Lies My Teacher Told Me By James W. Loewen: An Analysis

     In addition to opening up a New World to Europe and inspiring a spirit of adventure, Columbus’s experience also showed the importance of diversity. Columbus was an Italian, but he learned to sail from the Portuguese, and his trip was funded by the Spanish. He needed the help of several different countries to accomplish what we now know him for today. Conversely, Columbus’s confrontation with the Natives shows how cultures conflict when they do not understand each other. Columbus and his troops massacred thousands of

Columbus has always been portrayed as an enlightened, peaceful explorer who “discovered” a new world, and became friends with the native people. Howard Zinn’s view on Columbus’s encounter with the natives is an entirely different perspective. Zinn describes Columbus as a man who is willing to torture and kill others to be able to accomplish what he wants; in this case he wanted to obtain gold and other resources to take back with him to Spain.

High school history textbooks are seen, by students, as presenting the last word on American History. Rarely, if ever, do they question what their text tells them about our collective past. According to James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, they should be. Loewen has spent considerable time and effort reviewing history texts that were written for high school students. In Lies, he has reviewed twenty texts and has compared them to the actual history. Sadly, not one text measures up to the author's expectation of teaching students to think. What is worse, though, is that students come away from their classes without "having developed the ability to think coherently about social

Christopher Columbus. The brilliant mariner. The discoverer of the New World, hailed as a hero, awarded his own holiday in the United States. However, he may not have been the morally-upright man many people have made him out to be. According to Document C (a secondary source published by the History Channel), Columbus, on his very first day in the New World, captured and enslaved six of the peaceful Taino natives, later writing in his journal that he thought that they would make excellent servants. In addition to this act of hostility towards the Taino, Columbus and his men brought with them a slew of highly infectious diseases that decimated local populations. Less than six decades later, there was barely a few hundred Taino left compared

Beyond the fact that Columbus was not the first person to discover the Americas, he was the man that brought about European civilization to America and their fascination with conquering a new world. His wrong doings, which include, letting his crew rape, pillage and plunder the Bahamas, should not outweigh the good that coming to America brought for us as Americans who, without European influence may not have progressed quite as far or in the circumstances we did. As with the Colombian exchange that was brought about by Columbus’ venture to the Americas it is a box of good and evil. With the disease and captured indigenous people, the Columbian Exchange brought a trade of new plants and animals and ideas to further

In April of 1492, before he came to the New World for the first time, Columbus negotiated a contract with the King and Queen of Spain. This contract entitled him to ten percent of all profits he earned in the New World. Not only did Columbus come for the profits, but he also came to convert the native people to Catholicism. Columbus kept a journal while on his expeditions to the New World, he wrote “They [the Indians] would make fine servants…With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.” Columbus knew the power and influence that he had over the Indians and this statement provides evidence that Columbus enslaved the Indians.

On Columbus’s journey to find riches he stumbled upon a new land and in this land there were people different from him.He used violence and slavery to deal with them, thinking only that the natives were “obstacles.” HE had several of them taken because he thought they would be good “servants.” Christopher Columbus forced the natives, “Indians” as he called them, to join a religion they had never heard of or followed before. And And by coming to the “New World” he brought diseases with him. Giving that

For most of American history, Christopher Columbus was regarded as a hero by all American people. However, in recently light, people have started to question the actions of their idoled founder, and scrutinize his treatment of the native people. His “discovery” of the Americas certainly is nothing to downplay as it expanded the borders of enlightened thinking, but the subhuman ways he treated the Native Americans is also impossible to ignore. While his exploration resulted in the development of the modern Americas, were all his means necessary and worth it? Christopher Columbus was an expert navigator who sparked the collide of the known world to a whole new land of opportunity; however, the merger resulted in mass genocide from inexcusable

One specific group of the indigenous people associated with Columbus were the Arawaks. The first time Columbus saw the Arawaks, he only wanted them to tell him where the gold was and decided to take some of them to find out. He didn't care what he did as long as he found what he was looking for. The Europeans didn't see the indigenous people as humans and they were treated exactly as if they weren’t. They were The Arawaks wanted to defend themselves but their weapons were nothing compared to the Europeans advanced weapons. They began killings amongst themselves in order to protect each other from the cruel ways of the English. Even mothers began killing their children. This all caused their population to decrease by the

Not only did Christopher Columbus change lives of the Europeans but he also changed the lives of the Indians, the Africans, and even future Americans. In 1492 Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic Ocean in search of the West Indies. On his voyage he land on what is now know as the Bahamas, then went to cuba, and then landed on the Hispaniola. Columbus gave them the name Indians because he thought he was in the Indies. War was not always the case with Native Indians, in fact on the Hispaniola there was peace. However, Columbus brought not only men but he also brought the plague. This drastically killed thousands upon thousands of Native Indians. So many Native Indians were dying that Columbus had to request King Ferdinand to give them protection. Christopher Columbus still had to face another problem. Since many of the Native Americans were dying, he had to find someone to do their work load. He decided to go to Africa, and bring Africans over to work the fields. This was the start of slavery. Christopher Columbus didn’t find the water route to Asia like he intended to, but with the 4 voyages Columbus found something, he found a “new world.”

Christopher Columbus arrived in a new land, occupied by Indians, that was very distinct and different from their old home. As stated in Columbus' letter to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, the land in the New World was described as beautiful, full of the most fertile farms and fields, and helpful for both pasturage and construction. It consisted of unique species, fruit and supplies which were much needed by the visitors. Columbus knew he was in an outstanding place to make new discoveries and create what could be the next way of life. The Indians greeted the Europeans with kindness and peace. They were full of affection towards the visitors, trading valuable treasures for trifles while Columbus and his crew were convincing them to become Christians and support the King and Queen of

Christopher Columbus was an explorer that landed in the Americas in 1492. On his second voyage Columbus traveled to Haiti to colonize the area. In Haiti Columbus kidnapped 1,600 Arawak Indians the native people of Hispaniola. He brought 500 of them back to Spain and forced another 500 to work in gold mines and plantations in the colony. An updated version of the traditional verse states, "In fourteen hundred and ninety three, Columbus stole all he could see." Columbus' main motivation for exploration was gold. He ransacked the tribes in Haiti and demanded everything they had including food, gold, and cotton. If the natives resisted the Europeans they would be brutally punished. Along with stealing material things, Columbus also stole the lives of Native Americans. Due to his arrival in Hispaniola the Taino population rapidly decreased due to warfare, forced labor, starvation and disease. Most textbooks leave out Columbus' exploitation of the native people. Instead they create myths to make Columbus' story "better or more relatable" and hide the horrible truth of the past. By creating these myths authors support a Eurocentric view of the discovery of America.

First of all, Columbus used violence. He lacked respect for the indigenous people he encountered. He also forced the so called “Indians,” to be Christians. The third thing Christopher Columbus did, was spread diseases from one place, to another, from his different interactions.

People may try to argue that nobody would know about the Native Americans if Columbus did not “discover” them. If Columbus did not discover the Native Americans, more people would probably know about them because around 8 million of them would not have died. Though Christopher Columbus praised the nature he “worked so hard to discover”, he failed to mention the people there for obvious reasons. In his second letter to the king and queen of Spain, our preconceptions about what kind of person he was is confirmed. He acted entitled and somewhat rude towards the royals. If that was how he treated his superiors that funded his trip, you can only imagine how he spoke to the natives.

Instead of the Europeans being the victims in the so called “savage” attacks of the American natives, European sailors slowly but surely changed the native’s way of life and society, which caused the extreme acts and violence of the many native groups. The Columbian Encounter began in 1492, when Columbus and crew discovered land after a long five week voyage at sea. Axtell explains that the word “encounter” was an agreement by both parties, Europeans and natives, but in actuality, the new discovery of both the Old and New worlds to each other was mostly initiated by the Europeans that was able to happen on the natives own land. Axtell also explains how this “forced the natives...into a defensive mode” (Axtell