Columbus, mass murderer, Thanksgiving....

[Gob]

A Somerville principal has opened fire on cherished American holidays, blasting legendary explorer Christopher Columbus for “atrocities” and saying “we need to be careful” about celebrating Thanksgiving in a scathing email to teachers — who are already under orders not to let the kids dress up for Halloween.

“When we were young we might have been able to claim ignorance of the atrocities that Christopher Columbus committed against the indigenous peoples,” wrote Kennedy School Principal Anne Foley. “We can no longer do so. For many of us and our students celebrating this particular person is an insult and a slight to the people he annihilated. On the same lines, we need to be careful around the Thanksgiving Day time as well.”

Mayor Joseph Curtatone said, “She raises a fair point. History is messy.” School Superintendent Tony Pierantozzi said her “intention is to be very, very sensitive to all of the many, many cultures” of Somerville. Foley said she just wanted to “open up a conversation.”

“When I grew up, I was taught from a very European perspective of history and it was both embarrassing and enlightening to me when I learned other perspectives,” Foley said. “I want our children and families to know that we are aware of those other perspectives.”

When pressed on the “atrocities” of Columbus and misdeeds of the Pilgrims, Foley said she wasn’t going to “dwell on that.”

“I have friends who are Native American. I have friends from the islands in the Caribbean. I’ve heard their perspective on different things that we say and do — their versions of history,” said Foley.

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/column ... on=comment

Not just the UK then?

[loCAtek]

Wot? Thanksgiving is not a festival of Columbus, nor was he a conquistador like the Spanish or British imperialists.

PC reactionaries are not exactly historians- What's Halloween got to do with this?

[dales]

To blazes with Columbus!

Leif Erikson Day is an annual American observance occurring on October 9. It honors Leif Ericson (Old Norse: Leifr Eiríksson or the Norwegian: "Leiv Eiriksson"), the Norse explorer who brought the first Europeans known to have set foot in North America.[1]

[Gob]

Madoc or Madog ab Owain Gwynedd was, according to folklore, a Welsh prince who sailed to America in 1170, over three hundred years before Christopher Columbus's voyage in 1492.

According to the story, he was a son of Owain Gwynedd who took to the sea to flee internecine violence at home. The legend evidently evolved out of a medieval tradition about a Welsh hero's sea voyage, only allusions to which survive. However, it attained its greatest prominence during the Elizabethan era, when English and Welsh writers made the claim that Madoc had come to the Americas as a ploy to assert prior discovery, and hence legal possession, of North America by the Kingdom of England.

The story remained popular in later centuries, and a later development asserted that Madoc's voyagers had intermarried with local Native Americans, and that their Welsh-speaking descendants still lived somewhere on the American frontier. These "Welsh Indians" were accredited with the construction of a number of natural and man-made landmarks throughout the American Midwest, and a number of white travellers were inspired to go and look for them.

[rubato]

A wealth of physical evidence from Leif Erikson's trip has been found in Newfoundland, confirming its accuracy.

yrs,
rubato

[quaddriver]

Im not seeing this columbus/thanksgiving connection. Heck fire, columbus' compass was broken, he was quite a ways off

[dgs49]

More sophomoric attempts to denigrate history.

Columbus was a courageous explorer who opened up the New World to a continent that didn't know it existed. He was a product of his culture, as we all are. He thought the indigenous heathens were sub-human, ripe for exploitation.

Thanksgiving is a time when we celebrate God's bounty, and out ability to exploit it. There is nothing to be gained by re-examining the actions and motives of the Pilgrims from a 21st Century "progressive" viewpoint.

It is arrogant and fatuous to presume to evaluate the virtue of others who lived in different times and cultures. Which is why sophomoric self-appointed scholars take such delight in doing it.

[Scooter]

Columbus was an idiot who was very lucky to have run into a land mass that no one knew to exist. The calculations by which he believed he could sail west to reach Asia were based on a series of misapprehensions which taken together meant that the actual distance exceeded his estimate by over 500%. If he had not found the Americas by complete accident, it would not have been much longer before an entry in the ship log reported that the crew had eaten him to delay starvation.

[dales]

THANKSGIVING!?!?

[loCAtek]

He thought the indigenous heathens were sub-human, ripe for exploitation.

He thought they were Indians- as in: indigenous of India, which was why he called them Indians. There was already civilized trade with the Indies and China, Columbus was just trying to establish a new trade route to Asia.

It was the later Spaniards, who stove to exploit the land and the natives.

[Long Run]

Loved the Sopranos episode where Tony and the gang get ready to do battle with their Native American cohorts over whether Columbus Day should be celebrated.

[Rick]

I don't work at a bank.

I don't get that day off...