Attack on Apalachicola River. The fort had provided home and safety to more than 300 African and Choctaw families. Painting by Jackson Walker, Museum of Florida Art.

Colonial laws prohibiting Black and white people from marrying one another suggest that some Black and white people did marry. Laws imposing penalties on white indentured servants and enslaved Africans who ran away together likewise suggest that whites and Blacks did run away together. Laws making it a crime for Indians and Black people to meet together in groups of four or more indicate that, at some point, these gatherings must have occurred. As Benjamin Franklin is said to have remarked in the Constitutional Convention, “One doesn’t make laws to prevent the sheep from planning insurrection,” because this has never occurred, nor will it occur.

The social elites of early America sought to manufacture racial divisions. Men of property and privilege were in the minority; they needed mechanisms to divide people who, in concert, might threaten the status quo.

Find more remote-ready lessons here and refer to our remote teaching guide.

Individuals’ different skin colors were not sufficient to keep these people apart if they came to see their interests in common. Which is not to say that racism was merely a ruling class plot, but as Howard Zinn points out in chapters 2 and 3 of A People’s History of the United States, and as students see in this lesson, some people did indeed set out consciously to promote divisions based on race.

Because today’s racial divisions run so deep and can seem so normal, providing students an historical framework can be enlightening. We need to ask, “What are the origins of racial conflict?” and “Who benefits from these deep antagonisms?” A critical perspective on race and racism is as important as anything students will take away from a U.S. history course. This is just one early lesson in our quest to construct that critical perspective.

Classroom Stories

The Color Line lesson led to a discussion about how oligarchs defend their interests. We would come back to that throughout the school year because the students noticed how race was being used as a wedge issue again and again. . .

When students learned how race had been created, how the structure of white supremacy had been constructed, they began to realize that it could also be destroyed.

— Julian Hipkins III
High School U.S. History Teacher, Washington, D.C.
Originally quoted in “How American oligarchs created the concept of race to divide and conquer the poor” by Courtland Milloy in The Washington Post.

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The new Voyages website is the product of three years of development by a multi-disciplinary team of historians, librarians, curriculum specialists, cartographers, computer programmers, and web designers, in consultation with scholars of the slave trade from universities in Europe, Africa, South America, and North America.

The Slave Trade Databases comprise tens of thousands of individual slaving expeditions between 1514 and 1866. Records of the Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American voyages have been found in archives and libraries throughout the Atlantic world. They provide information about vessels, routes, and the people associated with them, both enslaved and enslavers. Sources are cited for every voyage included. Users may search for information about a specific voyage or group of voyages. The website provides full interactive capability to analyze the data and report results in the form of statistical tables, graphs, maps, a timeline, and an animation.

The voyages database for Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American slave trade can be searched, filtered, and sorted by variables like “Principal Place of Purchase, destination, and ship’s name.

The database enables users to explore the Trans-Atlantic trade routes as well as the contours of the enormous New World slave trade, which not only dispersed African survivors of the Atlantic crossing but also displaced enslaved people born in the Americas. These voyages operated within colonial empires, across imperial boundaries, and inside the borders of nations such as the United States and Brazil.

Finally, the Image Galleries and African Names Database illustrate the history. In the galleries, explore several hundred images of the people, places, vessels and manuscripts of the Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American slave trades. The African Names database provides personal details of nearly 100,000 Africans taken from captured slave ships or from African trading sites. It displays the African name, age, gender, origin, country, and places of embarkation and disembarkation of each individual. [Descriptions from the website.]

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The insurrection began when 24 Africans (including two women) gathered late in the evening and set fire to an outhouse in the middle of town. These African men and women — enslaved and oppressed into an inhuman system — had reached the breaking point. They would rather have died than continue to be treated as less than human beings simply on the basis of their skin color.

Redraft of the Castello Plan New Amsterdam in 1660. Source: NY Historical Society Library

When local whites arrived to extinguish the fire, the Africans emerged wielding axes, guns, and swords. Nine whites were killed and seven were wounded. . . . Militias from the New York area were called in to put down the insurgency. In the end, 21 Africans were executed [many were burned alive] for participating in the revolt and many others were imprisoned. [Six committed suicide before they were apprehended.]

The lesson New York authorities took away from the revolt was not to end the institution of slavery and the oppressive racial hierarchy; it was to strengthen that system. [For example, the enslaved were not allowed to gather in groups of more than three and manumission was made more difficult.] New York maintained slavery for decades thereafter. It wasn’t until 1799 that a law was finally passed that would begin to do away with slavery in the state. The United States, of course, did not abolish slavery until 1865 and preserved for a century after that a system of race-based discrimination.

*Note that reports on the date for this revolt vary, with some listing it as the evening of April 6 and others the evening of April 7.

Also, on April 7 in 1760, Tacky’s Rebellion in Jamaica.

Learn More

Learn more about the revolt of 1712 at Mapping the African American Past, Equal Justice Initiative, and Black Past.

New York high school teacher Alan Singer has worked with students to ensure that the truth is told about slavery and resistance in New York, as described in the article “Reclaiming Hidden History: Students Create a Slavery Walking Tour in Manhattan” and the book New York and Slavery: Time to Teach the Truth. On the history of resistance to slavery in New York, we also recommend Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad by Eric Foner, described in a Democracy Now! interview.

Find related lessons and resources below, including a lesson on resistance to slavery called Poetry of Defiance and lessons for the book, How the Word Is Passed.

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It is a story of racist violence and unspeakable cruelty. But it is also the strange story of how this mission of colonial conquest was appropriated as a day of Italian pride, a defiant yet sad assertion that “We’re American, too.”

Columbus in America explores the history of what transpired in 1492 and after, and how “Columbus” has been used throughout U.S. history to legitimate the marginalization of Indigenous peoples. However, the film is ultimately hopeful, as it focuses on how the victims of Columbus and those who came after have themselves targeted “Columbus in America” to assert their humanity, their history, and their rights.

The film is too long for most classroom uses, but there are lots of excerpts that could be used effectively.

The filmmaker notes,

Many people never think about how the man who first brutalized Indigenous peoples became a hero in the United States, a nation guilty of its own atrocities against native peoples. The little we learn as children about this monumental event in history is inexcusable. But a generation of young people raised on instant access to information are learning and sharing what isn’t taught in class. Columbus is falling.

Hear what Theresa Sheldon, Roberto Borrero, Matt Remle, Native Americans at Brown (Sierra Edd, Phoebe Young, Floripa Olguin, and Kara Roanhorse), Red Nation members (Nick Estes, Hope Alvarado and Jennifer Marley), James Loewen, Bill Bigelow, Kirkpatrick Sale, Jonathan Zimmerman, and Italian American leaders say about this never ending controversy over one of the most useful symbols for maintaining the status quo in the United States.

View in Full for Free

Trailer

Produced by the Film Accord. Available on iTunes, Amazon, Amazon Prime, Google Play, and Films Media Group.

Find related teaching resources below.

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Engraving depicting the Pequot Massacre, 1637. Source: Library of Congress.

A pre-dawn attack on Mystic Fort that left 500 adults and children of the Pequot tribe dead, the Pequot Massacre (or the “Mystic Massacre”) was the first defeat of the Pequot people by the English in the Pequot War, a three-year war instigated by the Puritans to seize the tribe’s traditional land.

The Pequot War is described in the new young reader’s version of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Here is a brief excerpt:

Pequots were living in two forts. In one fort were mainly Pequot men. In the other were primarily women, children, and elders. [Mercenary John] Mason targeted the latter. Slaughter ensued. After killing most of the Pequot defenders, the soldiers set fire to the structures and burned the remaining people there alive.

Though the Puritan’s slaughter of the Pequots was devastating, they continued to fear retaliation by the surviving Pequots who had sought refuge among neighboring nations. The fear was so great that they destroyed Pequot’s remaining homes and food supplies and forced them to leave their homelands.

This gruesome defeat marked a turning point in the war, which the Pequots and their allies had been winning for eight months. The war also had the goal of enslavement, as described in “America’s Other Original Sin” in Slate:

During the Pequot War, which was initially instigated by struggles over trade and land among the Europeans, the Pequot, and rival tribes, colonists explicitly named the procurement of captives as one of their goals. Soldiers sent groups of captured Pequot to Boston and other cities for distribution, while claiming particular captured people as their own.

Below is a photo of the site of the Pequot Massacre today. It is one of the images in a series by photo journalist Andrew Lichtenstein of unmarked locations of historical significance.

Pequot Massacre Site in Mystic, Connecticut.

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The name of the Point Comfort landing place was just one of the great and bitter ironies of the August 1619 disembarkation, which led to the establishment of the British trans-Atlantic slave trade, as well as slavery itself in the British colonies, and, subsequently, in the United States.

The Point Comfort name derived from the first English settlers finding “comfort” on this point of land in 1607. But in 1619, the “20 and odd” Africans were inhumanely traded like chattel by the captain of the ship The White Lion to Virginia’s colonial Governor George Yeardley and merchant Abraham Peirsey, and dispersed to several other locations. Another irony was that 1619 also was the year that a semblance of democracy came to Virginia, as the colony held its first election for the inaugural House of Burgesses, the forerunner of today’s Virginia General Assembly.

According to various histories, the Africans were part of a contingent of about 350 enslaved Africans from the Portuguese colony of Angola, captured from the kingdom of Ndongo in west central Africa. The Portuguese took the Africans aboard the São João Bautista, which was to sail to Vera Cruz, Mexico, but was attacked by English vessels, The White Lion and The Treasurer.

Hampton History Museum curator Allen Hoilman said,

The Angolans that were brought here came from a vibrant, sophisticated civilization. If they survived that terrible voyage, they would have been brought to this culture that is barely surviving and hanging on.

Teach the NYT Magazine‘s “1619 Project” issue with the Zinn Education Project.

Historians still debate whether these first Africans were slaves or indentured servants, but as Howard Zinn points out in A People’s History of the United States, “it would have been strange if those twenty Black people, forcibly transported . . .  and sold as objects to settlers anxious for a steadfast source of labor, were considered as anything but slaves.” The next few decades, however, would see the continual codification of laws governing enslavement.

The cruelties of slavery mounted and included the use of labor by enslaved people to help the U.S. Army build the massive Fort Monroe between 1819 and 1834 as a strategic bastion, at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, to protect America’s liberty against foreign invaders. In another twist of history, Fort Monroe became known as “Freedom’s Fortress” during the Civil War because Union Major General Benjamin F. Butler welcomed thousands of freedom seekers, declared them “contraband of war” and refused to return them to the Confederate plantations. Fort Monroe became part of the National Park Service in 2011.

“This Day in History” story and photo submitted by Michael Knepler.

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Recently, I ran across an old manual that described itself as “An easy step-by-step guide to obtain U.S. Citizenship.” A page of history and government questions begins:

Q: Who discovered America?

A: Christopher Columbus in 1492.

This was the simple, and simplistic, history that I learned in 4th grade in the early 1960s growing up in California — a kind of secular Book of Genesis: In the beginning, there was Columbus; he was good and so are we.

And it stayed the history that most everyone learned until the Columbus quincentenary in 1992 brought together Native Americans, social justice organizations, and educators to demand a more inclusive and critical version of what occurred in 1492 and after. These critics of the “Discovery Myth” pointed out that Columbus enslaved hundreds of Taínos and shipped them from the Caribbean to Spain; that his colonial policies destroyed cultures, devastated the ecology, and launched the African slave trade. And they pointed out that today’s patterns of poverty, racial inequality, and ecological degradation throughout the Americas began in 1492. Critics argued that we should not celebrate Columbus but instead those who resisted and survived the European invasion.

The demand to “rethink Columbus” blended scholarship with activism, and prompted much curricular soul searching in our schools. Almost 20 years later, the contradictory results can be seen in textbooks.

Two of these typify how the textbook industry has incorporated but distorted the Columbus critique.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is one of the education publishing giants. Their Social Studies United States History: Early Years tells 5th graders that Columbus “had a bold plan to sail west to Asia. Although he never reached his goal, his journeys to the Americas changed history for millions of people.”

Changed history. Yes, but how?

Unlike any textbook I had as a child, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Early Years acknowledges the people who lived in the Caribbean before Columbus, and names them: Taínos. And the book says that the European arrival was not all joy and light. There were “many harmful effects.” Fifth graders learn that, “Many American plants and animals were destroyed.”

Still, the book’s use of passive voice shields Columbus, himself. The book never mentions that Columbus enslaved Taínos and forced Taínos to deliver impossible quotas of gold, or risk horrific forms of execution. Instead, the Early Years misinforms children that the Taínos died solely from “epidemics”— a word it helpfully teaches youngsters as new vocabulary.

Ultimately, the narrative becomes a paean to globalization. “The Columbian Exchange benefited people all over the world.” The section concludes: “Today, tomatoes, peanuts, and American beans and peppers are grown in many lands.”

The full color world map on the opposite page illustrates these benefits of global trade. Corn and potatoes move east, pigs and bananas move west.

However, much is missing from this rosy portrait — including the African slave trade. According to the eminent historian of Africa, Basil Davidson, in 1501, the king and queen of Spain issued the first permits to transport enslaved people from Africa to the Americas, a direct consequence of Columbus’s arrival. In 1495, Columbus had sent 550 enslaved Taínos east across the Atlantic. As Davidson writes, Columbus was the “father of the slave trade.”

The Early Years is an improvement over the Discovery Myth of yesteryear, but nonetheless ends up masking genocide and slavery in its effort to turn these events into a tale of progress and development — now we all can consume cool new stuff.

Another newer textbook approach to Columbus also acknowledges some of the critiques that became widespread 20 years ago, but it ends up as a kind of historical shopping expedition, asking students to buy whichever version of Columbus they prefer. TCI’s high school text, History Alive! uses Columbus for an opening lesson in historiography — sort of.

History Alive! offers students three contrasting accounts of Columbus: Washington Irving’s 19th century “Mythic Hero” — “his conduct was characterized by the grandeur of his views and the magnanimity of his spirit” — Samuel Eliot Morison’s “Master Mariner” — “As a master mariner and navigator, Columbus was supreme in his generation” — and Kirkpatrick Sale’s “Overrated Hero” — “Admiral Colon [Columbus] could be a wretched mariner.”

This last does a disservice to Sale’s important critique in his 1990 book The Conquest of Paradise, which focuses especially on Columbus’s environmental attitudes and policies. But the bigger problem with History Alive!’s approach is that students have no way to evaluate historical interpretations, nor are they encouraged to think about the social conditions that might produce different interpretations — which is what a lesson on historiography ought to do. Instead, high schoolers are told that because historians “bring different approaches to their work, they often interpret the past in different ways.” A neat little tautology that tells students: people think differently because they think differently.

No doubt, as in the Columbian Exchange approach, the multiple Columbuses approach reveals more truth than in the old Discovery myth. The Early Years indicates that what happened back then had an impact on today, even if it limits its curiosity mostly to food. And in History Alive! at least students are informed that there are multiple ways to view Columbus — even if these focus mostly on his skills as a mariner. History Alive! even includes a contemporary protest poster, with a caption that mentions the “severe mistreatment of native peoples.”

But new textbook treatments of Columbus fail to urge students to consider how Europe incorporated the Americas into a world system that was exploitative and unequal, or to encourage students to inquire how these patterns of exploitation have helped to determine the world we live in today. In 1492, Columbus “discovered” a land of abundance; today those lands are some of the poorest in the Americas. What happened? Studying Columbus’s legacy means asking hard questions about the history of colonialism, slavery, and intervention in the Americas. Unfortunately, that’s not the Columbus that today’s textbooks offer students.

In 1492, Columbus wrote, “Considering the beauty of the land, it could not but be that there was gain to be got.” Treating everything from trees to water to human beings as exploitable commodities where “gain was to be got,” was Columbus’s gift to the world. It’s a gift that keeps on giving. Twenty years after the Columbus quincentenary, students deserve a deep and honest inquiry into the world Columbus initiated. They deserve more than textbooks that tiptoe around the truth.

This article is part of the Zinn Education Project’s If We Knew Our History series.

Published on: Common Dreams.

© 2011 The Zinn Education Project, a project of Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change.

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Very detailed, with extensive quotes from far-ranging original sources. Links Columbus’s legacy to environmental degradation. [Description by Rethinking Schools.]

Christopher Columbus’ arrival on a small Bahamian island in 1492 is often judged to be a defining moment in the history of mankind, changing forever the map of the world. In, Christopher Columbus and the Conquest of Paradise, Kirkpatrick Sale offers readers a unique take on Columbus and his legacy, separating the man from the legend. Sale also looks at the global consequences of the discovery, revealing the colossal impact this brief moment in history had not only on a continent but also on the world. [Publisher’s description.]

ISBN: 9781845111540 | Tauris Parke Paperbacks

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Time to Abolish Columbus Day

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The Columbus Controversy: Challenging How History Is Written is a short film released during the Columbus Quincentenary in 1992. The film contrasts the views of Seneca historian, writer, and activist John Mohawk and University of Chicago historian William McNeill, who reflect on the legacy of Columbus. The Columbus Controversy also features Zinn Education Project co-director Bill Bigelow — then a teacher at Jefferson High School in Portland, Oregon — who “steals” a student’s purse and engages his class in reflecting on the problematic use of the word “discovery” to describe Columbus’s arrival in the Americas and his occupation of Taíno land.

The Columbus Controversy demonstrates aspects of critical teaching about Columbus, some of it described in Bill Bigelow’s article, “Discovering Columbus: Re-reading the Past,” and can be used in middle school, high school, and teacher education classes.

Watch Online

The Columbus Controversy documentary was produced for classrooms and teacher education programs by American School Publishers, a Macmillan/McGraw-Hill Company, ISBN: 0-383-05031-6

Executive producer: Frank Beck
Producer, director, writer: Nick Kaufman
Editor: Mark Lipman
Consultants: Howard Zinn, Kirkpatrick Sale, and Jose Barreiro

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