Philadelphia's annual Columbus Day parade has been canceled. Brown University this year renamed the holiday "Fall Weekend" following a campaign by a Native American student group opposed to celebrating an explorer who helped enslave some of the people he "discovered."
And while the Italian adventurer is generally thought to have arrived in the New World on Oct. 12, 517 years ago on Monday, his holiday is getting bounced all over the calendar. Tennessee routinely celebrates it the Friday after Thanksgiving to give people an extra-long weekend.
Read the rest of The Wall Street Journal article here.
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Unlike my other tongue-in-cheek post this one is serious. Every year I come across an increasing number of revisionist history takes on the Christopher Columbus Myth cloud. You Tube videos and a swelling number of other outlets are peeling back years of denial about New World slavery as a business. Separating hype from fact is not easy after four or five centuries but this video covers a lot of territory.
One of the first posts I came across this morning was The Myth of "America" at Truthout Blog which includes this:
"This is not your grandfather's Columbus.... While giving the brilliant mariner his due, the collection portrays Columbus as an unrelenting social climber and self-promoter who stopped at nothing - not even exploitation, slavery, or twisting biblical scripture - to advance his ambitions.... Many of the unflattering documents have been known for the last century or more, but nobody paid much attention to them until recently. The fact that Columbus brought slavery, enormous exploitation or devastating diseases to the Americas used to be seen as a minor detail - if it was recognized at all - in light of his role as the great bringer of white man's civilization to the benighted idolatrous American continent. But to historians today this information is very important. It changes our whole view of the enterprise."
A lengthy column follows including this:
In "A People's History of the United States," celebrated historian Howard Zinn describes how Arawak men and women emerged from their villages to greet their guests with food, water and gifts when Columbus landed at the Bahamas. But Columbus wanted something else. "Gold is most excellent; gold constitutes treasure; and he who has it does all he wants in the world, and can even lift souls up to Paradise," he wrote to the king and queen of Spain in 1503.
Rather than gold, however, Columbus only found slaves when he arrived on his second visit with seventeen ships and over 1,200 men. Ravaging various Caribbean islands, Columbus took natives as captives as he sailed. Of these he picked 500 of the best specimens and shipped them back to Spain. Two hundred of these died en route, while the survivors were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town where they landed.
Pretty tawdry stuff.
Hi Michael,
Simple: Google.
One has to ask, "If Google doesn't change their logo that day, is it really a holiday?"
Cheers,
Joe
Dr Boli might have the idea here
"Columbus was Right"
http://drboli.wordpress.com/2009/10/11/advertisement-409/
He has great humorous advertisements in the Victorian Style.
Just a moment before going to this article. Have you ever do any activities on columbus day? If no please try to do any Columbus day 2014 activities. Just columbus day activities.
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