Teaching About Columbus

Two articles by William M. Davidson and Henry Noble Sherwood take the point of view that Columbus was a great man who discovered America. Davidson calls Columbus "The Great Navigator" and says that in Columbus "passion for discovery rose to the dignity of an inspiration" (Davidson 248). Sherwood writes that Columbus and his men found "naked savages" in the new land and that Columbus treated them well (Sherwood 253).

If we were to try to understand Columbus and his activities after reading Davidson and Sherwood, we would not have a complete or true picture. In Bill Bigelow's "Columbus in the Classroom," we find a more complete and true picture of what Columbus was really like and what he really did in and to the land he thought was India.

Bigelow writes that Columbus did sail west with three ships. He and his men did finally find land which was populated by people whom they named Indians because they believed the land was Ind

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bout the people in the land, but instead thought only about how they could use them and conquer them. Columbus himself wrote that "All the inhabitants could be taken away to [Spain], or made slaves on the island. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want" (Bigelow 256). In recent years there have been a number of books which have questioned the traditional view of Columbus as a wonderful hero from Europe who discovered America and began to civilize it in the name of Christianity and progress. Bigelow writes about a number of the problems of the traditional picture of Columbus. Schlesinger tries to answer some of these problems. Schlesinger says that teachers want to go too far in changing the way the story of Columbus is told. Schlesinger says that the new world would have been changed by Europeans sooner or later anyway, whether Columbus discovered the land or not. Some writers, such as Kirkpatrick Sale, say that Europeans should have respected the people in the new land and left their society alone. Schlesinger writes that The fact that we cannot stop change complicates one's response to the idea that every culture and species is sacred. And to deny the right to change is to amputate the hum
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Approximate Word count = 1680
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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