Word: columbus
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...CROWN OF COLUMBUS...
...guess where these two polar-opposite paragons teach. You got it: Dartmouth, veddy Ivy League but founded as a prep school for New Hampshire Indian lads. Their common link, besides furtive lust, is Christopher Columbus. She has been asked for an article on the quincentennial of his first voyage from her people's perspective. He is laptopping an epic poem on the great explorer. In pursuit of Columbus' lost diary, Roger and Vivian fly to Eleuthera in the Bahamas as guests of a junk-bond financier on the lam. This quasi Milken thinks Vivian knows the secret burial site...
Nowhere is that point illustrated more starkly than in Columbus, Ga. Since Georgia adopted its current death-penalty law in 1973, four white men in the Columbus district attorney's office have decided which murders will be prosecuted as capital crimes. To date, 78% of their cases have involved white victims, although blacks are the victims in 65% of the community's homicides. Among the other factors that may create greater sympathy for a white victim or defendant: all four judges in the state superior court, which tries capital cases, are white, and often the juries are all white, although...
American history, as it was taught to us, began with Columbus' "discovery" of an apparently unnamed, unpeopled America, and moved on to the Pilgrims serving pumpkin pie to a handful of grateful red-skinned folks. College expanded our horizons with courses called Humanities or sometimes Civ, which introduced us to a line of thought that started with Homer, worked its way through Rabelais and reached a poignant climax in the pensees of Matthew Arnold. Graduate students wrote dissertations on what long-dead men had thought of Chaucer's verse or Shakespeare's dramas; foreign languages meant French or German...
...families and neighborhoods reinforced the dogma of monoculturalism. In our heads, most of us '50s teenagers carried around a social map that was about as useful as the chart that guided Columbus to the "Indies." There were "Negroes," "whites" and "Orientals," the latter meaning Chinese and "Japs." Of religions, only three were known -- Protestant, Catholic and Jewish -- and not much was known about the last two types. The only remaining human categories were husbands and wives, and that was all the diversity the monocultural world could handle. Gays, lesbians, Buddhists, Muslims, Malaysians, Mormons, etc. were simply...