Christopher Columbus part 2

Hey Becca, hey Kim. All right, so you've brought me here to talk about Columbus and the origins of Columbus Day. So, what's the deal with Christopher Columbus? Was he a good guy?

So, that's a great question, Kim, and it's something that historians and people across the United States have argued about for over a century now since we started celebrating Columbus Day. Especially, you always see a lot of op-eds and a lot of people arguing on Columbus Day exactly about that question.

So, in the last video, I discussed why Christopher Columbus wanted to come to the New World and what happened when he arrived in the Caribbean. So, in this video, we'll talk a little bit more about the implications of Christopher Columbus's voyage and his legacy and how it's been remembered in the United States.

All right, so between the good, the bad, and the ugly of Christopher Columbus, please tell me that we can have a Venn diagram. Can we have a Venn diagram?

We can definitely have a Venn diagram! So, I will make a Venn diagram of the implications or impact of Christopher Columbus's voyage. So, this is kind of the bad, and this is good. All right? And in between, we've got, I guess, yellow, and we'll talk about that over here.

I like how we're talking about kind of the impact of Christopher Columbus because I think that's most important from a historical standpoint. You know, not whether or not he personally was a good guy, but whether what he did on the aggregate has been positive or negative for world history.

Definitely! So, on the good side, a lot of historians and people in the United States like to commemorate Christopher Columbus for how amazing he was at navigating the sea. He was the first person to cross the Atlantic, and he did it in only five weeks. So, he was a really amazing navigator. And in that process, he really connected two worlds that were otherwise completely distant and really had no idea that the other existed.

Okay, so he didn't discover the New World because, you know, the people who lived in the New World had already discovered it. But he did connect the European and African worlds with the American worlds.

Exactly! I think that's a really good distinction to make. Right, he connected, but he did not discover. And so, a lot of people like to think that something we should remember Christopher Columbus for is that he discovered the United States. Again, as you can see in my last video, he did not discover the United States. He actually never went to North America, and the person that we actually have to credit that is Leif Erikson.

So, can you tell me a little bit about Leif Erikson?

Leif Erikson was a Viking navigator. That might be all I've got. But Vikings were a lot earlier, right?

Yes! The Vikings came to North America through what is now Alaska, 400-500 years before Christopher Columbus. And so, they're the people that actually discovered North America, despite the Native Americans that were already there. They were the first Europeans to arrive in North America.

So, I'll talk a little bit more about the bad implications of Christopher Columbus and his contact with the New World. And that has a lot to do with his treatment of the Native Americans.

So, you can see that in these kind of two representations of the moment of contact. So here would be the bad, the ugly, and this is the kind of good.

Yeah, I can see that. This painting here on the right is very heroic. Right?

Um, he does look very heroic. I know. He's even looking up into the sky as though, you know, he's maybe making eye contact with God.

And definitely, God's up here. The other interpretation is looking like a lot of what historians have read in Christopher Columbus's journal and in these documents that he sent back to the Spanish, which provide evidence to show that Christopher Columbus and his men on the Pinta, Nina, and Santa enslaved the native people, mutilated them, and sexually assaulted many Native women.

So, the treatment of Native people—so, he's possibly the father of the Atlantic slave trade. And I would say unintentionally the cause of a fairly significant human genocide—an unintentional human genocide—in the form of disease passed to Native Americans.

Definitely, the historical record points towards Christopher Columbus's violence toward the native people, but disease was really what decimated the population. Because when the ships arrived from Europe, they brought weapons, but they also brought new diseases that the Native people had never encountered before, and they had no immune system to fight off these diseases.

The Tyō people were absolutely decimated.

Yeah, I mean, it's, I think it's important to note that no one coming from Europe meant to do this. This was before germ theory. They had an idea that being in contact with a sick person might get you sick, but they didn't know that, you know, we could carry immunity to these diseases.

Exactly! And that's a good segue into talking about what would probably be the center on this little diagram, which is the Columbian Exchange.

So, the Columbian Exchange, you can read more about it in the KH Academy article dedicated to talking about exactly what the Columbian Exchange was, but I'll give you a little bit of an overview.

Okay, so does this is really what came from Europe to the New World? How about also weapons like, uh, firearms and horses?

Horses! Definitely! No horses in the New World, so no Native Americans ever rode horses until the Spanish brought them over. And that really changed Native American culture because they became so mobile with these new horses.

So, coming in from West Africa, enslaved people were being sold and sent on a brutal voyage across the Atlantic, which many of them didn't survive to work in the fields in the New World.

Yeah, particularly, I would say, in what we call the Caribbean today, or the West Indies. So, the islands that are producing sugar like, uh, Barbados, uh, the Dominican Republic. And what was coming back from the New World to Europe was mostly gold, as well as Native American slaves.

So this is kind of a triangle between Europe, Africa, and the Americas.

Yeah, a lot of historians have called it the Triangular Trade. And so I put it in the middle because, yes, humans were transported as slaves. That is obviously on the bad side, but there also were new markets, and there was this kind of globalization of trade.

Yeah, some things that existed in the New World that were brought back were, uh, tomatoes. So imagine a world of Italy where there are no tomatoes. That was only after the connection with the New World. Corn! If you think about staples of the American diet and the diets in the world, many things came from the Americas.

I had to draw in some corn and tomatoes over here, and so those are definitely on the good side.

Next, I'm going to talk a little bit more about Columbus Day and why we celebrate it and why it's become such a contentious holiday. Really, no other holiday gets as much criticism.

So when did Columbus Day actually start being celebrated?

I mean, I'm going to assume that it didn't start in 1493.

That's correct, Kim. It did not start in 1493. It actually began on a state level in the 1890s. So it had to do with Italian immigration—these mostly Catholic Italian immigrants coming into the United States in the 1890s. And in the 1890s, there was a very anti-immigrant sentiment.

Yeah, 'cause this is a time when you have a lot of Russian Jews coming to the United States and also Southern Eastern Europeans in general who don't speak English. There was much more concern and a lot more nativism, sort of anti-immigrant sentiment directed to these people who many thought were so different from White Protestant Anglo-Saxon Americans that they would never be able to assimilate.

Exactly! So nativism was running really high. That's the anti-immigrant sentiment that was mostly held by Protestants—White Protestants in the United States during this time of immigration. There were a lot of episodes of violence against the Italian and Catholic communities, and one actually inspired the first Columbus Day. And so in 1891, there was a public lynching of 11 Italian immigrants in New Orleans.

Wow! I had no idea!

Yeah, and it's one of the largest public lynchings in American history. And so in response to that, the first ever Columbus Day was celebrated by Italian immigrants in New Orleans in 1892.

This was before it was a federal holiday, this was just a celebration of their heritage in a moment where their heritage was being violently uprooted.

The first president to recommend a Columbus Day was actually Harrison in '93.

So, 1893! What else was going on at that time, Kim?

Oh, this is one of my favorite things! Uh, so, in 1893, Chicago celebrated the World's Columbian Exposition where the United States proclaimed loudly to the world that they were an important cultural and scientific nation.

Um, so, you know, they had exhibitions of all different types of machinery that had been invented and, uh, different types of people from all over the United States. It was really the massive national event of 1893.

They did this in 1893 as the 400th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America.

Um, but he did that in 1492, so they were a year late!

It just took them an extra year to get ready for this World's Fair, right? And it was a very patriotic sort of event—the USA rules, and we want everyone to know about that. And it really was convenient to also celebrate Columbus at that time as to increase this patriotic morale.

So, it wasn't until the New Deal when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Columbus Day into law as a federal holiday.

So, why did he make it a federal holiday?

So, FDR was under a lot of pressure from the Knights of Columbus. So, this was this Catholic Italian cultural organization, and they lobbied him heavily because they really wanted a cultural hero for their ethnic identity.

Why are so many people upset about Columbus Day today?

So, this sort of anti-Columbus Day sentiment started in the late '80s, early '90s when different states, which had very high Native American populations, started to realize that we were celebrating a man who did inflict a lot of disease and violence against the native peoples when he arrived here in the '90s.

Hawaii, Alaska, and South Dakota all stopped giving people the day off from work for Columbus Day. They started to kind of disregard the federal mandate of a holiday.

The significance of these three states is that they all have very high Native American populations. And actually, in 1992, right over here, Berkeley, California, renamed Columbus Day to Indigenous People's Day.

And a lot of other states have followed suit in this kind of renaming of Columbus Day to commemorate the native people and the lives that were lost during Columbus's voyage and the colonization projects that ensued.

So, what do you think? At the end of the day, was Columbus a good guy or a bad guy?

You know, Kim, I don't think it's actually about him as much as it is about the long-term effects of colonization on the Native American population, which were really, really terrible. And to chalk it up to Christopher Columbus—we can definitely not celebrate him, but there were so many other colonization projects and different events that happened throughout American history that subordinated the native people. And that's really the conversation that I want to keep having.