Columbus cultures

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They provide insight into the many ways the Columbus Region is helping businesses grow and thrive. Columbus Chamber Member Testimonials. In , at the direction of Congress, President Benjamin Harrison delivered a proclamation that made October 12, "the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America by Columbus, [.

On that day let the people, so far as possible, cease from toil and devote themselves to such exercises as may best express honor to the discoverer.

In preparation for the quatercentenary celebration, New York City erected a statue of Columbus, in what is now known as Columbus Circle. Forty thousand people gathered in New Haven, Connecticut to listen to odes to Columbus and to watch 6, members of the Knights of Columbus march in a parade.

And at Chicago's World Fair , which was dubbed "The Columbian Exposition," replicas of Columbus's three ships were built and displayed. At this event, Senator Chauncey M. Depew of Kansas extolled Columbus's virtue in superlative terms:.

The voice of gratitude and praise for all the blessings which have been showered upon mankind by his adventure is limited to no language, but is uttered in every tongue. Neither marble nor brass can fitly form his statue. Continents are his monument, and unnumbered millions, present and to come, who enjoy in their liberties and happiness the fruits of his faith, will reverently guard and preserve, from century to century, his name and fame.

As a result of the contention surrounding Columbus's legacy, some states have chosen either to celebrate alternatives to Columbus Day, or to not observe it at all. McDonald of Colorado in Two years later, Tammany Hall man Timothy Sullivan introduced a successful bill in the New York state legislature to make Columbus Day a state holiday.

By , 15 states had officially adopted the holiday. Over time, many more states followed suit, and in Congress made Columbus Day an official holiday of the United States, to be celebrated annually on October While the Columbus Day celebrations of the nineteenth century were often resisted because of their association with Catholicism and immigration, resistance to the celebration today has emerged on altogether different grounds. Yet it is not Columbus the man who is being indicted but what he represents: the first tentative step toward the European settlement of the Americas.

Consequently, the debate over Columbus is a debate over whether Western civilization was a good idea and whether it should continue to shape the United States. Many critics argue the negative:. Let us examine the consistent portrait that emerges in multicultural literature about the legacy of Columbus. The advocates of multiculturalism are unanimous that Columbus did not discover America. They invaded and displaced a native population. But all of this is wordplay.

The real issue, as Leszek Kolakowski points out, is that "the impulse to explore has never been evenly distributed among the world's civilizations. The term "encounter" conceals this difference by implying civilizational contact on an equal plane between the Europeans and the Indians.

The multiculturalists are equally unanimous that Columbus, as the prototypical Western white male, carried across the Atlantic racist prejudices against the native peoples.

Gary Nash charges that Columbus embodied a peculiar "European quality of arrogance" rooted in irrational hostility to Indians. In a similar vein, Kirkpatrick Sale in The Conquest of Paradise argues that Columbus "presumed the inferiority of the natives," thus embodying the basic ingredients of the Western racist imagination that was bred to "fear what it did not comprehend, and hate what it knew as fearful.

It is true that Columbus harbored strong prejudices about the peaceful islanders whom he misnamed "Indians" — he was prejudiced in their favor. For Columbus, they were "the handsomest men and the most beautiful women" he had ever encountered. He praised the generosity and lack of guile among the Tainos, contrasting their virtues with Spanish vices. He insisted that although they were without religion, they were not idolaters; he was confident that their conversion would come through gentle persuasion and not through force.

The reason, he noted, is that Indians possess a high natural intelligence. There is no evidence that Columbus thought that Indians were congenitally or racially inferior to Europeans. Other explorers such as Pedro Alvares Cabral, Amerigo Vespucci, Ferdinand Magellan, and Walter Raleigh registered similar positive impressions about the new world they found.

So why did European attitudes toward the Indian, initially so favorable, subsequently change? Kirkpatrick Sale, Stephen Greenblatt, and others offer no explanation for the altered European perception. But the reason given by the explorers themselves is that Columbus and those who followed him came into sudden, unexpected, and gruesome contact with the customary practices of some other Indian tribes.

While the first Indians that Columbus encountered were hospitable and friendly, other tribes enjoyed fully justified reputations for brutality and inhumanity. On his second voyage Columbus was horrified to discover that a number of the sailors he left behind had been killed and possibly eaten by the cannibalistic Arawaks. Similarly, when Bernal Diaz arrived in Mexico with the swashbuckling army of Hernan Cortes, he and his fellow Spaniards were not shocked to witness slavery, the subjection of women, or brutal treatment of war captives; these were familiar enough practices among the conquistadors.

But they were appalled at the magnitude of cannibalism and human sacrifice. As Diaz describes it, in an account generally corroborated by modern scholars:. When Cortes captured the Aztec emperor Montezuma and his attendants, he would only permit them temporary release on the promise that they stop their traditional practices of cannibalism and human sacrifice, but he found that "as soon as we turned our heads they would resume their old cruelties.

Cannibalism was prevalent among the Aztecs, Guarani, Iroquois, Caribs, and several other tribes. Moreover, the Aztecs of Mexico and the Incas of South America performed elaborate rites of human sacrifice, in which thousands of captive Indians were ritually murdered, until their altars were drenched in blood, bones were strewn everywhere, and priests collapsed with exhaustion from stabbing their victims.

The law of the Incas provided for punishment of parents and others who displayed grief during human sacrifices. When men of noble birth died, wives and concubines were often strangled and buried with them. Multicultural textbooks, committed to a contemporary version of the noble savage portrait, cannot acknowledge historical facts that would embarrass the morality tale of white invaders despoiling the elysian harmony of the Americans. Kirkpatrick Sale dismisses all European accounts of Indian atrocities as fanciful: "Organized violence was not an attribute of traditional Indian societies.

Consider a recent analysis of two books on the Aztecs, published as a guide for teachers in Multicultural Review. The first book, Francisco Alarcon's Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation , receives high praise as "a wonderful celebration of Aztec religion, beliefs, and customs, intermingled with the thoughts and feelings of today's Mexican Americans. The Aztec practice of human sacrifice is described in gory detail.

This book is a distortion of the Aztecs. In the next item of the multiculturalists' indictment, Columbus — and by extension the West — is accused of perpetrating a campaign of genocidal extermination, a holocaust against native Americans. Kirkpatrick Sale charges the successors of Columbus with "something we must call genocide within a single generation.

The charge of genocide is largely sustained by figures showing the precipitous decline of the Indian population. Although scholars debate the exact numbers, in Alvin Josephy's estimate, the Indian population fell from between fifteen and twenty million when the white man first arrived to a fraction of that years later. Undoubtedly the Indians perished in great numbers. Yet although European enslavement of Indians and the Spanish forced labor system extracted a heavy toll in lives, the vast majority of Indian casualties occurred not as a result of hard labor or deliberate destruction but because of contagious diseases that the Europeans transmitted to the Indians.

The spread of infection and unhealthy patterns of behavior was also reciprocal. From the Indians the Europeans contracted syphilis. The Indians also taught the white man about tobacco and cocaine, which would extract an incalculable human toll over the next several centuries.

The Europeans, for their part, gave the Indians measles and smallpox. Recent research has shown that tuberculosis predated the European arrival in the new world.