Columbus Day used to be CELEBRATED

[JakeStarkey]

Intense, I am not saying that it wouldn't or shouldn't happen the way it did. What happened is what cultures inflict one to another. I am glad with my life. But that does not excuse Columbus for beginning a chain of events that devastated Native America.

 

[L.K.Eder]

Holidays are unproductive to the corporate class, so expect everything to go cept christmas.

Until Ramadan becomes a holiday?

Columbus is the Father of our Country and a great American

That's funny because Columbus worked for the Spanish crown, and no doubt was fluent in Spanish. By modern definitions, he would be considered "Hispanic," even though he was Italian...

So the father of our Country was a wetback?

Si! He swam the RioAtlantic with Maria & Nina & Santa...............

Note: It was Maria sp., not Marcia it.

the nina, the pinta, the santa enslaveya and the rapya

shout out to the goats from philly.

 

[Douger]

Columbus is the Father of our Country and a great American

Colon was a sociopathic Nazi, before the word Nazi was created.
Eurotrash. Just like the idiots directing your movie today.

 

[Ozmar]

Colon was full of shit.

 

[JBeukema]

Intense, I am not saying that it wouldn't or shouldn't happen the way it did. What happened is what cultures inflict one to another. I am glad with my life. But that does not excuse Columbus for beginning a chain of events that devastated Native America.

Noone faults him for 'beginning a chain of events'. We fault him for raping, murdering, and enslaving all he could.

 

[Intense]

Intense, I am not saying that it wouldn't or shouldn't happen the way it did. What happened is what cultures inflict one to another. I am glad with my life. But that does not excuse Columbus for beginning a chain of events that devastated Native America.

Noone faults him for 'beginning a chain of events'. We fault him for raping, murdering, and enslaving all he could.

Legacy

Columbus Lighthouse (Faro a Colón), Santo DomingoAlthough among non-Native Americans Christopher Columbus is traditionally considered the discoverer of America, Columbus was preceded by the various cultures and civilizations of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, as well as the Western world's Vikings at L'Anse aux Meadows. He is regarded more accurately as the person who brought the Americas into the forefront of Western attention. "Columbus's claim to fame isn't that he got there first," explains historian Martin Dugard, "it's that he stayed."[64] The popular idea that he was first person to envision a rounded earth is false. The rounded shape of the earth has already been known since antiquity.


Replicas of Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria sailed from Spain to the Chicago Columbian ExpositionAmerigo Vespucci's travel journals, published 1502-4, convinced Martin Waldseemüller that the discovered place was not India, as Columbus always believed, but a new continent, and in 1507, a year after Columbus's death, Waldseemüller published a world map calling the new continent America from Vespucci's Latinized name "Americus". The preoccupation of European courts with the rise of the Ottoman Turks in the East partly explains their relative lack of interest in Columbus's discoveries in the West at that time.[65]


San Marino special €2 coins issued in 2006 commemorating the anniversary of the death of Christopher Columbus
Columbus monument near the state capitol in Denver, ColoradoHistorically, the British had downplayed Columbus and emphasized the role of the Venetian John Cabot as a pioneer explorer, but for the emerging United States, Cabot made for a poor national hero. Veneration of Columbus in America dates back to colonial times. The name Columbia for "America" first appeared in a 1738 weekly publication of the debates of the British Parliament.[66] The use of Columbus as a founding figure of New World nations and the use of the word 'Columbia', or simply the name 'Columbus', spread rapidly after the American Revolution. In 1812, the name 'Columbus' was given to the newly founded capital of Ohio. During the last two decades of the 18th century the name "Columbia" was given to the federal capital District of Columbia, South Carolina's new capital city Columbia, the Columbia River, and numerous other places. Outside the United States the name was used in 1819 for the Gran Colombia, a precursor of the modern Republic of Colombia. The main plaza in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico is called Plaza Colón in honor of the Admiral.[67][68]

A candidate for sainthood in the Catholic Church in 1866, celebration of Columbus's legacy perhaps reached a zenith in 1892 when the 400th anniversary of his first arrival in the Americas occurred. Monuments to Columbus like the Columbian Exposition in Chicago were erected throughout the United States and Latin America extolling him. Numerous cities, towns, counties, and streets have been named after him, including the capital cities of two U.S. states, Ohio and South Carolina.

In 1909, descendants of Columbus undertook to dismantle the Columbus family chapel in Spain and move it to a site near State College, Pennsylvania, where it may now be visited by the public. At the museum associated with the chapel, there are a number of Columbus relics worthy of note, including the armchair which the "Admiral of the Ocean Sea" used at his chart table.

More recent views of Columbus, particularly those of Native Americans, have tended to be much more critical.[69][70][71] This is because the native Taino of Hispaniola, where Columbus began a rudimentary tribute system for gold and cotton, disappeared so rapidly after contact with the Spanish, due to overwork and especially, after 1519, when the first pandemic struck Hispaniola,[72] due to European diseases. Some estimates indicate case fatality rates of 80-90% in Native American populations during smallpox epidemics.[73] The native Taino people of the island were systematically enslaved via the encomienda system. The pre-Columbian population is estimated to have been perhaps 250,000-300,000. According to the historian Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes by 1548, 56 years after Columbus landed, less than five hundred Taino were left on the island.[74] In another hundred years, perhaps only a handful remained. However, some analyses of the question of Columbus's legacy for Native Americans do not clearly distinguish between the actions of Columbus himself, who died well before the first pandemic to hit Hispaniola or the height of the encomienda system, and those of later European governors and colonists on Hispaniola.

Christopher Columbus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[QUENTIN]

I don't get why, except for some culture warrior reason or what people learned in their historically whitewashed and inaccurate elementary school books, anyone would want to celebrate Columbus in the first place?

We don't celebrate the Vikings, so why Columbus?

My vote continues to go towards celebrating Las Casas if we must celebrate a historical figure of early colonial times.

Indeed.

Amazon.com: A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present (Perennial Classics) (9780060528379): Howard Zinn: Books

Read chapter one before posting in this thread

Indeed. Or even better, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. If people arguing for a celebration of Columbus as a national holiday don't know what Columbus really did, then I understand. If they do know and still want him honored... that's just kind of sick. The Vikings were not only here first, they also raped and pillaged and enslaved, which is why we don't venerate them.

Put simply, Columbus's actions don't deserve veneration. He was randomly chosen as the "Great Man" we'd all celebrate for reasons that don't hold up to intellectual or historical scrutiny.

If we're going to randomly pluck an old European to celebrate, why not Amerigo Vespucci?

So I guess every one here denouncing Columbus also denounces, Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Marx, Chavez, Hussein, Castro, and that Ass Hat from North Korea. Just so we are all on the same page here. Columbus was a Saint compared to these losers.

Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Chavez, Hussein, Casto, and Jong-Il certainly. They're responsible for human rights atrocities and murders just like Columbus, which is why we shouldn't celebrate them with national holidays ether. Marx has nothing to do with it because whether his economic and social theories are awesome or awful, he never killed anybody like the rest did.

Let's not forget Earth Day, May Day, Cinco De Mayo, and the December Harvest Festival Kwanzaa. I'm good with all of that, if you all give Columbus a break. We are all in a sense products of the influences of our times.

None of those are national holidays.

 

[Intense]

Hey Quentin, Neither is Columbus Day.

 

[hortysir]

Let guess, liberals made you stop celebrating Columbus day right?

They use to do hide under the desk bomb drills too but don't anymore. Its a conspiracy!!

They have made him out to be an oppressive A-hole though.

That cant be disputed. (honestly anyway)

Truth hurts I guess. He may or may not have been an asshole but the subsequent Spanish conquest (or pillaging for gold) was certianly brutal. If it had never happened most of us would not be here either.

So the end justify the means?

Way to excuse wrong behavior.....