Word: hispaniola
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...about a thousand years the peaceful people known as the Taino had thrived in modern-day Cuba, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and many other islands in the Lesser and Greater Antilles. But less than 30 years after Columbus' three ocean-crossing ships dropped anchor off the island of Hispaniola, the Taino would be destroyed by Spanish weaponry, forced labor and European diseases. Unlike their distant cousins, the Inca, Aztecs and Maya, the Taino left no pyramids or temples--no obvious signs that they had ever existed. Just about all that remains of their culture is the handful of Taino...
...Within 25 years of Columbus' first landing, several million Taino Indians were killed on the island of Hispaniola. Within a century, the entire race had been exterminated," read one of the flyers passed out at the vigil...
Well, it's time to shatter that idealized myth. When Columbus arrived on Cuba, Hispaniola and other islands in the Caribbean he instituted shockingly cruel and genocidal policies which rapidly decimated the populations of indigenous Arawak Indians. He was also a slave trader, and his own words condemn him. Furthermore, the claim that he "discovered" the New World is dubious--he accidentally came into contact with a culture that had existed for hundreds if not thousands of years...
...Hispaniola alone, war and slavery had killed 200,000 Arawaks, or 80 percent of the original population, by conservative estimates. Eventually, all of the natives were wiped out. Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison has written that the "cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide...
...iconoclastic biography is as one-sided as a lawyer's brief, but the evidence of European disdain for the conquered Eden and its inhabitants is hard to challenge. Between 1492 and 1514, as a result of disease and accumulated atrocities, the native Taino population on the island of Hispaniola shrank from an estimated 8 million to 28,000. By 1560 the Taino were extinct...