![]() ![]() Because Colón was being repurposed to be the founder of the United States, his name was anglicized to Christopher Columbus. David Vine asks, “Why do we call the man who some celebrate today as ‘Christopher Columbus’ when that wasn’t his name?” pointing out that his only known name historically is Spanish-Cristóbal Colón-not difficult to pronounce, but definitely not an English name. Some of these books even show pictures of Columbus in colonial era clothing.” And, of course, Columbus was not even his name. South Carolina named its capital Columbia.īrian Hardwerk observes, “Columbus also provided a convenient way to forget about America’s original inhabitants.” Bushman notes that “in early American textbooks from the 1700s Columbus is the first chapter. By 1777, a year after the settlers of the 13 British North American colonies declared independence, the poet Philip Freneau named what would become the United States of America “Columbia, America as sometimes so called from Columbus, the first discoverer.” There were others who advocated that the 13 states should adopt the name Columbia. The 1798 hymn “Hail, Columbia” was the early national anthem and is now used whenever the vice president of the United States makes a public appearance. ![]() And the federal capital was named the District of Columbia. ![]() Columbia College, now University, was founded in 1754 as King’s College and was renamed Columbia College when it reopened in 1784 after independence. At first, “Columbia,” meaning the land of Columbus, rather than “Columbus” was used for honoring Columbus. So, why did the United States, which at its founding had no direct geographical, calendar, or colonizing link to Columbus, embed the event and date as the very founding of the United States? Historian Claudia Bushman thinks the cult of Columbus rose in part because it eschewed the British source of US existence and located its origins to first founder of the Americas. Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes, “To call ‘discovery’ the first invasions of inhabited lands by Europeans is an exercise in Eurocentric power that already frames future narratives of the event so described Once discovered by Europeans, the Other finally enters the human world.” October 12, 1492, is etched in the brains of many as the day of “discovery,” but the Indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere and of Africa and descendants of enslaved Africans regard the date as the symbol of infamy, domination, slavery, and genocide. Two decades later a Spanish army would possess the heart of that landmass, destroying the most populated city in the world at the time, Tenochtitlán, in the valley of México. The rapacious crusade-hardened mercenaries representing Christendom were skeptical, until some voyages later they reached the continent at Central America, which they named Cabo Gracias a Díos (Thanks to God Cape). The thriving Indigenous residents informed him that to the north and south and east and west stretched a huge landmass, two massive continents teeming with cities and tens of millions of acres of farmlands that would come to constitute the major portion of humanity’s food production. Columbus landed not at already European “discovered” India but, rather, on an island of what is now called the Bahamas. ![]() The other development was the taking of overseas colonies in the Americas by the same Castilian monarchy that spearheaded ethnic cleansing.” Mamdani emphasizes that modern colonialism didn’t suddenly start occurring in the 18th century but that European colonialism and the modern state were co-constituted.Ī few months after Catholic entry into ethnically cleansed Granada, the Spanish monarchs contracted with a Genoese seaman who promised he could reach India by a shorter route by sailing west. “One was ethnic cleansing, whereby the Castilian monarchy sought to create a homogeneous national homeland for Christian Spaniards by ejecting and converting those among them who were strangers to the nation-Moors and Jews. Mahmood Mamdani, in Neither Settler nor Native, locates the founding moment of the modern nation-state at 1492, noting it emerged out of two developments in Iberia. ![]()
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