Columbus Day Quotes

It’s like, how did Columbus discover America when the Indians were already here? What kind of shit is that, but white people’s shit?

I mean, your species is responsible for Windows Vista.

Imagination has brought mankind through the Dark Ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity. Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities. So I believe that dreams - day dreams, you know, with your eyes wide open and your brain-machinery whizzing - are likely to lead to the betterment of the world. The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to create, to invent, and therefore to foster civilization.

In 1492, the natives discovered they were indians, discovered they lived in America, discovered they were naked, discovered that the Sin existed, discovered they owed allegiance to a King and Kingdom from another world and a God from another sky, and that this God had invented the guilty and the dress, and had sent to be burnt alive who worships the Sun the Moon the Earth and the Rain that wets it.

Be a Columbus smell the fragrance of the new lands and discover them.

Though many non-Native Americans have learned very little about us, over time we have had to learn everything about them. We watch their films, read their literature, worship in their churches, and attend their schools. Every third-grade student in the United States is presented with the concept of Europeans discovering America as a "New World" with fertile soil, abundant gifts of nature, and glorious mountains and rivers. Only the most enlightened teachers will explain that this world certainly wasn't new to the millions of indigenous people who already lived here when Columbus arrived.

You want to have fun causing trouble? Go online and start a credible rumor that Justin Beiber is going to play Darth Vader in the next Star Wars movie.” I suggested.

We try, we struggle, all the time to find words to express our love. The quality, the quantity, certain that no two people have experienced it before in the history of creation. Perhaps Catherine and Heathcliff, perhaps Romeo and Juliet, maybe Tristan and Isolde, maybe Hero and Leander, but these are just characters, make-believe. We have known each other forever, since before conception even. We remember playing together in a playpen, crossing paths at FAO Schwarz. We remember meeting in front of the Holy Temple in the days before Christ, we remember greeting each other at the Forum, at the Parthenon, on passing ships as Christopher Columbus sailed to America. We have survived pogrom together, we have died in Dachau together, we have been lynched by the Ku Klux Klan together. There has been cancer, polio, the bubonic plague, consumption, morphine addiction. We have had children together, we have been children together, we were in the womb together. Our history is so deep and wide and long, we have known each other a million years. And we don't know how to express this kind of love, this kind of feeling. I get paralyzed sometimes. One day, we are in the shower and I want to say to him, I could be submerged in sixty feet of water right now, never drowning, never even fearing drowning, knowing I would always be safe with you here, knowing that it would be ok to die as long as you are here. I want to say this but don't.

Part of being super smart is knowing when to keep your mouth shut and let the other guy talk.

Religion is, in reality, living. Our religion is not what we profess, or what we say, or what we proclaim; our religion is what we do, what we desire, what we seek, what we dream about, what we fantasize, what we think - all these things - twenty-four hours a day. One's religion, then, is ones life, not merely the ideal life but the life as it is actually lived. Religion is not prayer, it is not a church, it is not theistic, it is not atheistic, it has little to do with what white people call "religion." It is our every act. If we tromp on a bug, that is our religion; if we experiment on living animals, that is our religion; if we cheat at cards, that is our religion; if we dream of being famous, that is our religion; if we gossip maliciously, that is our religion; if we are rude and aggressive, that is our religion. All that we do, and are, is our religion.

Columbus Day is still a federal holiday despite Columbus never having set foot on any territory ever claimed by the United States.

Oh, you may be sure that Columbus was happy not when he had discovered America, but when he was discovering it. Take my word for it, the highest moment if his happiness was just three days before the discovery of the New World, when the mutinous crew were on the point of returning to Europe in despair. It wasn't the New World that mattered, even if it had fallen to pieces. Columbus died almost without seeing it; and not really knowing what he had discovered. It's life that matters, nothing but life -- the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.

En 1492, los nativos descubrieron que eran indios, descubrieron que vivían en América, descubrieron que estaban desnudos, descubrieron que existía el pecado, descubrieron que debían obediencia a un rey y a una reina de otro mundo y a un dios de otro cielo, y que ese dios había inventado la culpa y el vestido y había mandado que fuera quemado vivo quien adorara al sol y a la luna y a la tierra y a la lluvia que la moja.

But you’re not that smart, I mean, your species is responsible for Windows Vista.” “Vist- that was a long time ago!” “It’s still an insult to computers across the galaxy.

Here's a simple test to tell whether a guy wants to get together with a girl: Step One- does he have a pulse? Step Two- is he conscious?

He who cherishes a beautiful vision, a lofty ideal in his heart, will one day realize it. Columbus cherished a vision of another world, and he discovered it; Copernicus fostered the vision of a multiplicity of worlds and a wider universe, and he revealed it; Buddha beheld the vision of a spiritual world of stainless beauty and perfect peace, and he entered into it.

At my level, the laws of physics are more like suggestions. And

The most important thing is love," said Leigh-Cheri. "I know that now. There's no point in saving the world if it means losing the moon." Leigh-Cheri sent that message to Bernard through his attorney. The message continued, "I'm not quite 20, but, thanks to you, I've learned something that many women these days never learn: Prince Charming really is a toad. And the Beautiful Princess has halitosis. The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and the vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. Loving makes love. Loving makes itself. We waste time looking for the perfect lover instead of creating the perfect love. Wouldn't that be the way to make love stay?" The next day, Bernard's attorney delivered to her this reply: Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words "make" and "stay" become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free. Leigh-Cheri went out in the blackberries and wept. "I'll follow him to the ends of the earth," she sobbed. Yes, darling. But the earth doesn't have any ends. Columbus fixed that.

The single window had once provided a view of the Columbus skyline, but I’d spray-painted it completely black a few days after I moved in. I’d decided that everything outside the window was a distraction from my quest,

Advice to explorers everywhere: if you would like to recieve due credit for your discoveries, keep a detailed account of your journeys as Columbus did. On Septemeber 28, 1492, after four weeks at sea, he writes: Dear diary...I means journal. Yes, dear journal. That's what I meant to say. Whew. Anyway, we have yet to discover America, and the crew has become increasingly rebellious. I have decided to turn back if we have not spotted it by Columbus Day. Will write again later if not killed by crew. P.S. Last night's buffet was fabulous, the ice sculptures magnificent.

IT’S ARBOR DAY! LET’S HUG TREES AND EAT CAKE! COLUMBUS BROUGHT SMALLPOX TO THE NATIVES; WE SHALL RECALL THE OCCASION WITH A PICNIC!, etc.

holidays—-such as Columbus Day—to be celebrated by all Protestants in America; thirty million dollars worth of church property exempted from taxation in New

Columbus's real achievement was managing to cross the ocean successfully in both directions. Though an accomplished enough mariner, he was not terribly good at a great deal else, especially geography, the skill that would seem most vital in an explorer. It would be hard to name any figure in history who has achieved more lasting fame with less competence. He spent large parts of eight years bouncing around Caribbean islands and coastal South America convinced that he was in the heart of the Orient and that Japan and China were at the edge of every sunset. He never worked out that Cuba is an island and never once set foot on, or even suspected the existence of, the landmass to the north that everyone thinks he discovered: the United States.

It’s Thursday, March twenty-ninth!” she basically screamed, a demented smile plastered to her face. “You are really excited about knowing the date!” I yelled back. “HAZEL! IT’S YOUR THIRTY-THIRD HALF BIRTHDAY!” “Ohhhhhh,” I said. My mom was really super into celebration maximization. IT’S ARBOR DAY! LET’S HUG TREES AND EAT CAKE! COLUMBUS BROUGHT SMALLPOX TO THE NATIVES; WE SHALL RECALL THE OCCASION WITH A PICNIC!, etc.

I was surprised that peacekeeping involved killing so many people, but it is what it is.

It's sort of a hobby. I tried collecting stamps, but messing with the universe is so much more relaxing.

The history of the world is a whitewashed history, where great many facts are distorted to maintain white supremacy – such as Columbus discovering America or Gandhi liberating India – Gandhi didn’t liberate India, Subhas Chandra Bose did and Columbus never even set foot on America.

I was in Christopher Columbus, and sported its blue badge with great pride. It took me many years to understand or truly believe that Columbus was actually Italian. Even to this day I can’t fully accept it. Why would a school in the heart of England choose a foreign hero? Perhaps they were unaware of his nationality themselves. It was common knowledge that the British discovered everything – trains, democracy, television, printing, jets, hover-crafts, the telephone, penicillin, the flush lavatory and Australia, so it was reasonable to assume Christopher Columbus must have been a Briton.

The Ruhar hit us on Columbus Day. There we were, innocently drifting along the cosmos on our little blue marble, like the native Americans in 1492. Over the horizon come ships of a technologically advanced, aggressive culture, and BAM! There go the good old days, when humans only got killed by each other.

No thoughts had I of anything, Or at least that's what I thought; I even thought I couldn't think, But now I think I never thought.

And now I will tell of the revels that went on for three nights and two days in the brothel on West Seventy-sixth Street between Columbus and Amsterdam avenues.

In full tumult the great afternoon current raced for Columbus Circle, where the mouth of midtown stood open and the skyscrapers gave back the yellow fire of the sun.

When things change, even radically, you look at your buddies, shake your head, shrug, and adapt. That's what you do, as soldiers. Civilians get upset when the menu changes at Applebees.

THE FAIR HAD A POWERFUL and lasting impact on the nation’s psyche, in ways both large and small. Walt Disney’s father, Elias, helped build the White City; Walt’s Magic Kingdom may well be a descendant. Certainly the fair made a powerful impression on the Disney family. It proved such a financial boon that when the family’s third son was born that year, Elias in gratitude wanted to name him Columbus. His wife, Flora, intervened; the baby became Roy. Walt came next, on December 5, 1901. The writer L. Frank Baum and his artist-partner William Wallace Denslow visited the fair; its grandeur informed their creation of Oz. The Japanese temple on the Wooded Island charmed Frank Lloyd Wright, and may have influenced the evolution of his “Prairie” residential designs. The fair prompted President Harrison to designate October 12 a national holiday, Columbus Day, which today serves to anchor a few thousand parades and a three-day weekend. Every carnival since 1893 has included a Midway and a Ferris Wheel, and every grocery store contains products born at the exposition. Shredded Wheat did survive. Every house has scores of incandescent bulbs powered by alternating current, both of which first proved themselves worthy of large-scale use at the fair; and nearly every town of any size has its little bit of ancient Rome, some beloved and be-columned bank, library or post office. Covered with graffiti, perhaps, or even an ill-conceived coat of paint, but underneath it all the glow of the White City persists. Even the Lincoln Memorial in Washington can trace its heritage to the fair.

an old formula; you find the worst psychopathic antisocial losers in a society, give them power, and they would give you their complete, unquestioning loyalty. That was how Hitler and Stalin had come to power. That

THE dreamers are the saviours of the world. As the visible world is sustained by the invisible, so men, through all their trials and sins and sordid vocations, are nourished by the beautiful visions of their solitary dreamers. Humanity cannot forget its dreamers; it cannot let their ideals fade and die; it lives in them; it knows them as they realities which it shall one day see and know. Composer, sculptor, painter, poet, prophet, sage, these are the makers of the after-world, the architects of heaven. The world is beautiful because they have lived; without them, labouring humanity would perish. He who cherishes a beautiful vision, a lofty ideal in his heart, will one day realize it. Columbus cherished a vision of another world, and he discovered it; Copernicus fostered the vision of a multiplicity of worlds and a wider universe, and he revealed it; Buddha beheld the vision of a spiritual world of stainless beauty and perfect peace, and he entered into it.

Fellow Italians: stop getting all bent out of shape about Christopher Columbus getting the same treatment as the Confederates. He was a horrible man, a horrible representative for our people, and not that special. Any asshole can get lost in a boat.

Pilgrim writers universally reported that Wampanoag families were close and loving—more so than English families, some thought. Europeans in those days tended to view children as moving straight from infancy to adulthood around the age of seven, and often thereupon sent them out to work. Indian parents, by contrast, regarded the years before puberty as a time of playful development, and kept their offspring close by until marriage. (Jarringly, to the present-day eye, some Pilgrims interpreted this as sparing the rod.) Boys

Stannard believes that by the end of the 16th century, the Spanish had been directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of between 60 and 80 million indigenous people in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America. Even if one were to discount the millions of deaths resulting from diseases, this would still make the Spanish conquest of the New World the greatest act of genocide in recorded history. These types of numbers, which are subject to considerable academic debate, are often overlooked during Columbus Day parades and related festivities.

Columbus’s conquest of Haiti can be seen as an amazing feat of courage and imagination by the first of many brave empire builders. It can also be understood as a bloody atrocity that left a legacy of genocide and slavery that endures in some degree to this day. Both views of Columbus are valid; indeed, Columbus’s importance in history owes precisely to his being both a heroic navigator and a great plunderer. If Columbus were only the former, he would merely rival Leif Eriksson. Columbus’s actions exemplify both meanings of the word exploit—a remarkable deed and also a taking advantage of.

Suddenly, it seems ridiculous that we just came from a city airport named for Columbus, a terrible navigator who insisted to his dying day that he was in India—which is why people here are called Indians. As the Native women in Houston said, “It could have been worse—he could have thought he was in Turkey.

Columbus says he decided to send “two men up-country” to see what they could see. “They traveled for three days,” he wrote, “and found an infinite number of small villages and people without number, but nothing of importance.”35 People without number—but nothing of importance. It would become a motto for the ages.

The misconception is that men didn’t travel long distances in boats before the days of Columbus. Yet New Zealand and Tahiti and countless Pacific islands were settled by people in boats whose navigation skills would have put Columbus to shame; and the wealth of Africa was from trading, although that was mostly to the East, to India and China. My

Though widely used in the 1892 Columbus Day ceremonies, Bellamy’s pledge did not officially become the pledge until after the Second World War. Indeed, at the turn of the century, a number of different pledges competed for the loyalty of American schoolchildren. In New York State, schools that held flag ceremonies had a choice of five pledges, none of which made any reference to a deity. In San Francisco, the sixty different public schools followed their own preferences, resulting in a considerable range of pledges. Only after the First World War was there any real effort to select a single pledge for the entire nation, a movement that peaked with a pair of National Flag Conferences in 1923 and 1924.

even the simplest technology has you staring slack-jawed in wonder at it, until the drool runs down your chin. Hell, if I gave you a jump drive, you’d probably just worship it, so

Here's a simple test to tell whether a guy wants to get together with a girl: Step One- does he have a pulse? Step Two- is he conscious? There is no need for a step three.

Thomas Hudson had gone in there to fill water, the dogs from the shacks were huddled with the pigs that had burrowed in the mud and dogs and pigs both were gray from the solid blanket of mosquitoes that covered them. It was a wonderful key when the east wind blew day and night and you could walk two days with a gun and be in good country. It was country as unspoiled as when Columbus came to this coast. Then, when the wind dropped, the mosquitoes came in clouds from the marshes. To say they came in clouds, he thought, is not a metaphor. They truly came in clouds and they could bleed a man to death. The people we are searching for would not have stopped in Romano. Not with this calm. They must have gone further up the coast.

On the very day that Columbus finally set forth on his journey that would shake the world, the port of the city he sailed from was filled with ships that were deporting Jews from Spain. By the time the expulsion was complete between 120,000 and 150,000 Jews had been driven from their homes (their valuables, often meager, having first been confiscated) and then they were cast out to sea.

Columbus was, in most respects, merely an especially active and dramatic embodiment of the European—and especially the Mediterranean—mind and soul of his time: a religious fanatic obsessed with the conversion, conquest, or liquidation of all non-Christians; a latter-day Crusader in search of personal wealth and fame, who expected the enormous and mysterious world he had found to be filled with monstrous races inhabiting wild forests, and with golden people living in Eden. He was also a man with sufficient intolerance and contempt for all who did not look or behave or believe as he did, that he thought nothing of enslaving or killing such people simply because they were not like him. He was, to repeat, a secular personification of what more than a thousand years of Christian culture had wrought.

Martin got up and brushed off the seat of his pants with his hat. He put his hat on his head and started back toward the path. For when you woke from a long dream, into the new morning, then try as you might you couldn't not hear, beyond your door, the sounds of the new day, the drawer opening in your father's bureau, the bang of a pot, you couldn't not see, through your trembling lashes, the stripe of light on the bedroom wall. Boys shouted in the park, on a sunny tree-root he saw a cigar band, red and gold. One of these days he might find something to do in a cigar store, after all he still knew his tobacco, you never forgot a thing like that. But not just yet. Boats moved on the river, somewhere a car horn sounded, on the path a piece of broken glass glowed in a patch of sun as if at any second it would burst into flame. Everything stood out sharply: the red stem of a green leaf, horse clops and the distant clatter of a pneumatic drill, a smell of riverwater and asphalt. Martin felt hungry: chops and beer in a little he remembered on Columbus Avenue. But not yet. For the time being he would just walk along, keeping a little out of the way of things, admiring the view. It was a warm day. He was in no hurry.

For many years (even before the MMQs) when this day rolled around, I discussed the complexities of celebrating Thanksgiving  as I did about Columbus Day when the country that was founded by Columbus (looking for someplace else) and settled by Pilgrims destroyed more than one peoples and was on the backs of more than one other. Times have changed. It's been a relief to not have to fight so hard for that questioning anymore.

there are plenty of your species who lack the ability to process new facts and adapt, but with humans those are mostly old people, their brains no longer are able to process new information. Or they're just lazy. But

Foreordain it? No. The man's circumstances and environment order it. His first act determines the second and all that follow after. But suppose, for argument's sake, that the man should skip one of these acts; an apparently trifling one, for instance; suppose that it had been appointed that on a certain day, at a certain hour and minute and second and fraction of a second he should go to the well, and he didn't go. That man's career would change utterly, from that moment; thence to the grave it would be wholly different from the career which his first act as a child had arranged for him. Indeed, it might be that if he had gone to the well he would have ended his career on a throne, and that omitting to do it would set him upon a career that would lead to beggary and a pauper's grave. For instance: if at any time--say in boyhood--Columbus had skipped the triflingest little link in the chain of acts projected and made inevitable by his first childish act, it would have changed his whole subsequent life, and he would have become a priest and died obscure in an Italian village, and America would not have been discovered for two centuries afterward. I know this. To skip any one of the billion acts in Columbus's chain would have wholly changed his life. I have examined his billion of possible careers, and in only one of them occurs the discovery of America.

We are studying American history for the ninth time in nine years. Another review of map skills, one week of Native Americans, Christopher Columbus in time for Columbus Day, the Pilgrims in time for Thanksgiving. Every year they say we're going to get right up to the present, but we always get stuck in the Industrial Revolution. We got to World War 1 in seventh grade - who knew there had been a war with the whole world? We need more holidays to keep the social studies teachers on track.

In all probability there is an infinite variety of mental states that no Sapiens, bat or dinosaur ever experienced in 4 billion years of terrestrial evolution, because they did not have the necessary faculties. In the future, however, powerful drugs, genetic engineering, electronic helmets and direct brain–computer interfaces may open passages to these places. Just as Columbus and Magellan sailed beyond the horizon to explore new islands and unknown continents, so we may one day embark for the antipodes of the mind.

Elie Wiesel is right: the road to Auschwitz was being paved in the earliest days of Christendom. But another conclusion now is equally evident: on the way to Auschwitz the road’s pathway led straight through the heart of the Indies and of North and South America.

A nation is only an individual multiplied. It makes plans and Circumstances comes and upsets them—or enlarges them. Some patriots throw the tea overboard; some other patriots destroy a Bastille. The PLANS stop there; then Circumstance comes in, quite unexpectedly, and turns these modest riots into a revolution. And there was poor Columbus. He elaborated a deep plan to find a new route to an old country. Circumstance revised his plan for him, and he found a new WORLD. And HE gets the credit of it to this day. He hadn’t anything to do with it.

Not that you're bragging or anything." "No, I'm very modest. Astonishingly modest, considering how awesome I am." "Oh, for sure, your awesome modesty is your most impressive trait." I rolled my eyes at that. "It's amazing how humble you are." "Yup. I'm very proud of my humbleness.

That something I cannot yet define completely but the feeling comes when you write well and truly of something and know impersonally you have written in that way and those who are paid to read it and report on it do not like the subject so they say it is all a fake, yet you know its value absolutely; or when you do something which people do not consider a serious occupation and yet you know, truly, that it is as important and has always been as important as all th things that are in fashion, and when, on the sea, you are alone with it and know that this Gulf Stream you are living with, knowing, learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before man and that it has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy island since before Columbus sighted it and that the things you find out about it, and those that have always lived in it are permanent and of value because that stream will flow, as it has flowed, after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans and after all the Cubans and all the systems of governments, the richness, the poverty, the martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venality and the cruelty are all gone as the high-piled scow of garbage, bright-colored, white-flecked, ill-smelling, now tilted on its side, spills off its load into the blue water, turning it a pale green to a depth of four or five fathoms as the load spreads across the surface, the sinkable part going down and the flotsam of palm fronds, corks, bottles, and used electric light globes, seasoned with an occasional condom or a deep floating corset, the torn leaves of a student's exercise book, a well-inflated dog, the occasional rat, the no-longer-distinguished cat; well shepherded by the boats of the garbage pickers who pluck their prizes with long poles, as interested, as intelligent, and as accurate as historians; they have the viewpoint; the stream, with no visible flow, takes five loads of this a day when things are going well in La Habana and in ten miles along the coast it is as clear and blue and unimpressed as it was ever before the tug hauled out the scow; and the palm fronds of our victories, the worn light bulbs of our discoveries and the empty condoms of our great loves float with no significance against one single, lasting thing - the stream.

Barney, the big purple cartoon dinosaur with the perpetual stupid grin. Barney, and Smurfs, Mickey Mouse, unicorns, and a lot of other fictional characters were painted on the truck. Whoever decided which characters to paint on the truck had made interesting choices, like, why was Iron Man waving to the Smurfs?

If Urton is right, khipu were unique. They were the world’s sole intrinsically three-dimensional written documents (Braille is a translation of writing on paper) and the only ones to use a “system of coding information” that “like the coding systems used in present-day computer language, was structured primarily as a binary code.

I am Gunnery Sergeant Cragen, of the United States Marine Corps.” Cragen paused as shouts of 'Oorah' and ‘Semper Fi’ rang out from the crowd. “I am relieved to hear that we have a few qualified riflemen among us. Since the rest of you are Army, I’ll try to talk slowly, so you can understand.” The other Marines laughed at that remark

For Bancroft, the nation’s fate was all but sealed the day Columbus set sail. By giving Americans a more ancient past, he hoped to make America’s founding appear inevitable and its growth inexorable, God-ordained. He also wanted to celebrate the United States, not as an offshoot of England, but instead as a pluralist and cosmopolitan nation, with ancestors all over the world. “France contributed to its independence,” he observed, “the origin of the language we speak carries us to India; our religion is from Palestine; of the hymns sung in our churches, some were first heard in Italy, some in the deserts of Arabia, some on the banks of the Euphrates; our arts come from Greece; our jurisprudence from Rome.

To we moderns the sensation of being in a constructed environment is so ubiquitous as to be invisible—in the cocoon of our strip malls and automobiles, we are like the fish that cannot feel the water through which they swim. In Cahokia’s day it was different. A thousand years ago it was the only place for a thousand miles in which one could be completely enveloped in an artificial landscape.

There was gray train smoke over the town most days, it smelled of travel, of transcontinental trains about to flash by, of important things about to happen. The train smell sounded the ‘A’ for Lamptown and then a treble chord of frying hamburger and onions and boiling coffee was struck by Hermann Bauer's kitchen, with a sostenuto of stale beer from Delaney's back door. These were all busy smells and seemed a 6 to 6 smell, a working town's smell, to be exchanged at the last factory whistle for the festival night odors of popcorn, Spearmint chewing gum, barber-shop pomades, and the faint smell of far-off damp cloverfields. Mornings the cloverfields retreated when the first Columbus local roared through the town. Bauer’s coffee pot boiled over again, and the factory’s night watchmen filed into Delaney’s for their morning beer.

Then, in 1497, five years after Columbus first stumbled across the Caribbean while searching for a westward route to the spice-producing lands of Asia, Giovanni Caboto sailed from Bristol, not in search of the Bristol secret but in the hopes of finding the route to Asia that Columbus had missed. Caboto was a Genovese who is remembered by the English name John Cabot, because he undertook this voyage for Henry VII of England. The English, being in the North, were far from the spice route and so paid exceptionally high prices for spices. Cabot reasoned correctly that the British Crown and the Bristol merchants would be willing to finance a search for a northern spice route. In June, after only thirty-five days at sea, Cabot found land, though it wasn’t Asia. It was a vast, rocky coastline that was ideal for salting and drying fish, by a sea that was teeming with cod. Cabot reported on the cod as evidence of the wealth of this new land,

Back in the time before Columbus, there were only Indians here, no skyscrapers, no automobiles, no streets. Of course, we didn't use the words Indian or Native American then; we were just people. We didn't know we were supposedly drunks or lazy or savages. I wondered what it was like to live without that weight on your shoulders, the weight of the murdered ancestors, the stolen land, the abused children, the burden every Native person carries. We were told in movies and books that Indians had a sacred relationship with the land, that we worshipped and nurtured it. But staring at Nathan, I didn't feel any mystical bond with the rez. I hated our shitty unpaved roads and our falling-down houses and the snarling packs of dogs that roamed freely in the streets and alleys. But most of all, I hated that kids like Nathan - good kids, decent kids - got involved with drugs and crime and gangs, because there was nothing for them to do here. No after-school jobs, no clubs, no tennis lessons. Every month in the Lakota Times newspaper there was an obituary for another teen suicide, another family in the Burned Thigh Nation who'd had their heart taken away from them. In the old days, the eyapaha was the town crier, the person who would meet incoming warriors after a battle, ask them what happened so they wouldn't have to speak of their own glories, then tell the people the news. Now the eyapaha, our local newspaper, announced losses and harms too often, victories and triumphs too rarely.

People of color in the internal colonies of the US cannot defend themselves against police brutality or expropriate the means of survival to free themselves from economic servitude. They must wait for enough people of color who have attained more economic privilege (the “house slaves” of Malcolm X’s analysis) and conscientious white people to gather together and hold hands and sing songs. Then, they believe, change will surely come. People in Latin America must suffer patiently, like true martyrs, while white activists in the US “bear witness” and write to Congress. People in Iraq must not fight back. Only if they remain civilians will their deaths be counted and mourned by white peace activists who will, one of these days, muster a protest large enough to stop the war. Indigenous people need to wait just a little longer (say, another 500 years) under the shadow of genocide, slowly dying off on marginal lands, until-well, they’re not a priority right now, so perhaps they need to organize a demonstration or two to win the attention and sympathy of the powerful. Or maybe they could go on strike, engage in Gandhian noncooperation? But wait-a majority of them are already unemployed, noncooperating, fully excluded from the functioning of the system. Nonviolence declares that the American Indians could have fought off Columbus, George Washington, and all the other genocidal butchers with sit-ins; that Crazy Horse, by using violent resistance, became part of the cycle of violence, and was “as bad as” Custer. Nonviolence declares that Africans could have stopped the slave trade with hunger strikes and petitions, and that those who mutinied were as bad as their captors; that mutiny, a form of violence, led to more violence, and, thus, resistance led to more enslavement. Nonviolence refuses to recognize that it can only work for privileged people, who have a status protected by violence, as the perpetrators and beneficiaries of a violent hierarchy.

One of my favorite examples of this occurred in the life of Moses in the Old Testament. Though born a Hebrew, he lived a life of privilege in the palace of Egypt until he was forty years old. But after killing an Egyptian, he was exiled to the desert for forty years. There God used him as a shepherd and father, and after four decades of faithful service in obscurity, Moses was called to leadership. Scripture says by that time he was the most humble man in the world. Bill Purvis, the senior pastor of a large church in Columbus, Georgia, said, “If you do what you can, with what you have, where you are, then God won’t leave you where you are, and He will increase what you have.

In 1846 on of his Academy exhibits was a painting called The Angel Standing in the Sun. Turner found this passage for the Academy catalogue in the Book of Revelation: And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God; That ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, both free and bond, both small and great. To reinforce the note of voracious doom, he added two lines from Samuel Rogers' Voyage of Columbus: The morning march that flashes to the sun; The feast of vultures when the day is done.

Europe in the days of Columbus, Copernicus and Newton had the highest concentration of religious fanatics in the world, and the lowest level of tolerance. The luminaries of the Scientific Revolution lived in a society that expelled Jews and Muslims, burned heretics wholesale, saw a witch in every cat-loving elderly lady and started a new religious war every full moon. If you travelled to Cairo or Istanbul around 1600, you would find there a multicultural and tolerant metropolis, where Sunnis, Shiites, Orthodox Christians, Catholics, Armenians, Copts, Jews and even the occasional Hindu lived side by side in relative harmony. Though they had their share of disagreements and riots, and though the Ottoman Empire routinely discriminated against people on religious grounds, it was a liberal paradise compared with Europe.

That was the end of my adventure in Central America. By the lakeshore in Granada, Nicaragua, I decided to turn for home. I wondered what Cortes would have said if, when he set out in the wake of Columbus, he had foreseen the beach outside Granada. He knew in his bones of the glory to come, would he have known about its eclipse? A Church without the True Cross, unable to protect its buildings from earthquake or idolatry; the gold and silver mines exhausted; the children of the Conquest reduced to beggary, placing their trust in the redundant theories of a Victorian economist; the empire overwhelmed by its own pagan and monstrous child. What a fool time has made of Cortes and his pretensions. He should have turned back to Cuba, to his dice and his saints and his women, and left the Indians with the Gods they honour, against all the odds, to this day.

We often associate science with the values of secularism and tolerance. If so, early modern Europe is the last place you would have expected a scientific revolution. Europe in the days of Columbus, Copernicus and Newton had the highest concentration of religious fanatics in the world, and the lowest level of tolerance. The luminaries of the Scientific Revolution lived in a society that expelled Jews and Muslims, burned heretics wholesale, saw a witch in every cat-loving elderly lady and started a new religious war every full moon. If you had travelled to Cairo or Istanbul around 1600, you would find there a multicultural and tolerant metropolis, where Sunnis, Shiites, Orthodox Christians, Catholics, Armenians, Copts, Jews and even the occasional Hindu lived side by side in relative harmony. Though they had their share of disagreements and riots, and though the Ottoman Empire routinely discriminated against people on religious grounds, it was a liberal paradise compared with Europe. If you had then sailed on to contemporary Paris or London, you would have found cities awash with religious extremism, in which only those belonging to the dominant sect could live. In London they killed Catholics, in Paris they killed Protestants, the Jews had long been driven out, and nobody in his right mind would dream of letting any Muslims in. And yet, the Scientific Revolution began in London and Paris rather than in Cairo and Istanbul.

… The most important contribution you can make now is taking pride in your treasured home state. Because nobody else is. Study and cherish her history, even if you have to do it on your own time. I did. Don’t know what they’re teaching today, but when I was a kid, American history was the exact same every year: Christopher Columbus, Plymouth Rock, Pilgrims, Thomas Paine, John Hancock, Sons of Liberty, tea party. I’m thinking, ‘Okay, we have to start somewhere— we’ll get to Florida soon enough.’…Boston Massacre, Crispus Attucks, Paul Revere, the North Church, ‘Redcoats are coming,’ one if by land, two if by sea, three makes a crowd, and I’m sitting in a tiny desk, rolling my eyes at the ceiling. Hello! Did we order the wrong books? Were these supposed to go to Massachusetts?…Then things showed hope, moving south now: Washington crosses the Delaware, down through original colonies, Carolinas, Georgia. Finally! Here we go! Florida’s next! Wait. What’s this? No more pages in the book. School’s out? Then I had to wait all summer, and the first day back the next grade: Christopher Columbus, Plymouth Rock…Know who the first modern Floridians were? Seminoles! Only unconquered group in the country! These are your peeps, the rugged stock you come from. Not genetically descended, but bound by geographical experience like a subtropical Ellis Island. Because who’s really from Florida? Not the flamingos, or even the Seminoles for that matter. They arrived when the government began rounding up tribes, but the Seminoles said, ‘Naw, we prefer waterfront,’ and the white man chased them but got freaked out in the Everglades and let ’em have slot machines…I see you glancing over at the cupcakes and ice cream, so I’ll limit my remaining remarks to distilled wisdom: “Respect your parents. And respect them even more after you find out they were wrong about a bunch of stuff. Their love and hard work got you to the point where you could realize this. “Don’t make fun of people who are different. Unless they have more money and influence. Then you must. “If someone isn’t kind to animals, ignore anything they have to say. “Your best teachers are sacrificing their comfort to ensure yours; show gratitude. Your worst are jealous of your future; rub it in. “Don’t talk to strangers, don’t play with matches, don’t eat the yellow snow, don’t pull your uncle’s finger. “Skip down the street when you’re happy. It’s one of those carefree little things we lose as we get older. If you skip as an adult, people talk, but I don’t mind. “Don’t follow the leader. “Don’t try to be different—that will make you different. “Don’t try to be popular. If you’re already popular, you’ve peaked too soon. “Always walk away from a fight. Then ambush. “Read everything. Doubt everything. Appreciate everything. “When you’re feeling down, make a silly noise. “Go fly a kite—seriously. “Always say ‘thank you,’ don’t forget to floss, put the lime in the coconut. “Each new year of school, look for the kid nobody’s talking to— and talk to him. “Look forward to the wonderment of growing up, raising a family and driving by the gas station where the popular kids now work. “Cherish freedom of religion: Protect it from religion. “Remember that a smile is your umbrella. It’s also your sixteen-in-one reversible ratchet set. “ ‘I am rubber, you are glue’ carries no weight in a knife fight. “Hang on to your dreams with everything you’ve got. Because the best life is when your dreams come true. The second-best is when they don’t but you never stop chasing them. So never let the authority jade your youthful enthusiasm. Stay excited about dinosaurs, keep looking up at the stars, become an archaeologist, classical pianist, police officer or veterinarian. And, above all else, question everything I’ve just said. Now get out there, class of 2020, and take back our state!

Smallpox has an incubation period of about twelve days, during which time sufferers, who may not know they are sick, can infect anyone they meet. With its fine roads and great population movements, Tawantinsuyu was perfectly positioned for a major epidemic. Smallpox radiated throughout the empire like ink spreading through tissue paper. Millions of people simultaneously experienced its symptoms: high fever, vomiting, severe pain, oozing blisters everywhere on the body. Unable to number the losses, the Jesuit Martín de Murúa said only that the toll was “infinite thousands.

you find the worst psychopathic antisocial losers in a society, give them power, and they would give you their complete, unquestioning loyalty.

that I had been selected to receive an award known as the Medaglia de Grifone, or Christopher Columbus medal, given every year for “outstanding contributions to sea travel.” Admiral Rickover had been the recipient just the year before. Bonny and I traveled to Genoa, Italy, the birthplace and boyhood home of Columbus. On October 12, 1958, Columbus Day, we attended the black-tie awards ceremony. I accepted on behalf of everyone on board Nautilus and emphasized that “no dramatic development in the history of modern man would be possible without the labor and genius of those who have gone before

The Olmec were but the first of many societies that arose in Mesoamerica in this epoch. Most had religions that focused on human sacrifice, dark by contemporary standards, but their economic and scientific accomplishments were bright. They invented a dozen different systems of writing, established widespread trade networks, tracked the orbits of the planets, created a 365-day calendar (more accurate than its contemporaries in Europe), and recorded their histories in accordion-folded "books" of fig tree bark paper.

Joiner’s article “On Buckeyes, Gators, Super Bowl Sunday, and the Miracle on Ice” makes a strong case that it’s not the winning that counts but the taking part—the shared experience. It is true that he found fewer suicides in Columbus, Ohio, and Gainesville, Florida, in the years when the local college football teams did well. But Joiner argues that this is because fans of winning teams “pull together” more: they wear the team shirt more often, watch games together in bars, talk about the team, and so on, much as happens in a European country while the national team is playing in a World Cup. The “pulling together” saves people from suicide, not the winning. Proof of this is that Joiner found fewer suicides in the US on Super Bowl Sundays than on other Sundays at that time of year, even though few of the Americans who watch the Super Bowl are passionate supporters of either team. What they get from the day’s parties is a sense of belonging. That is the lifesaver. In Europe today, there may be nothing that brings a society together like a World Cup with your team in it. For once, almost everyone in the country is watching the same TV programs and talking about them at work the next day, just as Europeans used to do thirty years ago before they got cable TV. Part of the point of watching a World Cup is that almost everyone else is watching, too. Isolated people—the types at most risk of suicide—are suddenly welcomed into the national conversation. They

The weakness of the existing system had been evident during the financial crisis when the Wall Street bank Morgan Stanley needed a $9 billion infusion from a Japanese firm. The agreement was reached on a Sunday, but the money could not be sent because the wire network was down for the weekend and the next day was Columbus Day. It turned out that even banks couldn’t send each other money on holidays. In order to get around this, the Japanese bank cut an absurd $9 billion paper check. With

The weakness of the existing system had been evident during the financial crisis when the Wall Street bank Morgan Stanley needed a $9 billion infusion from a Japanese firm. The agreement was reached on a Sunday, but the money could not be sent because the wire network was down for the weekend and the next day was Columbus Day. It turned out that even banks couldn’t send each other money on holidays. In order to get around this, the Japanese bank cut an absurd $9 billion paper

you’re not that smart, I mean, your species is responsible for Windows Vista.” “Vist- that was a long time ago!” “It’s still an insult to computers across the galaxy.

Whether the glass is half empty or half full depends on if you're drinking from it or filling it." Milt Carp in Dollarapalooza

Every dollar has a story to tell," Vonn Carp in Dollarapalooza.

No, I pull in other resources as needed, I've never used more than seven percent of my capacity so far since I met you.

Christopher Columbus and his brothers were no different from many of the Spanish adventurers of the time. They were a roughhewn lot, who wrote the rules by which they lived. As with their fellow conquistadors, they had a code of honor that sadly did not include the Indians. Since most of the Indians were never baptized, killing or enslaving them was not considered sinful. Human life was cheap to them, as they lived and died by the sword. The same was not true of the gentry or the clergy, many of whom saw that their responsibility was to administer “the Great Commission” as mentioned in the Bible, which was to convert the heathens to Christianity. However, many of the Spanish Adventurers never got outside of their own bubble and had no idea what the World was really all about. It is interesting that Columbus Day is celebrated, when in fact he was not the first to discover America, nor was he really an honorable person, as we understand the word “honorable” now. It can only be said that things were different. Things were the way they were!

THERE ISN’T A historian the last five centuries who could argue against the idea that Luther’s stand that day at Worms—before the assembled powers of the empire, and against the theological and political and ecclesiastical order that had reigned for centuries, and therefore against the whole of the medieval world—was one of the most significant moments in history. It ranks with the 1066 Norman Conquest and the 1215 signing of the Magna Carta and the 1492 landing of Columbus in the New World. And in its way, it far outweighs all of those historic moments. If ever there was a moment where it can be said the modern world was born, and where the future itself was born, surely it was in that room on April 18 at Worms.

We can get up to speed much quicker." He went on for a while about tactics of air combat, the three of us were enthralled, at that moment, I thought he was the coolest guy who ever lived. I left my seat and got another hot dog for him, so he'd keep talking

wealthy Georgian named Charles Augustus Lafayette Lamar, who bought the Wanderer, a luxury yacht, in New York and outfitted her for slaving. Around the time Meaher made his bet, Lamar was being lionized as a hero in newspapers across the nation as tales of the Africans he smuggled into the country spread. Relying on family money to make his start, Lamar was involved in horse racing, gold mining, road building, and the shipping of cotton. However, it appears he was not particularly good at any of those endeavors, and was repeatedly bailed out of financial disasters by his father, Gazaway. A family history going back three hundred years contains a small mention of Charles, describing him as “a dangerous man, and with all his apparent recklessness and lawlessness, a cautious man, too.” Perhaps not too cautious, as he was known to often resort to violence. While serving as an alderman on the Savannah City Council in 1853, he was arrested for “disorderly conduct and fighting in the streets.” In 1858, he shot out a friend’s eye while attempting to defend his uncle in a fight. Ultimately, he was the last person killed in the Civil War, in a small battle fought in Columbus, Georgia, seven days after the surrender at Appomattox.

We try, we struggle, all the time to find words to express our love. The quality, the quantity, certain that no two people have experienced it before in the history of creation. Perhaps Catherine and Heathcliff, perhaps Romeo and Juliet, maybe Tristan and Isolde, maybe Hero and Leander, but these are just characters, make-believe. We have known each other forever, since before conception even. We remember playing together in a playpen, crossing paths at F.A.O. Schwarz. We remember meeting in front of the Holy Temple in the days before Christ, we remember greeting each other at the Forum, at the Parthenon, on passing ships as Christopher Columbus sailed to America. We have survived pogrom together, we have died in Dachau together, we have been lynched by the Ku Klux Klan together. There has been cancer, polio, the bubonic plague, consumption, morphine addiction. We have had children together, we have been children together, we were in the womb together. Our history is so deep and wide and long, we have known each other a million years. And we don't know how to express this kind of love, this kind of feeling.

Perdu had discovered another thing above the rivers - stars that breathed. One day they shone brightly, the next they were pale, then bright again. And this had nothing to do with the haze or with the fact that he no longer simply stared at his own feet. It looked as though they were breathing to some never-ending slow, deep rhythm. They breathed and watched as the world came and went. Some stars had seen the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals; they had seen the pyramids rise and Columbus discover America. For them, the earth was one more island world in the immeasurable ocean of outer space, its inhabitants microscopically small.

Italian immigrants, for instance, were seen as something close to Black, especially if they came from southern Italy. Indeed, they were sometimes lynched for racist reasons. The establishment of Columbus Day was part of an effort to write Italians into American history in a way that would allow them to be seen as White. That worked. Today Italian immigrants and their descendants are, without doubt, White so far as race in contemporary America goes. The social dynamics are, of course, much more complicated than this compressed history indicates. And I haven’t said anything about Native Americans, Asians, Pacific Islanders—or any other group that might count as a distinct

For 167 days in 1925 two Polish researchers ate almost nothing but potatoes (mashed with butter, steamed with salt, cut with oil into potato salad). At the end they reported no weight gain, no health problems, and, improbably, “no craving for change” in their diet.

Derek Walcott wrote in his 1992 Nobel Lecture about the enthusiasm of the tourist: What is hidden cannot be loved. The traveller cannot love, since love is stasis and travel is motion. If he returns to what he loved in a landscape and stays there, he is no longer a traveller but in stasis and concentration, the lover of that particular part of earth, a native. So many people say they ‘love the Caribbean’, meaning that someday they plan to return for a visit but could never live there, the usual benign insult of the traveller, the tourist. These travellers, at their kindest, were devoted to the same patronage, the islands passing in profile, their vegetal luxury, their backwardness and poverty . . . What is the earthly paradise for our visitors? Two weeks without rain and a mahogany tan, and, at sunset, local troubadours in straw hats and floral shirts beating ‘Yellow Bird’ and ‘Banana Boat Song’ to death. There is a territory wider than this – wider than the limits made by the map of an island – which is the illimitable sea and what it remembers. All of the Antilles, every island, is an effort of memory; every mind, every racial biography culminating in amnesia and fog. Pieces of sunlight through the fog and sudden rainbows, arcs-en-ciel.24

Honduras, as you of course know, is a republic of Central America, and it gets its name from something that happened on the fourth voyage of Columbus. He and his men had had days of weary sailing and had sought in vain for shallow water in which they might come to an anchorage. Finally they reached the point now known as Cape Gracias-a-Dios, and when they let the anchor go, and found that in a short time it came to rest on the floor of the ocean, some one of the sailors—perhaps Columbus himself—is said to have remarked: "'Thank the Lord, we have left the deep waters (honduras)' that being the Spanish word for unfathomable depths. So Honduras it was called, and has been to this day. "It is a queer land with many traces of an ancient civilization, a civilization which I believe dates back

I gave up on honoring Christopher Columbus long before the country did and have often espoused the questioning of the path trod by those we studied as the great explorers. What havoc they wreaked on the lands they explored. And who really did the exploring? The myth of the lone white man braving the new land is just that, a myth-- the local guides were the ones who knew the territory and did the work, including the work of keeping them all alive. And yet, indigenous populations explored as well, and some wreaked their own havoc on other populations at the same time that they grew worlds. History is incredibly complicated.

And he showed little compassion to the slaves themselves, arguing that sugar would be too expensive were it not for slave labour, and that ‘One cannot get into one’s mind that God, who is a very wise being, should have put a soul, above all a good soul, in a body that was entirely black.

it was the thought of being injected with tiny machines that was making me queasy. Microscopic alien robots were swimming in my blood. It was creepy.

After his transfer, Trump was put in charge of a special drill team for New York City’s Columbus Day parade. In white gloves and dressed in full uniform, Trump led the procession south along Fifth Avenue toward St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where he shook hands with Francis Cardinal Spellman. Turning to Major Anthony “Ace” Castellano, one of NYMA’s commanders, Trump said, “You know what, Ace? I’d really like to own some of this real estate someday.” When

They were proud of their nationality, which had existed nearly as long as from Columbus to our own day. They gloried in their splendid background of great deeds and their long line of heroes reaching back to Rurik.