Word: columbus
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...done more to change the course of human history than Christopher Columbus." That was the conclusion of Edward Channing's 1905 classic, History of the United States. To generations of American schoolchildren, Columbus has been the all-time heroic figure portrayed by Channing and, more romantically, by Washington Irving in 1828: "a man of great and inventive genius" whose "ambition was lofty and noble." No wonder that Pope Pius IX wanted to make the discoverer of America a saint, or that more places in the English- speaking world are named for the Admiral of the Ocean Sea than...
...sailed the ocean blue in 1492 is a downright dirty word. Russell Means, the Native American activist, says the explorer "makes Hitler look like a juvenile delinquent." In a new revisionist biography, The Conquest of Paradise (Knopf; $24.95), author and environmentalist Kirkpatrick Sale portrays Cristobal Colon (to name Columbus correctly) as a grasping fortune hunter, a mediocre sailor and an incompetent governor of Spain's New World colonies, whose legacy to the Indians he "discovered" was rapine, servitude and death...
...Latin America, the 500th anniversary of Columbus' first voyage to the New World is still two years away, but already it is marred by snappish and divisive quarrels over the meaning of the event. Native American zealots like Means see Columbus as a precursor of exploitation and conquest. Hispanic Americans want to use the quincentenary to stress the glories of Spanish culture in the New World. Environmentalists see the anniversary as a reminder that the arrival of Europeans meant the despoliation of the New World and as a potential inspiration to modern-day Americans to save what is left...
...Columbus anniversary has also sparked religious battles. In May the governing board of the predominantly Protestant National Council of Churches resolved that the quincentenary should be a time for penitence rather than jubilation. "For the descendants of the survivors of the subsequent invasion, genocide, slavery, 'ecocide' and exploitation of the wealth of the land," read the resolution, "a celebration is not an appropriate observance of this anniversary." Mario Paredes, executive director of the Northeast Hispanic Catholic Center, called the council's statement a "racist depreciation of the heritages of most of today's American peoples, especially Hispanic...
...were caught by surprise. They had hoped to remove Arizona from the list of three states (the others are New Hampshire and Montana) that do not observe the civil rights leader's birthday as a holiday. A major reason for the rejection: voter confusion. One proposal called for trading Columbus Day for the King holiday; it lost 3 to 1. The other would have simply added King's birthday to the list of state holidays; it failed by only 17,000 out of 1 million votes cast...