. But none of that touches what mattered most to the man himself (as I learned from the historian Carol Delaney) - which was a spiritual purpose.

Chief sponsor of a narrowly “secular’’ assessment of Columbus was his most important 20th-century biographer, Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison. “My main concern is with the Columbus of action, the Discoverer,’’ Morison openly declared. “I am content to leave his ‘psychology,’ his ‘motivation’ and all that to others.’’ Yet even Morison, aware as he was of what Columbus wrote in his voluminous “Journals,’’ had no choice but to acknowledge “all that.’’

Morison wrote, “Christopher Columbus belonged to an age that was past, yet he became the sign and symbol of this new age of hope, glory, and accomplishment. His medieval faith impelled him to a modern solution: expansion.’’ Morison was put off by Columbus’s own self-proclaimed ambition, which was the old Crusader ambition of recapturing for Christianity the place where Jesus had walked, especially Jerusalem. “If the Turk could not be pried loose from the Holy Sepulcher by ordinary means,’’ Morison summarized, “let Europe seek new means overseas; and he, Christopher the Christ-bearer, would be the humble yet proud instrument of Europe’s regeneration.’’

Regeneration presumed the banishment of both Jews and Muslims - the 1492 purification of the Christian realms. That his departure was simultaneous to the expulsion of the unbelievers had significance for Columbus, who later wrote, in his report to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, “And thus, having expelled all the Jews from all your kingdoms and dominions . . . Your Highnesses commanded me that I should go to the said parts of India.’’

The word “India’’ had an imprecise meaning in Europe, with its main connotation being the realms that lie to the east beyond those controlled by Muslims. Achieving those realms by going west defined Columbus’s purpose - and the freedom from Islamic control was the point.

Yes, Columbus wanted to circumvent the Muslim chokehold on European trade with the East, the glories of which had been sung by Marco Polo. And he wanted to enrich his sponsors with gold and spices. But picking up the thread of Crusader attempts to retake Jerusalem was even more to the point.

In his “Journals,’’ Columbus’s report to his royal sponsors, he declares; “Your Highnesses, as Catholic Christians and Princes devoted to the Holy Christian Faith and the propagation thereof, and enemies of the sect of Mahomet and of all idolatries and heresies, resolved to send me, Christopher Columbus, to the said regions of India, to see the said princes and peoples and lands and the disposition of them and of all, and the manner in which may be undertaken their conversion to our Holy Faith, and ordained that I should not go by land (the usual way) to the Orient, but by the route of the Occident, by which no one to this day knows for sure that anyone has gone.’’

As for the gold that Columbus hoped to find for his sponsors, he knew that it was not merely for their enrichment. He wrote, “I declared to Your Highnesses that all the gain of this my Enterprise should be spent in the conquest of Jerusalem; and Your Highnesses smiled and said that it pleased you.’’

For Columbus, achieving Jerusalem was not merely a matter of releasing the Holy Sepulcher from the age-old Muslim bondage. Like millennialists before and after him, he seems to have believed that the final restoration of the Holy Land to Christian dominion would usher in the Messianic Age. “God made me the messenger of the New Heaven and the New Earth,’’ he wrote in about 1500, “of which he spoke in the Apocalypse of St. John . . . and he showed me the spot where to find it.’’ An apocalyptic impulse informed the New World project at its birth; the project assumed hostility to Islam; and its ultimate purpose involved Jerusalem. Those three facts remain pillars of the American problem today.

James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe."

Columbus and the American problem - The Boston Globe

++++++++++++++
Maura

[BC-Maura]

And another:

"Darker side of Columbus taught in US classrooms

Many will not observe holiday
By Christine Armario, Associated Press | October 12, 2009
TAMPA, Fla. - Jeffrey Kolowith’s kindergarten students read a poem about Christopher Columbus, take a journey to the New World on three paper ships, and place the explorer’s picture on a timeline through history.

Kolowith’s students learn about the explorer’s significance, but they also come away with a more nuanced picture of Columbus than the noble discoverer often portrayed in pop culture and legend.

“I talk about the situation where he didn’t even realize where he was,’’ Kolowith said. “And we talked about how he was very, very mean, very bossy.’’

Columbus’s stature in US classrooms has declined somewhat through the years, and many districts will not observe his namesake holiday today. Although lessons vary, many teachers are trying to present a more balanced perspective of what happened after Columbus reached the Caribbean and the suffering of indigenous populations.

“The whole terminology has changed,’’ said James Kracht, executive associate dean for academic affairs in the Texas A&M College of Education and Human Development. “You don’t hear people using the world ‘discovery’ anymore like they used to. ‘Columbus discovers America.’ Because how could he discover America if there were already people living here?’’

In Texas, students start learning in the fifth grade about the “Columbian Exchange,’’ which consisted not only of gold, crops, and goods shipped back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean, but also of diseases carried by settlers that decimated native populations.

In McDonald, Pa., 30 miles southwest of Pittsburgh, fourth-grade students at Fort Cherry Elementary put Columbus on trial this year, charging him with misrepresenting the Spanish crown and thievery. They found him guilty and sentenced him to life in prison.

Of course, the perspective given varies across classrooms and grades. Donna Sabis-Burns, a team leader with the US Department of Education’s School Support and Technology Program, surveyed teachers nationwide about the Columbus reading materials they used in class for her University of Florida dissertation.

She examined 62 picture books and found the majority were outdated, containing inaccurate - and sometimes outright demeaning - depictions of the native Taino population.

The federal holiday also is not universally recognized. Schools in Miami, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Seattle will be open, while those in New York City, Washington, and Chicago will be closed.

The day is an especially sensitive issue in places with larger Native American populations.

“We have a very large Alaska native population, so just the whole Columbus being the founder of the United States doesn’t sit well with a lot of people, myself included,’’ said Paul Prussing, deputy director of Alaska’s Division of Teaching and Learning Support.

Many recall decades ago when there was scant mention of indigenous groups in discussions about Columbus. Kracht remembers a picture in one of his fifth-grade textbooks that showed Columbus wading to shore with a huge flag and cross.

“The indigenous population was kind of waiting expectantly, almost with smiles on their faces,’’ Kracht said. “ ‘I wonder what this guy is bringing us?’ Well, he’s bringing us smallpox, for one thing, and none of us are going to live very long.’’

There are people who believe the discussion has shifted too far. Patrick Korten, vice president of communications for the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic fraternal service organization, recalled a note from a member who saw a lesson at a New Jersey school.

The students were forced to stand in a cafeteria and not allowed to eat while other students teased and intimidated them - apparently so they could better understand the suffering that the indigenous populations endured because of Columbus, Korten said.

“My impression is that in some classrooms, it’s anything but a balanced presentation,’’ Korten said. “That it’s deliberately very negative, which is a matter of great concern because that is not accurate.’’


Darker side of Columbus taught in US classrooms - The Boston Globe

+++++++++++++
Maura

[Desca]

Hey, do you still have the costume? My ds has to be Napoleon for a school project - I know it's a few hundred years later but they still seemed to like the tights and wigs.

[NJ-DawnCuba]

I am Cuban and live in NY-NJ metro area around here they do 2 parades, Columbus day parade in Manhattan it celebrates Italian Heritage ( we have a very big Italian community in this area) Also a Hispic Heritage Parade, I think the idea is for all Hispanic Countries to celebrate the discovery of America by Columbus. Different ideas but sort of related I guess.
From I know Columbus came from Spain with the 3 ships and the Queen of Spain Isabella was the one to finance the whole trip but Spain is not really mentioned much when it comes to this day. The Spaniards don't have a big community here, that may be the reason.

[Julester]

flouncing silky shorts???