Posted on 10/12/2009 6:48:09 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
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.
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