Today marks the 523rd anniversary of the landing of Christopher Columbus (and a whole new set of ideological perspectives) in the Americas, paving the way for a series of events--some wonderful, others disturbing and tragic--that have come to be known as "American History." SO...Happy Indigenous People's Day and/or Columbus Day, depending on your perspective.
Please use your class time to do beautiful work today. Below is a list of the assignments you should be working on. It is quite robust, so hopefully those of you who used their class time effectively last week will be able to reap the rewards. The new reading assignment (Zinn, Chapter 1, "Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress") is not small, so I would definitely recommend getting a big chunk of it done. You won't have time in class tomorrow to read it and answer the questions.
I appreciate all of you!
Your To-Do List for Today...
Due at midnight: Rhetorical Discourse Case Study on Gun Control/Gun Rights
Due at midnight: Project Reflection and DP update
*When you submit, please self-assess on the rubric!
Due Wednesday: Read Chapter 1 of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States: "Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress"
Answer the following questions in your digital comp books.
1. How does Zinn
challenge your previous notions about the “discovery” of America by Christopher
Columbus? How does this version
complicate the dominant ideological tradition of Columbus as our forefather?
2. What is Zinn’s
perspective about the writing of history?
3. Zinn argues that
most history texts pretend that there is such a thing as “The United States”—a
community of people with common interests.
What are the “communities” that Zinn identifies? What “interests” do they share? What “interests” of one group might be in
opposition to an “interest” of another group?
4. If communities
share common interests, did Columbus and Las Casas belong to the same
community? If so, what are their common
interests? (What was Columbus in the
Caribbean for? Las Casas?) If not, what interests separate them into
different communities? Did Las Casas
have more in common ideologically with the Arawaks than he did with Columbus?
5. From what you have
read so far, how would you characterize Howard Zinn’s ideological bias?