How Columbus Day Fell Victim to Its Own Success

Today is Columbus Day, a solemn occasion marked by parades, pageantry, and buckets of fake blood splashed on statues of its namesake. Activists have turned the commemoration of Columbus' landfall in the New World into an annual protest against "the celebration of genocide." What the protesters may not know, however, is that the holiday they are protesting once played a crucial role in forging a society capable of listening to their concerns. This is the curious tale of how Columbus Day fell victim to its own remarkable success.<br /><br /> Christopher Columbus has been, from the first, a powerful symbol of American nationalism. In the early American republic, Columbus provided a convenient means for the new nation to differentiate itself from the old world. His name, rendered as Columbia, became a byword for the United States. Americans represented their nation as a woman named Columbia, adopted Hail, Columbia! as an unofficial anthem, and located their capitol in the District of Columbia.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlj1i7CjdT2a7fbjlWw6tDbnIBLrJQsnaSnwx-uMyiCjdHiTA3MvaJoJSP4oTHGky2GTiLhwM-lrH_yClcAF0s6lp4sAgC4fv2cPtaGpyTZLgOgPXU4acZg0CBIygP3BgWHsah5IndGfY/s1600/Columbus_1892_Issue-%25245.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlj1i7CjdT2a7fbjlWw6tDbnIBLrJQsnaSnwx-uMyiCjdHiTA3MvaJoJSP4oTHGky2GTiLhwM-lrH_yClcAF0s6lp4sAgC4fv2cPtaGpyTZLgOgPXU4acZg0CBIygP3BgWHsah5IndGfY/s400/Columbus_1892_Issue-%25245.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><br /> Italian-Americans, arriving in large numbers in the late nineteenth century, took note of the reverence which their famous countryman enjoyed. It was a far cry from the treatment they themselves received. Many Americans believed Italians to be racially inferior, their difference made visible by their "swarthy" or "brown" skins. They were often portrayed as primitive, violent, and unassimilable, and their Catholicism brought them in for further abuse. After an 1891 lynching of Italians in New Orleans, a New York Times editorial proclaimed Sicilians "a pest without mitigation," adding, for good measure, that "our own rattlesnakes are as good citizens as they."<br /><br /> Italians quickly adopted Columbus as a shield against the ethnic, racial, and religious discrimination they faced in their adoptive country. They promoted a narrative of national origins that traced back beyond Plymouth or Jamestown, all the way to San Salvador. How could a nation, they asked, reject the compatriots of its own discoverer?<br /><br /><b><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/how-columbus-day-fell-victim-to-its-own-success/261922/" target="_blank">Click here to read this article from The Atlantic</a></b>

How Columbus Day Fell Victim to Its Own Success

Today is Columbus Day, a solemn occasion marked by parades, pageantry, and buckets of fake blood splashed on statues of its namesake. Activi...

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Research uncovers new details about John Cabot’s voyage to North America

Evidence that a Florentine merchant house financed the earliest English voyages to North America, has been published on-line in the academic journal Historical Research.  <br /><br />The article by Dr Francesco Guidi-Bruscoli, a member of a project based at the University of Bristol, indicates that the Venetian merchant John Cabot (alias Zuan Caboto) received funding in April 1496 from the Bardi banking house in London.<br /><br />The payment of 50 nobles (£16 13s. 4d.) was made so that ‘Giovanni Chabotte’ of Venice, as he is styled in the document, could undertake expeditions ‘to go and find the new land’.<br /><br /><b><a href="http://www.medievalists.net/2012/05/09/research-uncovers-new-details-about-john-cabots-voyage-to-north-america/" target="_blank">Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net</a></b>

Research uncovers new details about John Cabot’s voyage to North America

Evidence that a Florentine merchant house financed the earliest English voyages to North America, has been published on-line in the academic...

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Elizabethan Map of America provides clue to ‘Lost Colony’

<br />After decades of unsuccessful searching, archaeologists may have their best evidence ever of the possible fate of Sir Walter Raleigh’s “Lost Colony.” It comes in the form of a clue from Sir Walter himself, secreted within the 425 year old “Virginea Pars” map drawn by his expedition to site the first English colony in the New World.<br /><br />At a conference held yesterday at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, archaeologists and scholars from the First Colony Foundation and the British Museum discussed the newly discovered information previously hidden within the map and possible implications for understanding the eventual fate of Raleigh’s “lost colonists.”<br /><br />The “Virginea Pars” map was produced from explorations conducted by members of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Roanoke Colony of 1584-1590. The remarkably-accurate map depicts the coastal area from Chesapeake Bay to Cape Lookout, including the location of many native American villages visited by the colonists. However, until now the map provided little information about the location of his planned “Cittie of Ralegh.”<br /><br /><b><a href="http://earlymodernengland.com/2012/05/elizabethan-map-of-america-provides-clue-to-lost-colony/" target="_blank">Click here to read this article from Early Modern England</a></b><br />

Elizabethan Map of America provides clue to ‘Lost Colony’

After decades of unsuccessful searching, archaeologists may have their best evidence ever of the possible fate of Sir Walter Raleigh’s “Lost...

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Marco Polo really did go to China, new study finds

<br />It has been said that Marco Polo did not really go to China; that he merely cobbled together his information about it from journeys to the Black Sea, Constantinople and Persia and from talking to merchants and reading now-lost Persian books. But in Marco Polo was in China: New Evidence from Currencies, Salts and Revenues, Hans Ulrich Vogel, Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Tübingen, puts paid to such rumors.<br /><br />He begins with a comprehensive review of the arguments for and against, and follows it up with evidence from relevant Chinese, Japanese, Italian, French, German and Spanish literature. The result is compelling: despite a few, well-known problems with Marco Polo’s writings, they are supported by an overwhelming number of verified accounts about China containing unique information given over centuries.<br /><br /><b><a href="http://www.medievalists.net/2012/05/01/marco-polo-really-did-go-to-china-new-study-finds/" target="_blank">Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net</a></b><br />

Marco Polo really did go to China, new study finds

It has been said that Marco Polo did not really go to China; that he merely cobbled together his information about it from journeys to the B...

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