How We Started

October 2009

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“Hare We Go” (1951)

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Texts We Analyzed

Photos of Columbus monument on Columbus Boulevard in Philadelphia (1992)

Images and descriptions of rotunda doors at the US Capitol (1855-61)

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“The first landing of Columbus in the new world” (c1876, Library of Congress)

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Photos of Columbus statue in Philadelphia’s Marconi Park (Library of Congress)

Texts We Analyzed (continued)

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• Video clip of Bugs Bunny cartoon “Hare We Go” (1951)
• Creating America (2000) textbook [provided by our school district]
• Adapted text of W. Irving’s (1833) The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus [at Library of Congress]
• Excerpt about W. Irving in The Greatest Stories Never Told (2003)
• Encounter, a fictional children’s book about Columbus from perspective of Taíno child by Jane Yolen (1992)
• Journal excerpt written by Columbus (in Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States)
• Online history of Haiti, “Deep Look: The Taínos?” at discoverhaiti.com
• Chart of maritime contact with North Americans in Lies My Teacher Told Me (2007)
• “Taíno History and Taínos Today” webpage about Puerto Rican culture
• “Examining the Reputation of 
Christopher Columbus” essay by J. Weatherford (in The Baltimore Evening Sun, 1989)

Things I Am Wondering About (Then and Now)

1. Why spend so much time with Columbus? Was it worth it? Could we have spent more time on Indigenous peoples in the Americas? What about connections to people today (beyond monuments)?
2. What about more local perspectives on the Taíno and Columbus?
3. What about the more recent history of why some Americans were so interested in venerating Columbus?
4. Could we have focused on abstract representations in monuments? Representations beyond written texts? (art)

Example Chronicling America Searches...

***I haven’t read these thoroughly and am including them only as an example of the kinds of things you might find when searching historical newspapers.

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• Christopher Columbus statue (between 1820 and 1910)
• Fisherman & Farmer [Edenton, NC]. September 16, 1892, p. 2. The Columbus Statue: The Gift of Italy Arrives in the Port of New York
• Lancaster [PA] Daily Intelligencer. December 09, 1889, p. 2. The World’s Fair: The Plan Agreed Upon for an Exposition in Washington.
• Italians (between 1820 and 1900)
• The [NY] Sun. June 28, 1891, Page 23. Italy’s Invading Army.
• The Topeka [KS] State Journal. May 24, 1895, Page 10. Italian Immigrants: Professor Ordini Looks After Them at Ellis Island.

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Some Additional Resources

• Bigelow, B. (2008). Discovering Columbus. In A people’s history for the classroom (pp. 15-20). Rethinking Schools.
• Library of Congress. (2007). Exploring the Early Americas: Columbus and the Taíno.
• Monte-Sano C., De La Paz, S, & Felton, M. (2014). On integrating history and literacy. In Reading, thinking, and writing about history: Teaching argument writing to diverse learners in the Common Core classroom, Grades 6-12 (pp. 1-14). Teachers College Press.

Things I Would Emphasize to Students Now, a Decade Later

I didn’t directly name:

• sourcing (asking who wrote this, why, and what biases they might have),
• contextualizing (asking when this was written and what else was going on at the time)
• corroborating (comparing texts to one another)

I didn’t emphasize that sources can be both primary and secondary.

We could have better explored: What happened in the 1490s?

How and why did people later depict this time period as they did?