Christopher Columbus

Discussion in 'History & Geography' started by Hedi Mitchell, Oct 9, 2017.

  1. Hedi Mitchell

    Hedi Mitchell Supreme Member
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    He was a devoted slave trader
    a cheepsake among many other things ..so why in the world is many peoole complaining about Robert E Lee and others ?
    If any of the history I have read about him is true, why do so many get...and federal employees at that...get the day off to honor another slave trader?
    Although some cities even in the US honor this holiday under a different name, seems very contradicting to honor one and yet refuse to even acknowledge others. Plus depending on who you believe he may not have really found the NewWorld..at least not on his own.
    Was never ever taught any one this un my school !
     
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  2. Chrissy Cross

    Chrissy Cross Supreme Member
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    California doesn't honor Columbus Day. Kids have school, banks are open and there is mail
    delivery.
     
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  3. Shirley Martin

    Shirley Martin Supreme Member
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    Much of what we have been taught in history is incorrect. Are there monuments to Columbus? If there are, let's protest until they are taken down.
     
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  4. Ken Anderson

    Ken Anderson Senior Staff
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    It is wrong to hold historical figures to the standards of today. Although that makes it easy to demonize anyone, if it is applied across the board, we would have no choice but to burn every history book, monument museum, and historical artifact in the world. At around the same time that Christopher Columbus was embarking on his voyage, the Aztecs were making human sacrifices, and the indigenous people of North America were warring with one another, burning forests, and taking slaves. Yet we are replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day, and if we held everyone to the same standards that wouldn't make sense either. That was a brutal time, pretty much everywhere. Given that Christopher Columbus did not discover America, and never even set foot in North America, it doesn't make a lot of sense that we're celebrating him over Americus Vespucci, for whom America was named, but I'm sure that if we looked we'd find that he would be disqualified too, for being a sexist or perhaps for being cruel to animals, or something. I don't know that Christopher Columbus is deserving of having a holiday named for him, not because this 15th century man failed to live up to 21st century standards, but because he never set foot in any part of what would later become the United States or Canada.
     
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    Last edited: Oct 9, 2017
  5. Hedi Mitchell

    Hedi Mitchell Supreme Member
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    Excatly......
     
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  6. Martin Alonzo

    Martin Alonzo Supreme Member
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    Yes Christopher Columbus never set foot on US main land and also late to arrive in the new world. But the idea of tearing down statues and rewriting history is straight out of 1984. Yes we should know who founded the US and who has been lying to us for years. This politico correctness illness that everything has to think as a certain group is insanity. If they want to get so excited about things why do they not go after the Democrats the true slave owners the people who were the KKK and stop accusing everyone else of what they have been and still are doing to this day.
     
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  7. Shirley Martin

    Shirley Martin Supreme Member
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    Christopher Columbus: Didn't know where he was going, when he got there, he didn't know where he was. When he got back, he didn't know where he'd been.

    Too bad he didn't have a woman to give him directions. :D
     
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  8. Martin Alonzo

    Martin Alonzo Supreme Member
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    But he did have Martin Alonso to help him
     
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  9. Hedi Mitchell

    Hedi Mitchell Supreme Member
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    Not here total shut down.
     
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  10. Ted Richards

    Ted Richards Veteran Member
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    Columbus certainly wasn't the first to discover the Americas. I believe the first were northeast Asians who wandered across Beringa, the land bridge exposed by low sea levels during the last ice age. I think they started migrating across about 30,000 years ago. I think those migrations continued with different groups following that route until about 12,000 years ago when sea level rise closed that land bridge. I believe most of those people entered the Americas by following the ice-free coastline southward and continued beach combing until they reached the tip of South America. Any evidence of their movements along the coast is now submerged by rising sea levels. Sea levels were as much as 400 feet lower during the ice age maximum.
     
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  11. Shirley Martin

    Shirley Martin Supreme Member
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    I think the claim is that he was the first European to discover America. But that's not correct, either. There is evidence that Europeans were here long before he was.
     
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  12. Ted Richards

    Ted Richards Veteran Member
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    From: http://www.history.com/
    As Leif Erikssson Day approaches, the United States commemorates the explorer credited with the first European expedition to North America.

    Nearly 500 years before the birth of Christopher Columbus, a band of European sailors left their homeland behind in search of a new world. Their high-prowed Viking ship sliced through the cobalt waters of the Atlantic Ocean as winds billowed the boat’s enormous single sail. After traversing unfamiliar waters, the Norsemen aboard the wooden ship spied a new land, dropped anchor and went ashore. Half a millennium before Columbus “discovered” America, those Viking feet may have been the first European ones to ever have touched North American soil.

    Exploration was a family business for the expedition’s leader, Leif Eriksson (variations of his last name include Erickson, Ericson, Erikson, Ericsson and Eiriksson). His father, Erik the Red, founded the first European settlement of Greenland after being expelled from Iceland around A.D. 985 for killing a neighbor. (Erik the Red’s father, himself, had been banished from Norway for committing manslaughter.) Eriksson, who is believed to have been born in Iceland around A.D. 970, spent his formative years in desolate Greenland. Around A.D. 1000, Eriksson sailed east to his ancestral homeland of Norway. There, King Olaf I Tryggvason converted him to Christianity and charged him with proselytizing the religion to the pagan settlers of Greenland. Eriksson converted his mother, who built Greenland’s first Christian church, but not his outlaw father.

    Icelandic legends called sagas recounted Eriksson’s exploits in the New World around A.D. 1000. These Norse stories were spread by word of mouth before becoming recorded in the 12th and 13th centuries. Two sagas give differing accounts as to how Eriksson arrived in North America. According to the “Saga of Erik the Red,” Eriksson crossed the Atlantic by accident after sailing off course on his return voyage from Norway after his conversion to Christianity. The “Saga of the Greenlanders,” however, recounts that Eriksson’s voyage to North America was no fluke. Instead, the Viking explorer had heard of a strange land to the west from Icelandic trader Bjarni Herjolfsson, who more than a decade earlier had overshot Greenland and sailed by the shores of North America without setting foot upon it. Eriksson bought the trader’s ship, raised a crew of 35 men and retraced the route in reverse.

    After crossing the Atlantic, the Vikings encountered a rocky, barren land in present-day Canada. Eriksson bestowed upon the land a name as boring as the surroundings—Helluland, Norwegian for “Stone Slab Land.” Researchers believe this location could possibly have been Baffin Island. The Norsemen then voyaged south to a timber-rich location they called Markland (Forestland), most likely in
    present-day Labrador, before finally setting up a base camp likely on the northern tip of the island of Newfoundland.

    The Vikings spent an entire winter there and benefitted from the milder weather compared to their homeland. They explored the surrounding region abounding with lush meadows, rivers teeming with salmon, and wild grapes so suitable for wine that Eriksson called the region Vinland (Wineland).

    After spending the winter in Vinland, Eriksson and his crew sailed home to windswept Greenland with badly needed timber and plentiful portions of grapes. Eriksson, who would succeed Erik the Red as chief of the Greenland settlement after his father’s death, never returned to North America, but other Vikings continued to sail west to Vinland for at least the ensuing decade. In spite of North America’s more bountiful resources, the Viking settlers remained in desolate Greenland. This was perhaps due to the violent encounters—including the slaying of Eriksson’s brother Thorwald–they had with the indigenous population of North America.

    Archaeologists have unearthed evidence that supports the sagas’ stories of the Norse expeditions to America. In 1960, Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad scoured the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland for signs of a possible settlement, and he found it on the northernmost tip of Newfoundland at L’Anse aux Meadows. An international team of archaeologists that included Ingstad’s wife, Anne, excavated artifacts of Viking origin dating from around A.D. 1000, and the remains of the Norse village are now part of a UNESCO World Heritage site.

    While Columbus is honored with a federal holiday, the man considered to be the leader of the first European expedition to North America has not been totally forgotten on the calendar. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed a proclamation that declared October 9 to be Leif Eriksson Day in honor of the Viking explorer, his crew and the country’s Nordic-American heritage. The proximity of the days honoring Eriksson and Columbus is coincidence. October 9 was chosen because it is the anniversary of the 1825 arrival in New York of the ship Restaruation, which carried the first organized band of Norwegian immigrants to the United States.
     
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  13. Shirley Martin

    Shirley Martin Supreme Member
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    I have read that there have been artifacts found that indicate that Norsemen traveled as far as the Missouri River.
     
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  14. Frank Sanoica

    Frank Sanoica Supreme Member
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    And we have a slave-owner's memory perpetuated on the face of our greenback dollar.............

    Frank
     
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  15. Kitty Carmel

    Kitty Carmel Veteran Member
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    Seriously Chrissy, I didn't know this or even realize it. Good for California, they got one thing right!
     
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