On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus made landfall on an island in what's now the Bahamas, and a holiday was eventually born.
Here's a fun thing about today that a lot of people don’t know: Columbus never set foot in what would become the United States. Not once. He made four voyages across the Atlantic, and he landed in the Bahamas, Cuba, Hispaniola (the island that's now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and poked around the coasts of Central and South America. He likely never came within a thousand miles of what would become the United States.
So the country that has spent the last few decades arguing over whether we should have parades or tear down statues is actually a country he didn't discover, didn't visit, and didn't know existed.
That's a version of Columbus I never got in school. All I got was the rhyme-discoverer version. "In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue." He was a brave explorer who discovered America, the end.
(I may have been one of the last generation to learn that version of him.)
Now the pendulum's swung so hard the other way that kids get the total inversion of what I learned.
In this one, Columbus isn't an explorer who did some genuinely brave and genuinely terrible things—he's a one-dimensional monster, personally responsible for every evil of the next 500 years, and the only acceptable response to his name is to tear something down.
Of course both of these versions are useless. And they're useless in the exact same way: they give kids a cartoon instead of a person.
Plus, it robs them of the chance to know the real Columbus who was actually a pretty interesting guy.
He was a gifted navigator who talked half the monarchs of Europe into funding a voyage everyone told him was suicide, and he was right about the ocean being crossable even though he was wrong about where it would take him. He also turned out to be pretty bad at governing. So bad, in fact, that when word reached Spain about his tyrannical treatment of both natives and Spanish colonists (as well as his general failures as a governor), they sent someone to put him in chains and haul him back to Spain to explain himself.
Both of those things are true. And they were true about the same guy at the same time.
That's history, though.
It's full of people who were brave and cruel, brilliant and wrong, who built things worth keeping and did things worth condemning, usually all at once. And the thing is, kids can handle knowing that. What a kid can't do much with is a cartoon—because the second they figure out the hero version was a lie (and they always figure it out), they assume the villain version must be the truth, and they swing all the way to the other side having learned nothing except that the adults were lying to them.
This is the whole reason we built our America's History series the way we did. We don't give families the pageant version where everyone's a saint, and we don't do the struggle-session version where it's all a big crime scene, either. We tell kids what actually happened, and we trust them to exercise critical thinking and discernment.
For too long, educators have approached Columbus with the idea that kids needed to be either worshipping a myth or resenting a caricature. We just tell them the truth.
Our America’s History Volume 1 runs from the Magna Carta all the way through the early republic, and it does for the whole American story what today should do for Columbus: tells the fair and balanced truth, warts and all, and lets the reader decide what to do with it.
All our history bundles are on sale for Columbus Day.
If you're a parent, grandparent, or teacher who worries that the children you love have only ever been given a caricature-version of history, this is the sale you’ll want to shop.
Because the powers-that-be are thrilled to keep us divided in our ignorance, one of the most powerful weapons we have in our arsenal is the truth that we can teach our kids. Because people who know their history are very hard to manipulate into tribal-minded groupthink.
They become ungovernable in the best way.
— Connor
