Record a 4 minute audio essay about your beliefs on the topic of Columbus Day. Include readings, discussions and any relevant outside experiences to support your claims. Be sure to answer the question: what do you believe about Columbus Day? You can use readings from both this unit and any previous readings that connect well
Columbus Day
Every year on the second Monday of October, we celebrate Columbus Day, a day which commemorates the explorer Christopher Columbus’s so called “discovery” of the new world. However, just because we do celebrate this holiday, doesn’t mean we should. I believe that Columbus Day should be removed, and perhaps replaced with a new holiday in recognition of the evils he committed, for many reasons.
First, Columbus …show more content…
Columbus is often labeled as the person who “discovered” America, but now we know that’s just incorrect. The native american’s already lived there, and the Vikings, with explorers such as Lief Ericson, landed in the Americas long before the Spanish. Columbus did set forth the “age of discovery”, but when you think about it, that's not really much of an achievement on Columbus’ part. People often idolize Columbus and talk about him as if he was the only person who could have landed in America, but that’s a concept that I completely disagree with. I can say with complete certainty that if it wasn’t Columbus who landed in the America’s someone else would have. All wealthy overseas countries were colonizing in some sense of the word, and most of the them were looking to cross the Atlantic. If it wasn’t Columbus that landed in the new world, it would have been another explorer, whether Spanish or Portuguese or Chinese, all countries that Foner notes had been making trans-atlantic journeys. At the rate at which powers were exploring, the eastern world finding North America was inevitable. The bottom line is that if it wasn’t Columbus put as leader of the Spanish exploration, someone else would have been, and if that person hadn’t landed in the “new world” another person would have. Was Columbus influential? Absolutely. But worthy of celebration and merely influential aren’t the same things and as a nation we shouldn’t be treating them as such. To go further, another commonly cited achievement of Columbus’ is the Columbian Exchange, and it's often talked about as an incredible thing that he did, but it shouldn’t be. As much good as the Columbian Exchange did for countries in the old world, it did horrible things to the new world. The Columbian Exchange was the result of the old world and the new world mixing, causing an
Columbus Day
Every year on the second Monday of October, we celebrate Columbus Day, a day which commemorates the explorer Christopher Columbus’s so called “discovery” of the new world. However, just because we do celebrate this holiday, doesn’t mean we should. I believe that Columbus Day should be removed, and perhaps replaced with a new holiday in recognition of the evils he committed, for many reasons.
First, Columbus …show more content…
Columbus is often labeled as the person who “discovered” America, but now we know that’s just incorrect. The native american’s already lived there, and the Vikings, with explorers such as Lief Ericson, landed in the Americas long before the Spanish. Columbus did set forth the “age of discovery”, but when you think about it, that's not really much of an achievement on Columbus’ part. People often idolize Columbus and talk about him as if he was the only person who could have landed in America, but that’s a concept that I completely disagree with. I can say with complete certainty that if it wasn’t Columbus who landed in the America’s someone else would have. All wealthy overseas countries were colonizing in some sense of the word, and most of the them were looking to cross the Atlantic. If it wasn’t Columbus that landed in the new world, it would have been another explorer, whether Spanish or Portuguese or Chinese, all countries that Foner notes had been making trans-atlantic journeys. At the rate at which powers were exploring, the eastern world finding North America was inevitable. The bottom line is that if it wasn’t Columbus put as leader of the Spanish exploration, someone else would have been, and if that person hadn’t landed in the “new world” another person would have. Was Columbus influential? Absolutely. But worthy of celebration and merely influential aren’t the same things and as a nation we shouldn’t be treating them as such. To go further, another commonly cited achievement of Columbus’ is the Columbian Exchange, and it's often talked about as an incredible thing that he did, but it shouldn’t be. As much good as the Columbian Exchange did for countries in the old world, it did horrible things to the new world. The Columbian Exchange was the result of the old world and the new world mixing, causing an