For this response paper, using the class lecture material (powerpoint, viewing clips, and handouts) and class readings, I would like you to comment and analyze what you think are the important points/issues/themes/critiques of how “American history” has been written? What questions/comments did the readings raise for you regarding the writing of American history? What are your thoughts/analysis on Columbus as “hero” of history? Finally, what is the significance of the ban on Ethnic Studies (HB 2281) in Arizona and the Texas Textbooks controversy? And what does it reveal about multiculturalism and the writing of U.S. history and who has the “power” to frame the classroom learning?
Directions: Your paper is to be at least 400 to 450 words and should be organized into specific paragraphs (a paragraph is at least six to eight sentences). Be sure to reference specific authors or class material as supporting evidence in your post and even use short quotes as supporting evidence.
You should use at the very least 3 to 4 direct quotes as supporting evidence. There is no penalty for going over 450 words if you so choose. Anything less than 400 words will receive 0 points. Your post should demonstrate critical thinking and analysis of the class material and should not be summary of the class material. You should also not copy other student’s work and ideas, this is considered plagiarism. A student will automatically fail the class with any incident of cheating and/or plagiarism. This paper should be in your own words and again demonstrate your analysis and original thinking regarding this week’s class material and fully answer all of the above questions posed.

Critical Thinking Questions (CTQs):: Who writes history? And what views are typically found in American History Textbooks? What is often excluded in the writing of history and Why? What is the significance of how history remembers Columbus? What are the flaws in these perspectives?

Weekly Reading:

Takaki (Introduction)

Howard Zinn (Columbus, Indians and Human Progress-Online—follow the links)

http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html

James Loewen (Introduction to Lies My Teacher Told Me-Online)

http://www.uvm.edu/~jloewen/content.php?file=liesmyteachertoldme-introduction.html

VIDEOS:

http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2015/06/25/controversial-textbooks-texas

PLEASE USE THE INFORMATION AND ADDITIONAL RESOURCES I WILL UPLOAD AND LEAVE LINKS FOR. THE DIRECT QUOTES MUST BE ACCURATE IN ORDER FOR ME TO RECEIVE POINTS.
Columbus, The Original American Hero By Wade Frazier
Excerpt
Full Article at: http://www.ahealedplanet.net/columbus.htm
Why Do We Celebrate Columbus Day?
Why does America celebrate Columbus Day? Modern scholarship does not take the heroic image of Columbus seriously, and yet the “revisionists” are taken to task for their critiques of Columbus’ image and other popular myths.
America’s capital is named after Columbus (he jointly holds that honor with another American hero, George Washington), and America was nearly named after him. Cities, streets, a river and other places are named for him. According to an official at the 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, Columbus’ likeness was second place to Jesus in how often it had been produced.[58]
Americans celebrate the “discovery” of the Western Hemisphere because our ancestors erected European-style civilizations on the bones and ashes of its dead inhabitants. The Columbus Day celebrations are the dysfunctional rituals of a conqueror society. It is true that there were dark sides to native cultures. They apparently practiced human sacrifice in some of the New World cultures, sometimes. Warfare was not unknown. The people of the New World were human, but in the areas of viciousness and avarice, on a scale of ten the Western Hemisphere’s natives probably ranked a two or three, and the Europeans a nine. America celebrates Columbus Day because Columbus was a “winner.”
During the past several centuries, the apologists for Europe’s conquest of the New World have gladly told graphic tales of human sacrifice, cannibalism, torture of captives and other native atrocities. The record is nearly devoid of a European witness to those acts.
Howard Zinn summed up the position America and its scholarship has taken towards Columbus. He wrote about the brainwashing American students receive, how they rarely learn differently, and how scholars have abetted the situation. Zinn wrote:

“Past the elementary and high schools, there are only occasional hints of something else. Samuel Elliott Morison, the Harvard historian, was the most distinguished writer on Columbus, the author of a multi-volume biography, and was himself a sailor who retraced Columbus’ route across the Atlantic. In his popular book Christopher Columbus, Mariner, written in 1954, he tells about the enslavement and the killing: ‘The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and his successors resulted in complete genocide.’
“That is on one page, buried halfway into the telling of a grand romance. In the book’s last paragraph, Morison sums up his view of Columbus: ‘He had his faults and his defects, but they were largely the defects of the qualities that made him great – his indomitable will, his superb faith in God and his own mission as the Christ-bearer to lands beyond the seas, his stubborn persistence despite neglect, poverty and discouragement. But there was no flaw, no dark side to the most outstanding and essential of all his qualities – his seamanship.’
“One can outright lie about the past. Or one can omit facts that might lead to unacceptable conclusions. Morison does neither. He refuses to lie about Columbus. He does not omit the story of mass murder; indeed he describes it with the harshest word one can use: genocide.
“But he does something else – he mentions the truth quickly and goes on to other things more important to him. Outright lying or quiet omission takes the risk of discovery which, when made, might arouse the reader to rebel against the writer. To state the facts, however, and then to bury them in a mass of other information is to say to the reader with a certain infectious calm: yes, mass murder took place, but it’s not important – it should weigh very little in our final judgments; it should affect very little what we do in the world.
“…To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators, and to de-emphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves – unwittingly – to justify what was done.
“My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all) – that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respected classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly.
“The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks) – the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress – is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they, – the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme Court – represent the nation as a whole.
“…’History is a memory of states,’ wrote Henry Kissinger in his first book, A World Restored, in which he proceeded to tell the history of nineteenth-century Europe from the viewpoint of the leaders of Austria and England, ignoring the millions who suffered from those statesmen’s policies. From his standpoint, the ‘peace’ that Europe had before the French Revolution was ‘restored’ by the diplomacy of a few national leaders. But for factory workers in England, farmers in France, colored people in Asia and Africa, women and children everywhere except the upper classes, it was a world of conquest, violence, hunger, exploitation – a world not restored but disintegrated.”[59].

Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States is filled with insightful nuggets. His book should be read in American classrooms instead of the paeans to Columbus.
What has happened during the past generation, with Columbus’ heroic image being tarnished, is not new facts arising, but looking at the facts objectively. The picture that then emerged can rightly be called horrifying. Indeed, what have our ancestors been cheering about? Yet, we still have a national holiday called Columbus Day.
We cannot all get on boats and sail back to Europe. The acts of our ancestors are not pretty, and if we had been born then, we might have done the same. The past is the past, and we can do nothing about it except learn from it, and perhaps try healing some of the damage that our ancestors inflicted, such as treating the remnants of the native tribes a lot better, even giving back some of the land that our ancestors murderously stole from theirs. Celebrating what our ancestors did and lying about the past seem the most inappropriate responses, and probably underlie a mass psychosis.
Along with Zinn, there have been other efforts to counter the Columbus Myth propaganda. Hans Koning’s Columbus, His Enterprise, was published in 1976, which was Zinn’s first inkling that the story that Zinn, a Ph.D. in history, had been taught about Columbus might be a little awry. My college history textbook also did nothing to try challenging the Columbus Myth. In the 1991 edition of Columbus, His Enterprise, the final chapter is titled “Columbus in the Classroom,” written by Bill Bigelow. Bigelow described that presentation he makes to his classes every year, and then led them down the inexorable path of understanding that the European “discovery” of the New World was really invasion, murder and theft from the people who had been living here for millennia.
Bigelow uses Columbus, His Enterprise as a textbook for his class, and the students then studied history textbooks and critiqued their highly slanted presentations of the New World’s “discovery.” The people being discovered may as well have not existed as far as the textbooks went. The focus was all on the Spaniards and their awe of the new land, taking possession of it in the name of the King and Queen, the glory, etc. Who likes to hear they have been lied to their entire lives? At least regarding the Columbus Myth, those students began getting their brains unwashed, which helped them cast a critical eye at other myths they had been told. If only every American history class did the same.
Zinn was a professionally trained historian, ironically earning his doctorate at Columbia, and he openly admits that he did not realize what a whitewash the Columbus story was until he began researching A People’s History of the United States. Professional American historians have gone their entire lives and never learned about the dark side of Columbus’ legacy. One student said:

“It seemed to me as if the publishers had just printed up some “glory story” that was supposed to make us feel more patriotic about our country. In our group, we talked about the possibility of the government trying to protect young students from such violence. We soon decided that was probably one of the farthest things from their minds. They want us to look at our country as great, and powerful, and forever right. They want us to believe Columbus was a real hero. We’re being fed lies. We don’t question the facts, we just absorb information that is handed to us because we trust the role models that are handing it out.”[60]

In 2006, I heard from a college professor who has used this essay in his class curriculum for several years. He told me that the information on Columbus in this essay is a shock to about 99% of his pupils. As James Loewen remarked in his seminal Lies my Teacher Told Me, the real hero in American history textbooks is America itself. The story is of the state as hero, always right, forever unstained, marching off to greater feats of glory and righteousness. That is the Big Lie of American “history.” That mentality is needed, however, in order to get boys to march off to distant wars, to defend our great nation from “threats” such as Iraq and Vietnam.
America’s entertainment industry has a long-standing tradition of depicting invading armies from other planets, from the 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds to the 1996 movie Independence Day. The themes of those works of art tap deep into our national psyches and memories. In those stories, we are the natives. Unlike War of the Worlds, where invisible disease vanquished the invaders, or Independence Day, where a small group of unlikely heroes pulled off an unlikely upset, the Tainos (and most natives of the Western Hemisphere) were not so fortunate. Imagine the Martian invasion was successful. Humanity quickly became a dying species as the invaders “cleared” the land for settlement, while importing their people, culture, crops, animals and technology. Maybe humanity was not totally exterminated, but small surviving groups were allowed to exist on land the invaders deemed useless, where they barely eked out an existence. Then imagine the anniversary of the invasion’s first day became a great day of celebration for the conquering extra-terrestrials, their invading fleet’s captain a hero, with their rhetoric stating they had displaced an inferior species, beings who were not properly taking advantage of what their planet offered. How advanced would such a conquering culture be?
Or turn the story of Columbus around a little. Imagine that Native Americans discovered the British Isles in 1492. They were searching for flint, because they used it as currency. Because they had a military prowess that nobody could resist, they quickly enslaved the British Isles’ natives, and in a couple of generations had exterminated the Isles’ entire population, while the natives were forced to mine flint. It was also a mere prelude to invading Europe and killing off about 95% its inhabitants. The Indians, after they had secured Europe, wrote histories that extolled the virtues of their race and European culture was nearly wiped off the map. The English and Celtic languages became as extinct as their culture and people, and the Indians could not have cared less, and never even mentioned or cared about the people they exterminated. Would the Indians therefore be a “great people”? Or, might some legitimately lament the passing of a people and culture that might have contributed much to humankind? Imagine a world with no Shakespearean writings. Would that be something to celebrate, or something to lament? Some might think it would be have been great, given the course of world history. Not me. Everybody can have something worthwhile to offer. Perhaps the gentle Taino could have taught the world profound lessons about loving one’s neighbor, which they may have done better than any other culture. We will never know. It is one of history’s ironies that Christians completely exterminated them.
Will Americans ever stop celebrating (or overlooking) the murderous acts of our ancestors? That is something only we can answer. Progress has been made. Columbus Day is not the frenzied celebration it was a hundred years ago, or even forty. The day we unmake that national holiday and replace it with one for native remembrance, for instance, (and maybe give some land back) will be an important one for our progress as a people. Maybe then we will be on our way to becoming “great.”
For one example of a summary of the “revisionism” by a mainstream historian, where his opinions are of the establishment variety, see Axtell, James. “Columbian Encounters: 1992-95.” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, Vol. LII, No. 4, October 1995. Ward Churchill takes Axtell’s scholarship to task in his A Little Matter of Genocide.
[58] See Sale, The Conquest of Paradise. p. 348.
[59] See Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, pp. 7-9.
[60] See Bigelow, “Reading the Past,” in Confronting Columbus, p. 72.

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