Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen Read Free Book Online Page A

could see.
    Bartolome de las Casas Traditional verse, updated

Lies My Teacher Told Me
    2. 1493: The True Importance of Christopher Columbus
    In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Christopher Columbus sailed in from the blue. American
     history books present Columbus pretty much without precedent, and they portray him as
     America's first great hero. In so canonizing him, they reflect our national culture.
     Indeed, now that President's Day has combined Washington's and Lincoln's birthdays,
     Columbus is one of only two people the United States honors by name in a national holiday.
     The one date that every school child remembers is 1492, and sure enough, all twelve
     textbooks I surveyed include it. But they leave out virtually everything that is
     important to know about Columbus and the European exploration of the Americas. Mean
     while, they make up all kinds of details to tell a better story and to humanize Columbus
     so that readers will identify with him.
    Columbus, like Christ, was so pivotal that historians use him to divide the past into
     epochs, making the Americas before 1492 “pre-Columbian.” American history textbooks
     recognize Columbus's importance by granting him an average of eight hundred wordstwo and a
     half pages including a picture and a map a lot of space, considering all the material
     these books must cover. Their heroic collective account goes something like this:
    Born in Genoa, Italy, of humble parents, Christopher Columbus grew up to become an
     experienced seafarer. He sailed the Atlantic as far as Iceland and West Africa. His
     adventures convinced him that the world must be round. Therefore the fabled riches of the
     Eastspices, silk, and goldcould be had by sailing west, superseding the overland route
     through the Middle East, which the Turks had closed off to commerce.
    To get funding for his enterprise, Columbus beseeched monarch after monarch in western
     Europe, After at first being dismissed by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, Columbus
     finally got his chance when Queen Isabella decided to underwrite a modest expedition.
    An early draft of this chapter formed the basis of The Truth about Columbus, a “poster hook” for high school students and teachers (New York: The New Press, 1992).
    Columbus outfitted three pitifully small ships, the Nina, the Pinto, and the Santa Maria, and set forth from Spain. The journey was difficult. The ships sailed west into the
     unknown Atlantic for more than two months. The crew almost mutinied and threatened to
     throw Columbus overboard. Finally they reached the West Indies on October 12, 1492.
    Although Columbus made three more voyages to America, he never really knew he had
     discovered a New World. He died in obscurity, unappreciated and penniless. Yet without his
     daring American history would have been very different, for in a sense Columbus made it
     all possible.
    Unfortunately, almost everything in this traditional account is either wrong or
     unverifiable. The authors of history textbooks have taken us on a trip of their own, away
     from the facts of history, into the realm of myth. They and we have been duped by an
     outrageous concoction of lies, half-truths, truths, and omissions, that is in large part
     traceable to the first half of the nineteenth century.
    The textbooks' first mistake is to underplay previous explorers. People from other
     continents had reached the Americas many times before 1492. Even if Columbus had never
     sailed, other Europeans would have soon reached the Americas. Indeed, Europeans may
     already have been fishing off Newfoundland in the 1480s. In a sense Columbus's voyage was not the first but the last “discovery” of the Americas.
     It was epoch-making because of the way in which Europe responded. Columbus's importance is
     therefore primarily attributable to changing conditions in Europe, not to his having
     reached a “new” continent.
    American history textbooks seem