Happy Columbus Day

[Alan]

As is my tradition I planted garlic. Zemo and Killarney Red varieties this year.

The traditional Columbus Day in my household is a birthday celebration. My wife on Oct 11th and my youngest brother on Oct 12th.

[LDAHL]

LDahl knew full well what he was stirring when he posted this.

I’m just pleased with myself for having the good sense to be born in America. Who knows, if not for Columbus I might be a Norwegian. Got nothing against Norway. There’s certainly no shame in being Norwegian. I just really like America.

I could apologize to history, but history wouldn’t care.

[catherine]

Alan, Happy birthday to your wife and your brother!!

LDAHL, there could be a worse fate than being born Norwegian. I think the Norwegians are pretty happy.

[razz]

I was curious about Columbus and find out that the whole holiday because of Columbus discovering North America is a fraud.
The famous names of the ships he took on his famous 1492 trip across the Atlantic Ocean, the Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria, probably weren’t really named Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria. The Santa Maria was also known at the time as La Gallega, meaning The Galician.” The Niña is now believed to be a nickname for a ship originally called the Santa Clara, and the Pinta was probably also a nickname, though the ship’s real name isn’t clear.

*Columbus didn’t “discover” America — he never set foot in North America.

During four separate trips that started with the one in 1492, Columbus landed on various Caribbean islands that are now the Bahamas as well as the island later called Hispaniola. He also explored the Central and South American coasts. But he didn’t reach North America, which, of course, was already inhabited by Native Americans, and he never thought he had found a new continent. You may also remember that it is believed that Norse explorer Leif Erikson reached Canada perhaps 500 years before Columbus was born, and there are some who believe that Phoenician sailors crossed the Atlantic much earlier.
The first Columbus Day celebration recorded in the United States was in New York on October 12th, 1792, held to honor Italian-American heritage. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937 proclaimed October 12th to be Columbus Day, a national holiday. In 1971, the holiday date was changed to the second Monday in October.
Online https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.b3527e81abddsource:

[ApatheticNoMore]

How many people ever really "celebrated" it anyway, except maybe Italians. So all it becomes is a bunch of nagging of a few people with Italian heritage or else of people for getting a day off work, or for many not getting a day off work, at least having a lighter commute which is no small blessing.

[Yppej]

Maybe what would have made a difference, rather than who was aboard the ship, is where it landed. Many countries engaged in the horrors of plantation slavery, which spread north from Hispaniola. If settlement had flowed south instead, from colder climates, and followed a pattern of Viking fishing and French fur trading, the story of the Americas could have been different. I don't know though. The French were extremely brutal in Haiti, and to this day it has never recovered.

[Lainey]

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/columbus_day

Very enlightening article. By coincidence, a few months ago I picked up a copy of the bestseller, "Lies My Teacher Told Me - Everything your American History textbook got wrong." One discussion was about the pressure on textbook sellers to edit out anything unpleasant that would be unacceptable to school boards. Hence the schoolbooks in southern states were required to refer to the Civil War as the War Between the States. They also downplay the impact of hundreds of years of slavery in America, both in the North or South, and how that legacy still haunts us.


Teaching history has start with the truth, however hurtful or upsetting it may be to learn it.

[ApatheticNoMore]

I think for some the focus on the past has actually become an excuse to ignore the horrors of the present. "But things are much better now". Well in some ways yes, but overall, I don't know about that ....

[oldhat]

The extent and cruelty of Spanish treatment of natives were chronicled in detail by Bartolomeo de las Casas, a contemporary of Columbus, and have been verified by countless historians thereafter.

As for applying contemporary standards of morality to people who lived hundreds of years ago, I'm not talking about condemning Columbus, just not lionizing him. IMO opinion true greatness, the kind that merits having a holiday named after you, consists not of just going with the flow of contemporary mores but rising above them. That's why our holidays are named after people like Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King.

[Float On]

I spent Columbus Day evening gifting someone with time and a half or triple time for having to work a holiday. My house lost water pressure so I called the company that takes care of our community well. Did not realize the holiday went beyond government and banking to privately held water companies. By the time he got there there water was back on though spurting air. He got 3 hours holiday/overtime just for checking.