Posted on 10/12/2009 6:48:09 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Christopher Columbus' stature in U.S. classrooms has declined somewhat through the years, and many districts will not observe the explorer's namesake holiday on Monday.
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 diseases carried by settlers that decimated native populations.
In McDonald, Pennsylvania, 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.
"In their own verbiage, he was a bad guy," teacher Laurie Crawford said.
Of course, the perspective given varies across classrooms and grades. Donna Sabis-Burns, a team leader with the U.S. 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 She examined 62 picture books, and found the majority were outdated and contained inaccurate - and sometimes outright demeaning - depictions of the native Taino population.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
I read this interesting post :
If you ever want to read any eye opening book “An UNDERGROUND EDUCATION” by Richard Zacks is it. Page 347 states “Columbus rightly deserves credit for many firsts, but one of his first has been routinely overlooked in Americn textbooks. Christopher Columbus was the “first slave trader” in the New World.
He returned from his first voyage with ten live Indians he had kidnapped, and these were paraded along with parrots through the streets and road of Spain.
Because it was discovered by an advanced culture that was able to actually DO something with the land. After thousands of years of habitation by people who were still living in the stone age in the age of the Enlightenment has earned Columbus the honor of having discovered the new world.
If you like the idea of people in the Americas living above a stone age level, due to the transplant of European culture and ideas, then he’s a hero. He’s a villain if you just hate Whitey but don’t have the balls to say it.
These Indians were scalping their enemies and enslaving each other’s tribes routinely during the time Columbus discovered America.
Ole Chris eventually got in dutch with the Spanish for his exploits (IIRC he came back in chains the second time).
And so what. Any good or damage he did was miniscule compared with what followed when regular voyages to the New World began. Some were hostile to the natives, some friendly. National wars spread to the New World. People behaved like... people. These liberals might want to think twice whether they really would have been so angelic themselves under the circumstances.
He was a devout man of prayer. The garbage that continues to impugn this man seeks to destroy all the remarkable feats he was able to accomplish.
I am teaching my kids about his strong Catholic faith and that times were certainly different then. More than that but I don’t want to go over our entire curriculum! :0)
Ask the kiddies this. The Aztecs murdered 20,000 people a year, so was it good or bad that they were defeated?
Oh, what would it have been like to have been a fly on the bulkhead in Columbus’ ships.
Some content has been unfortunately lost to mankind. A monk wrote a second hand rendition of Columbus’ personal diaries and we do have that. There might have been some motivation to minimize the ugly and maximize the beautiful, as might happen when talking about any religious man’s checkered mortal life from which lessons might be taught. It would certainly have needed a man of faith to carry out a mission of such risk and uncertainty.
Were they offered this as a bargain to keep their lives rather than be killed for their own acts? This is not clear to me.
In 1492 Columbus rediscovered a land populated by savage stone age natives continually engaged in genocidal warfare against their neighbors. Four hundred years later as the American frontier closed, the savagery and genocidal aspects of the natives was no more but they were still stone age having never in four centuries figured out how to copy and make anything of the Europeans.
**Yes, but does it justify kidnapping 10 of them and then bringing them back to Europe against their will ? ***
And yet, whe Verizano went ahead of his men to contact Indians they promptly killed him, cooked him, and ate him.
The native Taino people of the island were systematically enslaved and murdered. Hundreds were rounded up and shipped to Europe to be sold; many died en route. For the rest of the population, Columbus demanded that all Taino under his control should bring the Spaniards gold.
Those who didn’t were to have their hands cut off. Since there was, in fact, little gold to be had, the Taino fled, and the Spaniards hunted them down and killed them. The Taino tried to mount a resistance, but the Spanish weaponry was superior, and European diseases ravaged their population. In despair, the Taino engaged in mass suicide, even killing their own children to save them from the Spaniards. Within two years, half of what may have been 250,000 Taino were dead.
The remainder were taken as slaves and set to work on plantations, where the mortality rate was very high. By 1550, 60 years after Columbus landed, only a few hundred Taino were left on their island. In another hundred years, perhaps only a handful remained.
***Ask the kiddies this. The Aztecs murdered 20,000 people a year, so was it good or bad that they were defeated?***
Ask the kiddies this. The Aztecs murdered (AND ATE) 20,000 people a year, so was it good or bad that they were defeated?
There. Fixed it for you..
Montezuma was fond of cooked young boys.
***These Indians were scalping their enemies and enslaving each other’s tribes routinely during the time Columbus discovered America****
Proof..
http://www.dickshovel.com/scalp.html
If this story you tell me about the Taino people is true, then we should re-assess the character of Columbus himself. He might be a great explorer, but let’s not go overboard praising him as a man to emulate in term of the goodness of his heart.
Roman Catholic or not, what he did was clearly UNCHRISTIAN.
He should be celebrated. If not for CC, the Mexicans would still be cutting out hearts and playing hockey with heads, and WE would be besieged with even worse neighbors.
The Aztecs were enslaving and eating the hearts of their captives. Virtually every indian nation kept war captives as slaves or took them as wives. The idea that whites began the institution of a universal institution is preposterous.
We could probably find some authentic villains in the education departments of our universities.
In truth, leftist educators in the universities hope to change society by changing the way teachers teach kids.
Can’t blame Columbus for all this. Yes, the Spaniards treated the Indians badly, but the Spanish crown—spurred by friars such as De Las Casas —enacted a legal code that gave the indians far more protection than other Europeans did, or the indians themselves did to tributary tribes. And this bit about disease. One can hardly blame the Spaniards if the indians immune systems gave them almost no protection to the aborgines. Do you think that the Spaniards rejoined to see their work force decimated?
When our high school son asked us the other day why we celebrate Columbus day when “it’s about how the Native Americans were killed and had their land taken away”, we had quite a discussion but the gist of it was that there are some things about history that we know to be true. 1) Before America, countries were conquering other countries and civilizations were killing each other over land and resources. 2) Every civilization that we conquered ended up being better off than they were.
While they probably lamented the loss of slaves, I doubt they were very broken up about the uncontested land and resources that became easily available.
Absolutely not true. The “Civilized” nation of the Southeast began chaging their way of life almost as soon as they made contact with the the whiles. White traders from Charleston exchanged goods with the indians all the way into what is now Oklahoma, and intermarried with them. The Chickasaw indians were allies with the England against the French and then with the Americans. a company of Chickasaw fought along with the whites at Fallen Timbers. The lifestyle of all these indians was deeply affected by all these contacts, pretty much as the Scottish highlanders were by the lowlanders. The Cherokee were driven out of Georgia because they were competitors for lands they exploited pretty much the same was as the whites. Now the Comanche were indeed fierce,really “wild” indians but hey were certainly not much like their ancestors, they came down from the mountains onto the plains and became the horse indians nonpariell. In many respects they resembled the Mongol warriors of the Eurasian steppes.
They aim to discredit western civilization in general and Christianity in particular. So they tell all the bad things and ignore the good things.
Hell yes! I like it! VOIPD. Should be a three day weekend for sure!
Yes and I should have been more careful. What I meant was that along the frontier interface, the natives were stone age and either fought and died as stone age people or, they more or less integrated with Europeans.
Let me guess. You're not a history buff.
Not only did he NOT "discover" the 'new world' - he already knew that North and South America was here. He knew the history and had the maps.
The Vikings had a community of 30,000 in Greenland 1,500 years before Columbus. Leif, son on Eric the Red, sailed up and down the north American coast - they had winter camps in the south of of Cape Cod and explored up the Hudson, sailed the length of the continant - had a loosing battle with the natives on the shores of Mt.Desert Island in Maine.
The Vikings used maps by Zeno, of a family of cartographers.
A hundred years before Columbus "sailed the Ocean Blue", Sir Henry Sinclair, 1st Earl of Orkney (Scotland) sailed with a large fleet of ships to land he ALREADY owned in Nova Scotia, to establish a place to live out of the encroaching reach of the English King.
Columbus married into the family of descendants of Zeno - remember him - and knowledge of prior voyages and the continents, and, it is postured, maps.
He set out to sail BETWEEN the continents and thus to the back end of the spice rich Indies...not knowing that Central America was in the way. Indeed, he first encountered the islands and thought he had made it to the Indies - and thus, even now, we refer to the Native Americans as "Indians".
All that was before he launched a genocide, wiping out countless thousands of "Indians" = slaughtering them any way that came handy - being torn apart by his mastiffs or burned on stakes.
His third voyage ended in his being taken back to Spain in chains, on the order of the Queen.
Those are just some highlights.
So just why do we teach kids that he discovered America? And why do we so honor him?
It's akin to all the decades the schools taught, come Thanksgiving, and some still do, with school kids dressed in black and white - that the Pilgrims wore black and white clothing, erroneously mixing them up with the Boston Puritans...
The real histories are available. I'm not amused that even teachers don't get curious enough to do a bit of research on what they teach.
The old cliche is “Those who can, Do! Those who can’t, teach!
Now it is worse than that. Those who can (like the great Admiral of the Ocean Sea, Columbus) Do! Those who can’t teach that Columbus did not know what he was doing.
The current trend is absurd for those who have an understanding of sailing, history, culture, and exploration.
They really didn’t have much interface time. Unlike the Spaniards, the English brought their women with them, and the insatiable demand for land meant that the indians were pushed out of the way. The Iroquois had the best chance of all , since they were highly organized, but then they made the mistake of siding with the British against the Continentals. My guess is that if they had not, then upstate New York would be more like Oklahoma.
As for fighting a dying like “stone age people,” the Sioux for instance, adapted rather quickly. They took up the horse and the rifle quite quickly as they moved out onto the plains to living by harvesting the great herds. As they have investigated the Little Big Horn battle field, researchers have discovered why Custer got mowed down: the 2000 indian warriors they faced had a lot of guns, a LOT of guns. Years later Sitting Bull lead a hunting expedition and killed thousands of buffalo. Don;t do that with lances. Those guys could shoot.
There were Vikings in North America at the time of Julius Caesar? Really?
As a retired teacher I can tell you that teachers, as group, don’t read much. One survey affirmed what I saw. The average teacher reads about one/two books a year that have nothing to do with classwork, and of what they do read in connection with this is pretty thin gruel.
Was it good or bad that they died by the tens of thousands at the hands of the Spanish?
GOOGLE is at your fingertips.
ooops= meant 500 years
True but what they had they obtained from Europeans. They could make little aside from metal projectile tips and edged weapons, the metal itself obtained from Europeans. I think the Iroquois figured out how to make blackpowder but that was about the extent of it. To my knowledge none ever figured out that with wagons, they could load them with provisions and strike deep into the white mans territory just like the white men struck deep into their territory.
Years later Sitting Bull lead a hunting expedition and killed thousands of buffalo.
So much for living in harmony with the land, taking only what they needed and wasting nothing.
Let’s say Columbus found a young Mayan virgin girl; would he drag her up the steps and CUT HER HEART OUT for no reason..? For ANY reason..?
NOPE...!
Well, I doubt that Buffalo Bill made he gun he used. I didn’t say the Sioux started manufacturing plants. I am saying they radically changed their life style, as many peoples do when they encounter superior technology. In any case, stone age technology was not necessarily primitive. An indian living in South Carolina, a west African, and a French peasant who were contemporaries in the 16th Century lived on pretty much the same comfort level, even with the superior technology available to the last. Which is why, by the way, that a French peasant could immigrate to Canada and endure the hardships of a savage New Land, whereas you or I probably would not survive for more than a few months under those conditions.
That's the benefit of a division of labor.
I didn’t say the Sioux started manufacturing plants. I am saying they radically changed their life style, as many peoples do when they encounter superior technology.
Yes and after obtaining horses, the Sioux first waged holy jihad against tribes of the Plain well before coming in direct contact with Europeans. In other locations such as Florida, the same Indian tribes were in contact with Spaniards for centuries yet never managed to upgrade in any meaningful way.
In any case, stone age technology was not necessarily primitive. An indian living in South Carolina, a west African, and a French peasant who were contemporaries in the 16th Century lived on pretty much the same comfort level, even with the superior technology available to the last. Which is why, by the way, that a French peasant could immigrate to Canada and endure the hardships of a savage New Land, whereas you or I probably would not survive for more than a few months under those conditions
Darwin was definitely ever present. I'd be interesting in knowing just how many European newcomers didn't make it.
As for the life span of an immigrant, that depended. It took the Europeans about three generations to acclimate. Very often an indentured servant did not live out his seven year term. Bad water, bad food, and hard living will do that. And that's only on the trip over. Plus many of them were not in great health when they started.
Which brings me to what we owe to modern medicine. As late as 50 years ago, we were ravaged by diseases such as Polio. Many a worker was carried off by the lack of a tetanus shot. Giving them the right shots enables us to send troops into pestholes and expect to come out alive.
Different times, different paradigm. You are talking about an era where slavery was normal all over the world and the human race was evolving out of the dark ages.
How horrible was kidnapping and bringing the natives “against their will”?????-—compared to what the Aztecs did to the Mayans or whoever????.....sheeeesh! Most tribes brutalized other tribes and this kumbaya world of the “Noble Indian” is myth. The history of ALL MAN has been one of one group conquering the weaker group.
That you respect the rights of a minority is all because of the “evil white men” who fortunately arrived in a land where they could create their “ideal” government. They are the ones who wrote into the government protection for the minority—that did NOT allow for the tyranny of the majority. What other country or peoples have any respect for minorities??????? (or women for that matter not founded in Judeo-Christian paradigm).
Perfection is not achievable, but Christopher Columbus and the Christians that followed did an awesome job when you compare the US and the Founding Fathers’ genius to the rest of the world, especially at that point in history. That story is truly amazing and benefited far more people than it injured. People all over the earth today should drop to their knees and thank God for the courage and daring of Christopher Columbus!
The revisionists seem to work overtime to discredit anything good brought to this country by the Europeans.
You do know that Columbus went to jail for this in Spain, right? Ah, I thought not. Both the Pope and Isabel had forbidden the enslavement of the native peoples .
Using simple Trig, Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the Earth around 600BC. His number was amazingly close to reality: about 26,000 miles, + or-. Columbus somehow got the units wrong and claimed that the Earth was only 13,000 miles around the middle.
When he sought project funds from the Portuguese, they politely tried to straighten him out, before kicking him out of the country. The Spaniards also knew the ancient numbers, but they risked very little when they backed Columbus up and didn't even argue about Columbus' cut of the profits, figuring there would be none, They thought that if indeed they saw him again, he might add to their knowledge of the Western Seas.
Ferdinand and Isabella were super busy. They had just kicked the Moors out of Spain in that very year, and Columbus was just another back burner project; their medieval version of a very low budget space program.
If we had more people that were independently curious enough to study history - we wouldn't be in the mess we are now...
Parents need to do what Lt. Col. Allen West's parents did with him when he was growing up: assign history lessons at home for discussion and testing his comprehension. As a result, we have a 22 year war vet - and HERO - who understands the Constitution backward and forward - golly, he even understands that we are NOT a democracy but a REPUBLIC.
We need this man in the pipeline...He ran for Congress in ‘08 - with no real support from the GOP = (a new comer - like Palin - so the establishment is threatened, it's not “his turn”)
He's running again for 2010 - Another big plus, like Palin, he's NOT a lawyer - so tells it straight up, no twisting/parsing.
But I digress ;o)
Dion introduces Allen West
History is full of the end of previous peoples. It did not begin on America's shore. There were 40,000+ natives with Cortes when he destroyed the Aztecs. They hated their Aztec Overlords.
Disease was the principal killer of Native Americans. It was tremendous and rapid. There simply weren't enough Europeans to kill that many people that fast, do the math.
I would also caution you to beware of the "official history" as passed down from the British. It was greatly propagandized and often downright invented to paint the Spanish in a bad light. I can't imagine that it would be a good thing to have the Americas preserved as a giant zoo lightly populated by stone-age peoples.
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