Word: columbians
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...year 1892 was an annus mirabilis in the U.S. The best symbol of that was Chicago, a city leveled by fire as recently as 1871 but subsequently bristling with the continent's first cluster of skyscrapers. For the 1893 World's Fair that became known as the World's Columbian Exposition, Daniel Burnham and a panel of America's greatest architects created a gleaming new Exposition city on Lake Michigan. Henry Adams, arriving in the private train car of a Pennsylvania Senator, was struck with a vision of a new America; he returned alone to spend two weeks studying...
...approach 1992, it promises to be an annus not so mirabilis for America -- a strange thing, since we are reaching the end of that American Century launched on the last major Columbian centenary. During the past hundred years, America has exercised a global authority not even Henry Adams could have foreseen. Yet we seem not in the celebrating mood. Chicago turned down the honor of mounting another Columbian Exposition. Our federal commission on the quincentennial floundered in scandal and ineptitude during the six years John Goudie presided over it. The Columbus now being described is a rather bedraggled figure...
...heart of the hubbub lies a fundamental disagreement, not so much about Columbus himself as about the Columbian legacy. What, in other words, did the enigmatic Genoan set in motion when he first reached the New World? In one version of the story, Columbus and the Europeans who followed him brought civilization to two immense, sparsely populated continents, in the process fundamentally enriching and altering the Old World from which they had themselves come...
...charge that Columbus' arrival instigated genocide has become a major weapon in the anti-Columbian arsenal. George Tinker, a Native American who teaches at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, says of the quincentennial plans: "We're talking about celebrating the great benefit to some people brought by the murder of other people." Further to Columbus' discredit, at the bar of contemporary judgment, is his identity as a white European male. Across the U.S., academicians will be jetting to innumerable conferences where they will give papers on the colonial depredations and horrors that Columbus inaugurated. Author Hans Koning...
...story in the Old Testament. In the 18th century, Jean Jacques Rousseau popularized a secular version of that Eden story with his writings about the Noble Savage. And part of his inspiration for this concept came from his knowledge of the New World. Even Sale's anti-Columbian ideas, it seems, owe more to Columbus than some of his readers might imagine...