Lies My Teacher Told Me by James
Loewen, 1995, Excerpts
People from other continents had reached the Americas many
times before 1492. In 1005 the Vikings intended to settle Vineland, their name
for New England. A map found in Turkey dated 1513 based on material from the
library of Alexander the Great includes coastline details of South America and
Antarctica. Ancient Roman coins keep turning up all over the Americas, causing
some archaeologists to conclude that Roman seafarers visited the Americas more
than once. Native Americans voyaged east millennia ago from Canada to
Scandinavia or Scotland. Two Indians shipwrecked in Holland around 60 B.C.
became major curiosities in Europe.
In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed in from the blue.
American history books present Columbus pretty much without precedent, and they
portray him as America’s first great hero. In so canonizing him, they reflect
our national culture. Indeed, now that President’s Day has combined
Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays, Columbus is one of only two people the
United States honors by name in a national holiday. The one date that every
school child remembers is 1492. Columbus, like Christ, was so pivotal that
historians use him to divide the past into epochs, making the Americas before
1492 “pre-Columbian.”
The 1847 painting by John Vanderlyn Columbus Landing in the
Bahamas”, the first of eight huge “historical” paintings in the rotunda of the
U.S. Capitol, illustrates the heroic treatment of Columbus in most
textbooks. His theme was Columbus
Landing at Guanahani, 1492, glorifying the arrival on this West Indian island
of the historical figure who was regarded as the founder of the white and
Christian Americas. His Indians crouch like wild animals, frightened and
puzzled, and some of the explorer's Spanish sailors crawl on the ground,
already hunting for gold.
Theodore de Bry’s woodcuts, created around 1504, based his engraving
on accounts of Indians who impaled themselves, drank poison, jumped off cliffs,
hanged themselves, and killed their children to avoid the horror of the
newcomers.
Artist John
Vanderlyn, 1847: Columbus Landing at Guanahani, 1492
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