Free Republic

When it comes to the birth of America, most of us are working from a stew of elementary school history lessons, Westerns and vague Thanksgiving mythology. And while it's not surprising those sources might biff a couple details, what's shocking is how much less interesting the version we learned was. It turns out our teachers, Hollywood and whoever we got our Thanksgiving mythology from (Big Turkey?) all made America's origin story far more boring than it actually was for some very disturbing reasons. For instance ...

"In fourteen hundred ninety-two/ Columbus sailed the ocean blue. "He had three ships and left from Spain/ He sailed through sunshine, wind and rain." -- Source Unknown I'm old enough to remember a time when Christopher Columbus Day was a national holiday that was widely celebrated rather than shamefully downplayed and derided. Columbus has become the symbolic white devil harbinger of all that is evil about America's founding: genocide and manifest destiny imperialism; slavery and racism; annihilation and exploitation of peaceful, "noble savages" living in harmony with the environment. President Obama seems to echo the sentiments of multiculturalist leftists...

An Italian historian has unveiled a previously unknown document that sheds fresh light on explorer John Cabot’s discovery of Canada — a brief entry in a 516-year-old accounting ledger that shows Cabot had financial backing from a Florence-based bank in England and, most intriguingly, may have had prior knowledge of the distant land his famous 1497 voyage would put on the world map. The Italian-born Cabot is known to have sailed from England in search of the New World three times between 1496 and 1498. He is believed to have reached Newfoundland aboard the Matthew in 1497, but Cabot disappears...

By sailing to the New World, Christopher Columbus and other explorers who followed him may have set off a chain of events that cooled Europe’s climate. The European conquest of the Americas decimated the people living there, leaving large areas of cleared land untended. Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, Stanford University geochemist Richard Nevle reported October 11 at the Geological Society of America annual meeting. Such carbon dioxide removal could have diminished the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooled the climate, Nevil and his colleagues have previously reported....

Depopulation of Americas may have cooled climate MINNEAPOLIS — By sailing to the New World, Christopher Columbus and the other explorers who followed may have set off a chain of events that cooled Europe’s climate for centuries. The European conquest of the Americas decimated the people living there, leaving large areas of cleared land untended. Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, diminishing the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooling climate, says Richard Nevle, a geochemist at Stanford University. “We have a massive reforestation event that’s sequestering carbon … coincident...

Okay, today is Columbus Day observed (real Columbus Day comes in 2 days) and normally I just look at it as a low level holiday in which banks and post offices are closed. However, today I got to thinking: What if Columbus had not discovered America? I don't mean if he tried and failed. What if he never bothered in the first place? He could quite easily have given up on attempting to put together such an expedition. It would have been quite easy to have given up the attempt. One interesting thing is that 1492 was the very first...

“This is a very disturbing video about how our high school students are being brainwashed by Moslems in favor of Islam because our textbook publishers, school principals and teachers do not have the knowledge about Islam to know what is true and what is false. The textbooks are loaded with false positive statements about Islam and false negative statements about Christianity and Judaism.”

A Portuguese historian believes he has solved the age-old mystery surrounding the nationality of Christopher Columbus. According to Manuel Rosa, a lecturer at Duke University, North Carolina, the explorer was in fact the son of Polish King Władysław III. It has always been thought that King Władysław III fell in battle against the forces of the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Varna in 1444. According to Mr Rosa, however, the king managed to survive the battle unscathed and fled to the Portuguese island of Madeira where he lived out the rest of his life as a hermit and married...

The question of whether Christopher Columbus and his crew were responsible for bringing syphilis to Europe from the Americas appears to have been answered by the discovery of a collection of knobbly skeletons in a London cemetery. A popular theory among experts in tropical diseases is that outbreaks of syphilis in the mid-1490s were a direct result of Columbus and his randy crew returning from their first voyage across the Atlantic in 1492-93. However, the largest excavation of skeletons undertaken in Britain has unearthed seven that suggest the disease was known in England up to two centuries before that. Archaeologists...

The mixed legacy of 1492By James Carroll October 11, 2010 IT IS commonly observed that 1492, in addition to being the year of Christopher Columbus, was also the year of the Jews — their expulsion from Spain by the same Ferdinand and Isabella who sponsored the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria. But the overlap of events (actually, Columbus set sail in the very week of the banishment) has historic significance, for it was in Iberia that ancient Christian anti-Judaism had recently morphed into genetic anti-Semitism — the idea that Jews are contemptible not because of their religion, but because of...

British physicist Stephen Hawking, the brilliant man who wrote "A Brief History of Time," says aliens probably exist and frets that if they discover Earth their intentions might be less like the film, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and more like the book, "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." In the book, alien bureaucrats determine the Earth should be demolished to make way for space highway and blow the Earth up. Sorry. Nothing personal. Prepare to die. It's not such a crazy thought, says Hawking, in a Discovery Channel series. "To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking...

TAMPA, Fla. - Jeffrey Kolowith’s kindergarten students read a poem about Christopher Columbus, take a journey to the New World on three paper ships, and place the explorer’s picture on a timeline through history. Kolowith’s students learn about the explorer’s significance, but they also come away with a more nuanced picture of Columbus than the noble discoverer often portrayed in pop culture and legend. “I talk about the situation where he didn’t even realize where he was,’’ Kolowith said. “And we talked about how he was very, very mean, very bossy.’’ Columbus’s stature in US classrooms has declined somewhat through...

In fourteen hundred ninety-two. Columbus sailed the ocean blue. The native American Indian tribes in Christopher Columbus's time were probably less socialist than they are today - dominated by so many Indian Affairs bureaus, state programs, and other governmental agencies which help (overregulate) every aspect of Indian life, so much so that their culture is not so much now perceived as brave, self sufficient warriors as much as politically correct dependents on Big Gov, who have been blessed with gambling enterprises, and who object to the franchising of Indian logos adopted by sports teams, especially those evil Cleveland Indians...

TAMPA, Fla. – Jeffrey Kolowith's kindergarten students read a poem about Christopher Columbus, take a journey to the New World on three paper ships and place the explorer's picture on a timeline through history. Kolowith's students learn about the explorer's significance — though they also come away with a more nuanced picture of Columbus than the noble discoverer often portrayed in pop culture and legend. "I talk about the situation where he didn't even realize where he was," Kolowith said. "And we talked about how he was very, very mean, very bossy."

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) -- Jeffrey Kolowith's kindergarten students read a poem about Christopher Columbus, take a journey to the New World on three paper ships and place the explorer's picture on a timeline through history. Kolowith's students learn about the explorer's significance -- though they also come away with a more nuanced picture of Columbus than the noble discoverer often portrayed in pop culture and legend. ''I talk about the situation where he didn't even realize where he was,'' Kolowith said. ''And we talked about how he was very, very mean, very bossy.'' Columbus' stature in U.S. classrooms has declined...

Researcher whose father found old maps posits 2000 BC voyage to west coast History books tell us that the first Chinese settlers to Canada arrived in Victoria about 150 years ago, but a U.S. researcher says she has solid evidence that they came earlier. Some 4,000 years earlier. That would be 3,500 years before 1492, when European explorer Christopher "Columbus sailed the ocean blue." Or 10,000 years after nomadic hunters from Eastern Siberia crossed the frozen Bering Strait during the Ice Age, a migration taken by modern scholars to account for North America's native population. Charlotte Harris Rees, a retired...

Chicken Bones Suggest Polynesians Found Americas Before ColumbusBy Heather Whipps, Special to LiveScience Which came first–the chicken or the European? Popular history, and a familiar rhyme about Christopher Columbus, holds that Europeans made contact with the Americas in 1492, with some arguing that the explorer and his crew were the first outsiders to reach the New World. But chicken bones recently unearthed on the coast of Chile—dating prior to Columbus’ “discovery” of America and resembling the DNA of a fowl species native to Polynesia—may challenge that notion, researchers say. “Chickens could not have gotten to South America on their own—they...

The first Briton sailed to the New World only seven years after Columbus, a long-lost royal letter reveals.Written by Henry VII 510 years ago, it suggests Bristol merchant William Weston headed for America in 1499.In his letter the king, right, instructs his Chancellor to suspend an injunction against Weston because "he will shortly with God's grace, pass and sail for to search and find if he can the new found land".Bristol University's Dr Evan Jones believes it was probably the earliest attempt to find the North-West Passage - the searoute around North America to the Pacific. He said: "Henry's...

Did Chinese sailors really discover America before Columbus? A new exhibition sets the scene, presenting new evidence that lends support to the assumptions made in "1421: The Year China Discovered America" by Gavin Menzies. "1421: The Year China Sailed the World," in Singapore in a special tent near the Esplanade (until Sept. 11), is primarily a celebration of Admiral Zheng He's seven maritime expeditions between 1405 and 1423. With a fleet of 317 ships and 28,000 men, Zheng He is generally acknowledged as one of the great naval explorers, but how far he actually went remains a matter of dispute....

Egyptian Writer Muhammad Ibrahim Mabrouk: Columbus Was Trying to Recruit the Chinese Emperor to the Liberation of Jerusalem When He Stumbled Upon America Following are excerpts from an interview with Egyptian writer Muhammad Ibrahim Mabrouk, which aired on Al-Majd TV on April 27, 2009.To view this clip on MEMRI TV, visit http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/2167.htm. "Columbus Wanted to Liberate Jerusalem From the Muslims"Interviewer: "American society was not born and did not grow in the United States. It is a mixed society - a society of immigrants, of different nationalities. How can it be claimed that this society in its entirety was melted down...