1. Frischer, Susan. “Columbus Day Debates Reflect Cultural Diversity.” Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century, 1971-2000. Ed. Robert F. Gorman. Hackensack: Salem, 2008. n. pag. Salem Online. Web. 01 Oct. 2017. <http://online.salempress.com>.

Excerpt: “The commemoration of a historic event often tells more about the people doing the commemorating than it does about the event itself. The Columbus quincentennial was characterized by increased historical awareness and multicultural sensitivity. What about Columbus Day celebrations of the past? How did Columbus attain the hero status that is now widely believed to be so undeserved?”

2. Fernandez-Armesto, F. “Columbus–Hero or Villain?.” History Today, vol. 42, no. 5, May 1992, p. 4. EBSCOhost

            Excerpt: “Like Columbus-the-hero, Columbus-the-villain is also an old character in a long literary tradition. Most of the denunications of him written in his day have not survived but we can judge their tenor from surviving scraps. The usual complaints against servants of the Castilian crown in the period are made: he acted arbitrarily in the administration of justice; he exceeded his powers in enforcing his authority; he usurped royal rights by denying appeal to condemned rebels; he alienated crown property without authorisation; he deprived privileged colonists of offices or perquisites; he favoured his own family or friends; he lined his pockets at public expense. In the course of what seems to have been a general campaign against Genoese employees of the crown in the late 1490s, he was ‘blamed as a foreigner’ and accused of ‘plotting to give the island of Hispaniola to the Genoese’.”

3.”Christopher Columbus: Hero or villain?” New Haven Register [New Haven, CT], 9 Oct. 2012. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=nysl_ro_pmhs&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA304775484&it=r&asid=c82b5b6efc534fb8a3e72fe682a6c0dd. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.

Excerpt:  “”He was not the first person to discover the Americas,” said Provenzano. “Columbus got lost on his way to India where he was hoping to look for gold and spices. And when he got to the Americas he did everything he could to get those resources — that meant massacres and torture. That really resulted in about 80 percent annihilation of indigenous people and set the tone for the African slave trade.” Provenzano said he would like to see a different day, one dedicated to the indigenous people of the Americas, in Columbus Day’s place.”

4. “Different Feelings On Columbus Around The World.” Tell Me More, 11 Oct. 2010. Opposing Viewpoints in Context, link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A239106192/OVIC?u=nysl_ro_pmhs&xid=9c120e66. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.

Excerpt: “The impetus for the change, for the growth of this counter-narrative that Chavez really popularized comes about in the days leading up to 1992. Spain was celebrating. Of course, everybody was celebrating. This was the 500-year anniversary. But Spain was sponsoring World’s Fair in 1992, and there was a lot of pomposity about the patriotism of this particular day. And the groups in Mexico City and many cities throughout Latin America had started to come together around protesting this holiday. So the real growth of this counter-narrative comes at about 1987 or 1988.”

5. Zinn, Howard, and Anthony Arnove. A People’s History of the United States. Harper Perennial, 2015. <http://library.uniteddiversity.coop/More_Books_and_Reports/Howard_Zinn-A_peoples_history_of_the_United_States.pdf>

Note: “Because of Columbus’s exaggerated report and promises, his second expedition was given seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men. The aim was clear: slaves and gold. They went from island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indians as captives. But as word spread of the Europeans’ intent they found more and more empty villages. On Haiti, they found that the sailors left behind at Fort Navidad had been killed in a battle with the Indians, after they had roamed the island in gangs looking for gold, taking women and children as slaves for sex and labor.”

6. Wright, Mark Antonio. “Christopher Columbus and the New World.” National Review, 12 Oct. 2015, <www.nationalreview.com/article/425389/christopher-columbus-and-new-world-mark-antonio-wright>

Note: Writing in The Atlantic in 1992, in the run-up to the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s landfall on the island of San Salvador in the Bahamas, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. noted that the “great hero of the nineteenth century seems well on the way to becoming the great villain of the twenty-first.” The accusations were heavy. “Columbus, it is now charged,” Schlesinger continued, “far from being the pioneer of progress and enlightenment, was in fact the pioneer of oppression, racism, slavery, rape, theft, vandalism, extermination, and ecological desolation.”

1. Armesto, Fernandez F. MasterFILE Premier [EBSCO], May 1992, web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?vid=22&sid=198d83a2-028a-4bb5-8c41-8c1a8a6db702%40sessionmgr104&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=f5h&AN=9205183670.

“First, there was the issue of Columbus’ activities as a slaver. Coming from a Genoese background, Columbus never understood Spanish scruples about slavery, which had been characterised as an unnatural estate in the most influential medieval Spanish law-code, and which the monarchs distrusted as a form of intermediate lordship that reserved subjects from royal jurisdiction. Castilian practice was, perhaps, the most fastidious in Christendom. The propriety of slavery was acknowledged in the cases of captives of just war and offenders against natural law; but such cases were reviewed with rigour and in the royal courts, at least, decision-making tended to be biased in favour of the alleged slaves.”

“Slavery was only one among many ills which Columbus was said to have inflicted on the natives. The current myth incriminates him with ‘genocide’. In the opinion of one soi-disant Native American spokesman, ‘he makes Hitler look like a juvenile delinquent’. This sort of hype is doubly unhelpful: demonstrably false, it makes the horrors of the holocaust seem precedented and gives comfort to Nazi apologists by making ‘genocide’ an unshocking commonplace.”

2. Bigelow, Bill. “Once upon a Genocide: Christopher Columbus in Children’s Literature.” Social Justice, vol. 19, no. 2 (48), 1992, pp. 106–121. JSTOR, JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/29766680.

“Yet behind this tale of courage, adventure and “discovery” is the gruesome reality. For Columbus, land was real estate and it didn’t matter to him that other people were already living there; if he “discovered” it, he took it. If he needed guides or translators, he kidnaped them. If his men wanted women, he captured sex slaves. If the indigenous people resisted, he countered with vicious dogs, hangings and mutilations. On his second voyage, desperate to show his royal patrons a return on their investment, Columbus rounded up some 1,500 Taino Indians on the island of Hispaniola and chose 500 as slaves to be shipped back to Spain and sold. As one of the Spanish colonists wrote, the remaining Indians “rushed in all directions like lunatics, women dropping and abandoning infants in the panic, running for miles without stopping, fleeing across mountains and rivers.” Slavery didn’t show a profit as almost all the slaves died en route to Spain or soon after their arrival. Thus, Columbus decided to concentrate on the search for gold. Nonetheless, he wrote, “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.” AS for gold, Columbus ordered every Taino 14 years and over to deliver a regular quote. Those who failed were punished by having their hands chopped off. In a mere two years of the Columbus regime possible a quarter of a million people died. Yes, in 1942 Columbus sailed the ocean blue ­­­­­­– but he did much more than that.”

3. Handlin, Lilian. Art & Architecture Source, web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?vid=1&sid=56b82a42-ac23-4bc7-8b1c-aec04314f935%40sessionmgr103&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=503167718&db=asu.

“Winsor’s Columbus failed on all counts, being a deceitful, canting hypocrite who took the Lord’s name in vain to practice enormous cruelties. “No child of any age ever did less to improve his contemporaries and few ever did more to prepare the way for such improvements. There is no more conspicuous example in history of a man showing the path and losing it.” “The mines which Columbus went to seek were hard to find, the people he went to save for Christ were easy to exterminate.” He sent home “vessels laden with reeking cargoes of flesh,” as befitted a power-hungry, greedy haggler in the marketplace. “His discovery was a blunder, his blunder was a new world, the new world is his monument. Its discoverer might have been its father, he proved to be its despoiler.” This Columbus was a throwback to the Inquisition and the auto-da-fe, subject to hallucinations excusable only under the plea of insanity.”