"Christopher Columbus in United States Historiography: Biography as Projection" (original) (raw)
Related papers
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS: THE JUDGMENT OF HISTORY
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS: THE JUDGMENT OF HISTORY, 2023
Christopher Columbus, the discoverer of America; he was a daring navigator, brave and intrepid, ambitious and cruel with the Indians, admired and blessed in some countries and hated in others. Was Columbus a great man? The history of the discovery of America and the voyages of Christopher Columbus are reviewed. Comments are provided on the judgment of history regarding Columbus from Europe, Spain, the USA, and Latin America.
Confronting Columbus: Revisionism Versus Reality
A paper that highlights the *real* Christopher Columbus, based on authentic dispatches and interactions reported by and from the man himself. This reality is juxtaposed to the whitewashed revisionism that has created the celebratory theme of Columbus Day in the United States.
Remembering Columbus: Blinded by Politics
Academic Questions, 2019
The dozens of American cities, counties, and institutions that are named after Christopher Columbus (or his literary equivalent Columbia) signify the privileged role that Columbus holds in American civic life. Early Americans depicted Columbus as America's first frontiersman, a hero who had left the comforts of Europe to search for a fresh start in a new world. They cheered him as an enlightened champion of science who upended obscurantist European ideas. Washington Irving popularized this interpretation of Columbus in his History of the Life and Voyages of Columbus, published in 1837. In Irving's hands, Columbus became a man of science who liberated himself from the shackles of medieval and Catholic Europe to shape a progressive and Protestant America. Much of Irving's biography of Columbus is pure fiction, but his book defined Columbus for nineteenth century Americans. The most enduring myth that Irving promoted was the false assertion that Ferdinand and Isabella believed that the earth was flat. The geographers and astronomers that the royal couple consulted knew the earth was spherical but correctly estimated that Japan was 12,000 miles from Spain, not 2,400 miles, as Columbus calculated. 1 In 1940, Samuel Eliot Morison called Irving's story "misleading and mischievous nonsense. The sphericity of the globe was not in question. The issue was the width of the ocean; and therein the opposition was right." 2 Fortunately for Columbus, the Bahamas lie where he thought he would find Japan.
2014
M any people helped me as I wrote this book. Michael Palencia-Roth has been an unfailing mentor and model of ethical, rigorous scholarship and human compassion. I am grateful for his generous help at many stages of writing this manuscript. I am also indebted to my friend Christopher Francese, of the Department of Classical Studies at Dickinson College, who has never hesitated to answer my queries about pretty much anything related to the classical world. His intellectual curiosity and commitment to academic inquiry is inspiring. I thank him for meticulously reviewing many of the translations from Latin in this book and for making helpful comments on the drafts of my essay regarding Peter Martyr. I wish to thank Eli Bortz at Vanderbilt University Press for his faith in this project. I also thank Sue Havlish, Joell Smith-Borne, and copyeditor extraordinaire Laura Fry at Vanderbilt. I am also grateful to Silvia Benvenuto for the index. A special thanks to the anonymous readers whose careful reading significantly improved this book. Thank you to Ken Ward, librarian at the John Carter Brown Library, for scrounging up all kinds of gems for the sake of intellectual inquiry and friendship. I am also grateful to Cristóbal Macías Villalobos at the Universidad de Málaga for helping me understand more about the Romans and their language. I wish to thank Dickinson College and the Dickinson College Research and Development Committee for its generous financial support of this project and to my colleagues at Dickinson who make this a vibrant intellectual community. Thank you to Kristin Beach and Ursala Neuwirth, my Dana Research Assistants funded by Dickinson. I am grateful to the library staff at Dickinson, especially Tina Maresco and everyone in the x The Legacy of Christopher Columbus in the Americas interlibrary loan office. Thank you also to the cheerful and efficient Jennifer Kniesch, Visual Resources Librarian at the Art and Art History Department, for helping me locate images and secure permission to use them. I have benefited much from the generosity and insight of many fellow colleagues who have willingly shared material and/ or their work over the years, including Scott Breuninger, Lina del Castillo, Karen Racine, and fellow Columbus scholars Jenny Heil and Carol Delaney. I thank many friends and colleagues who have shared their expertise with me at various points in the development of this book, as well as those who have commented on various bits (long or short) of the manuscript.
1989
nesigned to complement the traditional textbook treatment of Columbus, the lessons in this packet utilize recent research, primary sources, and active student involvement. The first two lessons, "Columbus: The Man and the Myth" and "Columbus and the Known World: How Much Did He Really Know?," (D. Beal) provide students with opportunities to learn about Columbus as , person and dispel the commonlyheld view that everyone in 1492 believed the world was flat. "Who Discovered America" (C. Risinger) uses cooperative learning techniques to teach abLut other explorers who preceded Columbus and why his voyage receives the most attention. "A Mystery in History" (E. Holt) examines the current debate about the actual site where Columbus landed on October 12, 1492. The second
Columbus's name in the space of American collective memory: from consecration to desecration (2017)
Christopher Columbus used to be represented as an intrepid explorer who, by discovering America, marked the beginning of the modern age. Recently, the sacrality associated with his name has been challenged as a result of the increasing emphasis laid on the Native Americans' perspective, whereby Columbus, once deified, has recently often been vilified. This paper focuses on the role Columbus's name has played in the space of American collective memory with an interest in Columbus Day, a national holiday since 1937, which in the last twenty-five years has been renamed as Indigenous People's Day in many cities across the United States, drawing a scenario where the holiday name is shaping different versions of the past.
The Columbus Myth: Power and Ideology in Picturebooks About Christopher Columbus
Childrens Literature in Education, 2014
In 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus's landing in the Bahamas was simultaneously celebrated and denounced in the US. Damaging facts about Columbus and the impact of his voyages were aired along with demands for truth and change. This study analyzes the power relationships and political ideology of picturebooks about Columbus published in the US in the 20 years since that anniversary to determine what messages and attitudes young readers are likely to absorb from them and whether the picturebook image of Columbus has evolved. It draws on the ideas of progressive educator Herbert Kohl, who demonstrates how the analysis of power relationships in stories reveals their political stance (Should We Burn Babar?, 1995), and on the tradition of progressive librarianship, which seeks to promote intellectual freedom and positive images in children's literature of all peoples. The study finds extensive use of certain narrative techniques, including patterns of assumptions, avoidance, event selection, and omission. Patterns in illustration and sentence structure (use of passive voice, etc.) as well as stereotyping and Eurocentrism also abound. Finally, mild historical revisionism is introduced in more ''balanced'' titles, though the definition of balance is problematic. This article finds that the Columbus myth persists with little change, and that few titles present child readers with alternative perspectives.
Athenaeum Polskie Studia Politologiczne
Actually, Christopher Columbus, the discoverer of the New World and the godfather of American Indians (Native Americans), never set foot on the territory of the contemporary United States. However, since 1937, Americans have been celebrating the federal holiday named Columbus Day. From the 1960s, commemoration of October 12 has been subject to gradually increasing criticism by ancestors of Native Americans. On the 500th anniversary of the discovery of the New World the counterproposal was presented to commemorate this day as the Indigenous Peoples’ Day. In the 21st century, Columbus has become for many the symbol of extermination performed by white colonizers in the New World during the Age of Discovery. His monuments were stained with red paint as a symbol of blood shed by colonizers. According to some opinion poll from 2017, the US society is divided almost in half on which of these two holidays should be commemorated. The purpose of this paper is to present the changes regarding ...