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

to understand the need to cover social changes in Europe
     in the years leading up to 1492. They point out that history passed the Vikings by and
     devote several pages to the reasons Europe was ready this time “to take advantage of the
     discovery” of America, as one textbook puts it. Unfortunately, none of the textbooks
     provides substantive analysis of the major changes that prompted the new response.
    All but one of the twelve books I examined begin the Columbus story with Marco Polo and
     the Crusades. (American Adventures starts simply with Columbus.) Here Is their composite account of what was happening in
     Europe:
    “Life in Europe was slow paced.” “Curiosity about the rest of the world was at a low
     point.” Then, “many changes took place in Europe during the 500 years before Columbus's
     discovery of the Americas in 1492,”
    “People's horizons gradually widened, and they became more curious about the world beyond
     their own localities.” “Europe was stirring with new ideas. Many Europeans were filled
     with burning curiosity. They were living in a period called the Renaissance.” “What
     started Europeans thinking new thoughts and dreaming new dreams? A series of wars called
     the Crusades were partly responsible.” “The Crusades caused great changes in the ways that
     Europeans thought and acted.” “The desire for more trade quickly spread.” “The old trade
     routes to Asia had always been very difficult.”
    The accounts resemble each other closely. Sometimes different textbooks even use the same
     phrases. Overall, the level of scholarship is discouragingly low, perhaps because their
     authors are more at home in American history than European history. They provide no real
     causal explanations for the age of European conquest. Instead, they argue for Europe's
     greatness in transparently psychological terms“people grew more curious.” Such arguments
     make sociologists smile: we know that nobody measured the curiosity level in Spain in 1492
     or can with authority compare it to the curiosity level in, say, Norway or Iceland in 1005.
    Here is the account in The American Way.
    What made these Europeans so daring was their belief in themselves. The people of Europe
     believed that human beings were the highest form of life on earth. This was the
     philosophy, or belief, of humanism. It was combined with a growing interest in technology or tools and their uses. The
     Europeans believed that by using their intelligence, they could develop new ways to do
     things.
    This is not the place to debate the precepts or significance of humanism, a philosophical
     movement that clashed with orthodox Catholicism. In any case, humanism can hardly explain
     Columbus, since he and his royal sponsors were devout orthodox Catholics, not humanists. The American Way tells us, nonetheless, that Columbus “had the humanist's belief that people could do
     anything if they knew enough and tried hard enough.” This is Columbus as the Little Engine
     That Could!
    Several textbooks claim that Europe was becoming richer and that the new wealth led to
     more trade. Actually, as the historian Angus Calder has pointed out, “Europe was smaller
     and poorer in the fifteenth century than it had been in the thirteenth,” owing in part to
     the bubonic plague.
    Some teachers still teach what their predecessors taught me forty years ago: that Europe
     needed spices to disguise the taste of bad meat, but the bad Turks cut off the spice
     trade. Three booksThe American Tradition, Land of Promise, and The American Wayrepeat this falsehood. In the words of Land of Promise, “Then, after 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Turks, trade with the East all but
     stopped.” But A. H. Lybyer disproved this statement in 1915! Turkey had nothing to do with
     the development ofnew routes to the Indies. On the contrary, the Turks had every reason to
     keep the old Eastern Mediterranean