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This post was originally posted October 8, 2012. We offer some thoughts on reframing the Columbus Day holiday:

Have you ever stopped to think about the implications of celebrating Columbus Day?

While most of us probably grew up associating the holiday with classroom rhymes and mnemonic devices (“In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” etc.), days off from school, or sales at the mall, it’s important to remember what really happened in October of 1492. Columbus Day occupies a dubious spot in our nation’s calendar, ostensibly commemorating both the “discovery” of the Americas by Christopher Columbus and the subsequent destruction and enslavement of countless indigenous people.

Check out this video created by Nu Heightz Cinema filmmakers Carlos Germosen and Crystal Whelan in 2009. In order to garner support for a movement to “reconsider Columbus Day,” Germosen and Whelan collaborated with indigenous organizations and community activists, giving voice to the horrific and painful stories behind the mythology of the holiday.

In fact, there’s been a push to eliminate Columbus Day altogether and replace it with a federal holiday in honor of Native Americans.  Several states, such as Alaska, no longer recognize Columbus Day, or have replaced it with a day honoring indigenous people.

For example, since 1990, South Dakota has celebrated the second Monday of every October as Native American Day. In California, Berkeley replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day in 1992, and in 1998, legislation calling for Native American Day to be celebrated as an official California state holiday on the fourth Friday of every September was also passed. Hawaii also celebrates Discoverers’ Day instead of Columbus Day in order to recognize the Polynesian discovery of the Hawaiian Islands. Many tribal governments have also reclaimed the day as Native American Day, or, like the Navajo Nation, have replaced it with a holiday honoring their own tribe.

Here are two books we found that, like the alternatives listed above, aim to dispel the myths around Columbus Day:

A Coyote Columbus Story, written by Thomas King, a Canadian novelist and broadcaster of Cherokee and Greek descent, and illustrated by Kent Monkman, a Canadian multimedia artist of Cree ancestry. It tells the story using the figure of Coyote, a traditional trickster character who, in King’s retelling, is a girl who loves to play ball!

Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years, edited by Bill Bigelow & Bob Peterson. This collection of essays, articles, poems, teaching ideas, and primary source materials helps educators teach students how to think critically and creatively about the consequences of the arrival of Europeans on the North American continent.

What are some other ways you can think of to observe Columbus Day? Do you have any favorite books or resources that tell the story of Columbus from a Native American perspective? Let us know in the comments below!

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Of the many controversies surrounding the life and legacy of Christopher Columbus, who died on this day 510 years ago, one of the most intriguing but least discussed questions is his true country of origin. For reasons lost in time, Columbus has been identified with unquestioned consistency as an Italian of humble beginnings from the Republic of Genoa. Yet in over 536 existing pages of his letters and documents, not once does the famous explorer claim to have come from Genoa.

The post Where was Christopher Columbus really from? appeared first on OUPblog.

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The list of explorers that changed the way we see the world is vast, so we asked Stewart A. Weaver, author of Exploration: A Very Short Introduction, to highlight some of the most interesting explorers everyone should know more about. The dates provided are the years in which the explorations took place. Let us know if you think anyone else should be added to the list in the comments below.

1. Pytheas of Massalia, 325 B.C.E.: The first known reporter of the arctic and the midnight sun.
   The Greek geographer sailed out of the Bay of Biscay and did not stop until he had rounded the coast of Brittany, crossed the English Channel, and fully circumnavigated the British Isles. Pytheas was an independent adventurer and scientific traveler—the first, for instance, to associate ocean tides with the moon. Whether he made it as far north as Iceland is doubtful, but he somehow knew of the midnight sun and he evidently encountered arctic ice. Even conservative estimates give him credit for some 7,500 miles of ocean travel—an astounding feat for the time and one that justifies Pytheas’s vague reputation as the archetypal maritime explorer.
2. Abu ’Abdallah Ibn Battuta, 1349-1353: The first known crossing of the Sahara Desert
   The greatest of all medieval Muslim travelers was a Moroccan pilgrim who set out for Mecca from his native Tangier in 1325 and did not return until he had logged over 75,000 miles through much of Africa, Arabia, Central Asia, India, and China. He left the first recorded description of a crossing of the Sahara desert, including the only eye-witness reports on such peripheral and then little-known lands as Sudanic West Africa, the Swahili Coast, Asia Minor, and the Malabar coast of India for the better part of a century or more. His journeys included some high adventure and shipwreck worthy of any great explorer.
3. Zheng He 1405-1433: China’s imperial expeditions
   The “Grand Eunuch” and court favorite of the Yongle Emperor of China, Zheng He led seven formidable expeditions through the Indian Ocean. The first voyage alone featured 62 oceangoing junks—each one perhaps ten times the size of anything afloat in Europe at the time—along with a fleet of 225 smaller support vessels, and 27,780 men. With the admiral’s death at sea in 1433, the great fleet was broken up, foreign travel forbidden, and the very name of Zheng He expunged from the records in an effort to erase his example. In 1420 Chinese ships and sailors had no equal in the world. Eighty years later, scarcely a deep-seaworthy ship survived in China.
4. Christopher Columbus, 1492: God, gold, and glory in the discovery of the Americas
   Lured by flawed cartography, Marco Polo’s Travels, the legends of antiquity, and the desire for title and dignity, Columbus weighed anchor on August 3, 1492, in search of a westward route to China and resolved, as he said in his journal, “to write down the whole of this voyage in detail.” From the Canaries, the seasoned navigator picked up the northeast trades that swept his little flotilla directly across the Atlantic in a matter of 33 days. The trans-Atlantic routes he pioneered and the voyages he publicized not only decisively altered European conceptions of global geography; they led almost immediately to the European colonial occupation of the Americas and thus permanently joined together formerly distinct peoples, cultures, and biological ecosystems.
5. Bartolomeu Dias, 1488: The first European to round the Cape of Good Hope
   For six months, Portuguese commander Bartolomeu Dias battled his way south along the coast of Africa against continual storm and adverse currents in search of an ocean passage to India. Finally, unable to do much else, Dias stood out to sea and sailed south-south-west for many days until providentially around 40° south he picked up the prevailing South Atlantic westerlies that carried him eastwards round the southern tip of Africa without his even noticing it. The Indian Ocean was not an enclosed sea; it was accessible from the Atlantic by way of what Dias fittingly called the Cape of Storms and his sponsor, King João of Portugal, named the Cape of Good Hope.
6. James Cook, 1768-1779: The Christopher Columbus of the Pacific Ocean
   James Cook did not in any sense “discover” the Pacific or its island peoples. But he was the first to take full measure of both, to bring order, coherence, and completion to the map of the Pacific, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, and to disclose to the world the broad lineaments of Polynesian cultures. His voyages set a new standard for maritime safety and contributed decisively to the development of astronomy, oceanography, meteorology, and botany and to the founding, in the next century, of ethnology and anthropology. They also did much to integrate Oceania into modern systems of global trade even as they stimulated a fondness for the primitive and the exotic.

David Livingstone, 1856: The first European to transverse sub-Saharan Africa from coast to coast
Born in a one-room tenement in Scotland, this most famous of 19th century explorers had gone to Africa as medical missionary in 1841, but Livingstone’s wanderlust ran ahead of his proselytizing purpose. His sighting of the Zambezi river in June 1851 encouraged a vision of a broad highway of “legitimate commerce” into regions still blighted by the slave trade, and one year later he returned to explore its upper reaches, with the indispensable guidance and cooperation of the indigenous Makololo and other tribes. In May 1856, after years of harrowing travel, he became the first European to traverse sub-Saharan Africa from coast to coast

Nain Singh, 1866-1868: The first cartographer of the Himalayan Mountains
Starting in the winter of 1866, Nain Singh began a two-year trek across the Himalayan Mountains. Known to his British employers as “Pundit No. 1,” Singh surveyed the height and positions of numerous peaks in the Himalayan range, and many of its rivers during his 1,500-mile trek. Recognized by the Royal Geographical Society on his retirement in 1876 as “the man who has added a greater amount of positive knowledge to the map of Asia than any individual of our time,” Singh provided Western explorers the tools to navigate on their own, rather than to rely on local guides.

Roald Amundsen, 1910-1912: The winner of the ‘race to the South Pole’
During his three-year journey through the Northwest Passage beginning in 1903, Roald Amundsen learned to adapt to harsh polar conditions. The Norwegian learned to ski, appreciated the essential role of dogs in polar travel, and adapted to some native Inuit practices. Above all, learning to think small—in terms of ship size and crew—and to travel light , helped him beat his rival explorer, Englishman, Robert F. Scott to the South Pole by over a month. Scott, who considered Amundsen an interloper with a passion for chasing records, died with his four-person crew eleven miles short of their food depot.

Alexander von Humboldt, 1799-1804: Enlightenment scientist and romantic explorer of Latin America
A Prussian geographer, naturalist, and explorer whose five-year expedition through Latin America cast him as a “second Columbus.” Humboldt confirmed the connection of two river systems, the Amazon and the Orinoco, and is most noted for his attempt to climb Chimborazo, then mistakenly thought to be the highest peak in the Americas. A crevasse stopped his team just short of the summit, but at 19,734 feet, they climbed higher than anyone else on record. Sometimes reviled as an example of the explorer as oppressor, one whose travel writing reduced South America to pure nature, drained it of human presence or history, and thus laid it open to exploitation and abuse by European empires, Humboldt has more recently been recovered as an essential inspiration of modern environmentalism.

Leif Eriksson (Son of Eirik the Red), 1001: Northern Europeans’ discovery of America
Bjarni Herjolfsson accidentally triggered the European discovery of America in about 985 when he was blown off course while en route from Norway to Greenland. His adventure stirred an exploratory spirit in his countrymen. Fellow Norseman Leif Eiriksson had no known destination in mind when he set out across the North Atlantic in the year 1001. He sought something new, found it, occupied it, and then returned to tell others. While his journey from Greenland to the “new world” occurred roughly five hundred years before Columbus, it was not immediately celebrated in print and made no lasting cultural impression. Still, Leif’s landfall in “Vinland” led to the first attempt at a permanent European settlement in the Americas at L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland.

Featured image: “Hodges, Resolution and Adventure in Matavai Bay” by William Hodges. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The post The 11 explorers you need to know appeared first on OUPblog.

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As I write this post, Stephen Krensky's Christopher Columbus is ranked at #1 in e-book biographies for children. The paperback edition is ranked at #3 in historical biographies for children.

It was first published in 1991 in Random House's "Step Into Reading" series. At first read, you might think the book is ok, but I want to walk through the book, pausing at certain parts. On one page, we read:

There are people on the island.
Columbus calls them Indians
because he thinks he has reached
the Indies.
He names the island San Salvador.
He says it now belongs to Spain.

On the next page, Krensky writes:

But the island really belongs
to the people who live there.

See? Krensky essentially says "wait up Christopher, you're wrong about that!" Sounds good, doesn't it?

Don't be taken in! It might seem like Krensky is giving us something different from the "Columbus discovered America" myth, but... let's keep reading.

Columbus notices that some of the Indians are wearing what appears to be gold, so he pushes on, to look for gold. He visits other islands and:

He meets more Indians.
Most are helpful and friendly.

Most? Who isn't helpful or friendly to Columbus? And why were they not helpful or friendly? Krensky doesn't say.

Skip ahead a few pages to where Columbus is gonna return to Spain:

The ships are already loaded
with many new kinds of food--
corn, potatoes, peanuts,
papayas, avocados.
Columbus has also forced
six Indians to come with him.
People in Spain have never
seen Indians.

Krensky tells us that Columbus is taking Indians to Spain so people can see them? Why didn't Krensky rebut those last two lines, like he did earlier when he said that the island really belonged to the people who lived there?

Skipping ahead again, Columbus is back in Spain where he "is a hero." The last page is:

For the rest of his life,
Columbus never knows
how truly great
his discovery is.
He has really found a new world--
a world that no one in Europe knew about.
It is called America!

"Discovery"? "[F]ound a new world"??? I can hear defenders say "but Krensky says it was new to people in Europe! Leave poor Krensky (and Columbus) alone, you mean woman! You leftist liberal!"

Does Krensky want kids to feel sorry for Columbus because he didn't (according to Krensky) know how great his "discovery" was?! On one page, in one place, Krensky pushed back on the Columbus myth, but everywhere else? He just told the same-old-story!

Krensky's book, as noted earlier, is in the "Step Into Reading" series. Books like it are ones designed to help kids become independent readers. Christopher Columbus is a "Step 3" book. That means it is for kids in grades 1-3. Becoming an independent reader is a powerful moment in a person's life. Books that help with that process can take on a lot of emotional weight. They did for me, and likely for you, too. Go to the library. Get one that you read. See what sorts of strings it tugs as you turn its pages. The frightening thing is that a reader can also develop emotional attachment to the content of books like this.

Even more frightening is the information I shared at the very top of this post. This is a best selling book. It was first published in 1991 (no doubt to coincide with the 500 year "anniversary" of Columbus "discovery" of the "New World") and it still going strong.

Do you know of a book for independent readers, or a picture book, that honestly presents information about Christopher Columbus? Betsy Bird at SLJ says she's just learned of one that might do a better job of telling readers about Columbus. Due out in January of 2015, we'll have to wait and see.

In the meantime, those of you with older or capable readers can get Thomas King's brilliant Coyote Columbus Story. I recommended it in 2006.

If your child comes home today with coloring sheets of Columbus and you want to push back on what he/she was taught, the Zinn Education Project has an excellent page of resources.

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Earlier this week, a colleague wrote to me about a new picture book about Christopher Columbus. This morning, I was e-talking with Annette Wanamaker, editor of Children's Literature in Education, about an article in CLE about Columbus! I read it right away.

In "The Columbus Myth: Power and Ideology in Picturebooks About Christopher Columbus," Christina M. Desai shares results of her analysis of depictions of Columbus in picturebooks published since 1992. She looked at a representative sample of over 30 books and found that little has changed. Native peoples are still being misrepresented and stereotyped.

She also points to something very troubling:

In her defense of humanities education, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, Nussbaum (2010) warns that, as emphasis on the humanities declines in the U.S., curricula are increasingly designed to advance economic growth. She posits that such curricula will "present national ambition, especially ambition for wealth, as a great good, and will downplay issues of poverty and global accountability" (p. 21). The books examined here certainly exemplify such a curriculum and promote its agenda, by glorifying conquest and profit at the expense of ideals such as human rights and self determination.

That paragraph reminded me of Floca's Locomotive. Though his picture book is about early trains in the US, it is also about conquest and profit at the expense of Native peoples. Locomotive won the Caldecott Medal this year. I found it lacking. Floca responded to my critique.

I think Floca's win and Desai's article tell us how little we've come in terms of a humane society. If you don't have access to Children's Literature in Education, ask your librarian to get a copy of Desai's article. It has a lot to mull over for those of us who read, review, and recommend children's books.

Here's the citation:
Desai, Christina M. (2014). "The Columbus Myth: Power and Ideology in Picturebooks About Christopher Columbus," Children's Literature in Education. DOI: 10.1007/s10583-014-9216-0.

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Note this blog entry contains spoilers about the final two Harry Potter books

It’s a truism that cinematic adaptations often pale besides their literary counterparts. An obvious counterexample is Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner but, off the top of my head, I can’t think of more. For those who’ve only seen the film, it’s well worth reading the Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to see just how different it is, but to explain some elements of the screen version you’d have to gloss over otherwise.

A wonderful thing about a book is that everyone’s idea of it is unique. The reader converts the printed word from the page into a world of their own imagination. How I see the Imperial Palace on Melania in my head, is different from any readers of the Johnny Mackintosh books. Perhaps that’s why film adaptations so often disappoint, as the Director is competing with thousands of movies that have already run within a reader’s head.

There’s no film I can remember that’s disappointed me more that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, directed by David Yates with a screenplay by Steve Kloves. As someone who loves the stories so deeply, it horrifies me that this pairing were also asked to make the double film of the final book. While I think the quality of film-making in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince isn’t terrible (though it is weak), what I can’t fathom were the drastic, totally unnecessary changes to the plot that were introduced, diverting from Rowling’s marvellous story architecture and characterization.

[spoiler alert]

With a long book, why introduce a mad scene where Bellatrix Lestrange destroys The Burrow? Where will they hold the wedding in the next film, or has that been scrapped too?

A more important example was the death of Dumbledore. In the book, Harry is powerless to act, hidden under the invisibility cloak with Dumbledore’s body-bind curse on him. He would do anything to fight to save his pseudo-grandfather figure, and knows all too well the Hogwarts Headmaster is dead when the curse lifts. If the film, Harry is hiding in the background, and chooses simply to watch and not act, perhaps due to some bizarre element of cowardice that Yates and Kloves wanted to introduce into Harry’s character. There are numerous other examples and a lot concerning Dumbledore’s relationship with Harry: in the books, our hero is kept in the dark and has o puzzle things out for himself; according to this film, Harry is Dumbledore’s confidant.

When I write the Johnny Mackintosh books, I confess I sometimes have a secret nod to possible future film adaptations. I know a fair amount about film theory and structure, and sometimes I’ll be particularly proud of a passage because I know how well it would translate onto the big screen. I see the same in Jo Rowling’s writing at times, where she’s gone a little out of her way to write a beautiful, cinematic scene for her directors, knowing how much it would enhance the film. Yates completely ignored this. There ar

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Edwin Danson is a Chartered Surveyor and a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineering Surveyors.  His new book, Weighing the World: The Quest To Measure the Earth, he chronicles the stories of the scientists and scholars who cut their way through the jungles, crossed the arctic tundra, and braved the world’s highest mountains to discover the truth about our Earth.  In the excerpt below we learn how Christopher Columbus discovered the Earth was much, much larger than previously believed.

As the sun rose at the dawn of the sixteenth century, it shone upon a world mostly uncharted, warming newly discovered lands as yet unexplored… In the Old World of the West, the paucity of geographic knowledge had not deterred men from making maps and atlases, many of which were wildly inaccurate and frequently farcical, showing beautifully engraved continents that did not exist and vague, vast landscapes populated with monsters and cannibalistic savages.

Serene seaways promised wide passages through what were impassable icy wastes that, the cosmographers insisted, led to the riches and spices of the Indies. No one knew from where precisely the spices came, nor did they particularly care. In fact, the strange berries and nuts were grown in the glades of remote East Indian islands and shipped by sea to the coasts of India, from where Moghul traders carried them to Arabia. Arab traders then hauled the baggage overland by camel train through burning desserts to the coasts of Levant, where Genoese, Italian, French, and English sea traders imported the expensive and shriveled goods into the greedy markets of Europe.

The rich had been satisfied to purchase their spices and exotic goods from the last man in a long chain of traders, that is, until the Ottoman Turks expanded their empire from the east in the fifteenth century, capturing a swath of land stretching from Athens to the Crimea. With Sultan Bayezid II’s horde of warriors and warlords controlling access to the Danube, Europe’s great trade river, and dominating all of eastern Europe, exacting high tolls on goods and traffic, the flow of spices from Asia dwindled. At this juncture, an ancient, much copied map of the world suddenly became very important.

The map was from Geographia of Claudius Ptolemy (fl. 150 A.D.) made at the library of Alexandria during the second century. Much “improved” by Italian cartographers, the map suggested to a young Italian navigator by the name of Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) that there might be a sea route to Cathay and its exotic spices. Columbus reasoned that, the earth being round, he could bypass the Turkish obstruction simply by sailing west until he reached the exotic east.

When Columbus first spied the New World from his flagship, Santa Maria he knew exactly where he was because he had a sea chart. He had discovered, he was certain, the eastern outliers of fabled Japan, gateway to the spice lands. Unfortunately, his chart was hopelessly wrong…But Columbus did not know this, and there is no reason why he should have. As far as he was concerned, he had been proved right and had found Japan at the very eastern limits of the spice-rich East.

Paolo Toscanelli, a Florentine cosmographer, is supposed to have provided both inspiration and the chart Columbus took with him on his very first voyage of discovery. It was based, for the most part, on Ptolemy’s ancient map of the world, embellished by the salty tales of coastal traders, fishermen, and an “unknown pilot” who had supposedly seen the fabled lands. Ptolemy’s world was the Greek world and was a perfectly round, spherical world. Toscanelli, Columbus, and the natural philosophers of the day accepted this fact almost without question.

From this certain knowledge of a round world, and equipped with the great map, Columbus calculated that his sailing distance west to Japan would be a mere 2,760 miles (4,440 km). In 1492, as his little fleet sailed further and further westward, with no sight of the promised land, Columbus grew increasingly worried, yet he kept his thoughts to himself, confident in his own abilities and having faith in his Florentine map. The crew was frightened and the men were becoming mutinous when, on 12 October (after 36 days at sea), young Juan Rodriguez Ber Mejo saw land from the prow of the Pinta.

When Columbus toted up his sailing distance, he realized that they had gone about 4,500 sea miles (8,230 km), considerably further than his original 2,760 miles; the only conclusion the navigator could infer was that the earth appeared to be a lot larger than everyone thought. A few years later, on his third voyage to the Indies (1498-1500), Columbus made an even stranger discovery.

He was observing the latitude by sighting the Pole Star with his quadrant when something very odd occurred. He was certain he knew where he was from his previous voyages, but the latitude observations appeared to be all wrong.

I found that there between these two straits [the seas between Trinidad and Venezuela], which I have said face each other in a line from north to south, it is twenty six leagues from the one to the other, and I cannot be wrong in this because the calculation was made with a quadrant. In that on the south, which I named la Boca de la Sierpe, I found that at nightfall I had the pole star at nearly five degrees elevation, and in the other on the north, which I named la Boca del Drago, it was almost at seven.

The difference of nearly 2 degrees of latitude for two locations fewer than 70 miles apart could only be explained if the earth, instead of being a perfectly round sphere, had somehow or other manifested some sort of bump near the equator: it was, according to Columbus, deformed.

We might now suggest that the strange anomaly was probably in part the result of his dubious navigational skills and in part to what we would call “atmospheric aberration.” But, in 1498, neither Columbus nor any philosopher of the day was aware that the atmosphere behaves like a giant lens, bending light rays…

Whatever the cause for Columbus’s disconcerting discovery, his thoughts that the earth could be anything other than perfectly round flew in the face of divine perfection; it flaunted the Aristotelian dogma of the church of Rome and challenged the received wisdom of a thousand years. On that starry night in the Caribbean Sea were sown the first heretical seeds of doubt.

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