Is it?
When’s Leif Eiriksson day?
What bugs me is the idea that Columbus was this evil conqueror that if he had only stayed at home North Americans would have stayed happily peaceful or that had anyone else landed they would have first asked permission or something, I dont know. The point is it happened and I think we should move on. Slamming Columbus by rewriting history books to make him the bad guy or by vandalizing his statue does no good.
“She’s a round, she’s a firm, she’s a fully packed! She’s a round, like a you head!”
WHACK
“She’s a flat, like a you head!”
The story of why the statue is pointing East instead of West is quite interesting. Originally, it was going to be erected with the effigy of Columbus pointing indeed towards the West. However, the statue was to be placed right in front of the old port of Barcelona, right next to the sea, and it was felt that it would look really weird to have the great navigator pointing inland, towards the mountains.
So, they decided that Columbus would be pointing towards the sea, with his back to the mountains, to emphasize his role of sailor and admiral and all that.
Besides, technically speaking the statue still points towards America, only going the long way round the globe…
Yesterday, when I turned off the tv, the local news’ online poll had a grand total of 7 votes 4-3 against changing Columbus day to Indigenous day. My feeling is; Who cares honestly? let the feds and kiddies have their day off already and stfu all you people up in arms over this! there’s more important shit to worry about than who got here first.
We’d only have 49 states without it.
We don’t take St. Patrick’s Day off work, or Cinco De Mayo either. Why should an Italian heritage day be different?
Those holidays can pop up on any day of the week. Columbus Day is conveniently always on a Monday.
The truly mind-crushing bit is why USA people give a flying fart about him any more than Magellan or good old Leif (Garrett or Erikson, I can never remember); he never even SAW what would be the continental US.
For what it’s worth I’m all for something like Indigenous People’s Day, but I really can’t think of a more inappropriate day for it than CC day. Maybe expand Native American Day.
My edumacation was a bit spotty - tell me, why don’t we live in the United States of Columbus (Columbia?)? Who was this Amerigo Vespucci and why did his name take?
(yes, I know, I could go goggle it)
To the extent that I care about Christopher Columbus, it’s mostly in that I am still to this day pissed off that I got force fed the whitewashed ‘heroic’ portrait of Columbus when I was in elementary school. Like, if we as a society are going to teach kids about CC, then actually teach them about him as he actually was. It does not matter one iota to me whether a kid is only in the second grade or whatever when the Columbus history lesson is introduced; the world is a rough place and sanitizing the CC story doesn’t do anybody any favors.
The problem isn’t that it happened, the problem is that he’s glorified and thus his actions are glorified, which they shouldn’t be. We could celebrate what happened in a way that is respectful and reverent to the people who lost their lives, land and culture instead of the cartoon cock-licking we do today when it comes to revering Columbus.
A cartographer whose map of the newly-discovered lands became very popular.
You do realize that Christopher Columbus was vilified for his brutality and corruption by his contempories, even by people who admired him? And in fact, he did some prison time for his excesses and was only rescued because he had some greedy-ass patrons.
I think it is fair to say some violence was inevitable no matter which white man claimed the New World for the crown. But CC wasn’t just violent. He was sadistic even for his time.
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Writing history books accurately would mean including that everyone who knew anything about the subject already knew that the world was round; that others had been before him; and that he enslaved and murdered people who he found.
Continuing to write history books to make him the good guy, let alone The Good And Intelligent Guy Who Figured Out What Nobody Else Could, doesn’t do any good.
And yet every year it seems that there are people in this area who write indignant letters to the paper insisting that history books and news media shouldn’t tell the truth.
– what I find interesting is that it did turn out to be massively important that somebody got so thoroughly lost in the Atlantic ocean that even after landing he thought he was on a different continent entirely. It wasn’t as if he was the first person to go back and forth between the continents, even in that millenia. I don’t think, if you’d asked assorted people all over the world in 1492 or even for some years after he got back to Europe what the most important thing that happened in 1492 was, that any of them would have said ‘Somebody named Colombo got lost in the Atlantic Ocean.’ Always makes me wonder what’s happening in the current year that we’re not thinking of as important, or not noticing at all, but that may wind up causing that sort of shift.
FWIW, it’s not a school holiday in Montgomery Country or Prince George’s Country Maryland.
Back in 1999, no less an authority than Life Magazine called Columbus the 2nd most important person of the past 1,000 years.
Michael Hart, in his 1978 list of the most influential people in recorded history, put Columbus #9: The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History - Wikipedia
Back in 2010 I ran a round-robin contest, based upon Hart’s list, of the most influential people in history. The SDMB dropped Christo from #9 to #81: https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=12625376&postcount=696
So you think that rewriting history books to portray actual history instead of absurd fiction is a bad thing? That we should keep up statues to someone so awful even his contemporaries considered his behavior abhorrent? I’m going to have to disagree and say that history books should contain accurate history, not bowlderized and whitewashed accounts, and that statues to awful people celebrating awful things should come down. Remember, the quote below is what you’re defending:
Sculptor Gloria Vanderbilt Whitney managed to face hers correctly over in Huelva in 1929.