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Why Not Columbus Day?

by Evelyn Hudson on 2021-10-11T11:00:00-04:00 | 0 Comments

Many Americans grew up recognizing the second Monday in October as Columbus Day. In recent years, there has been a push to rename the day Indigenous Peoples' Day. Why is this happening? As Americans look through our history with a more socially conscious lens, we've realized that celebrating Columbus as the "discoverer of America" discounts all of the Indigenous people who already lived in the Americas and portrays a man who committed atrocities as a hero. If you want to learn more about this subject, check out one of the books listed below.

The following books are available through Delaware Libraries.
If you have a Delaware library card, you can access these books online!
Not sure if you have one? Email the DHSS Library and we will look up your account!

Columbus by Laurence Bergreen

ISBN: 9780670023011

Publication Date: 2011-09-20

From the author of the Magellan biography, Over the Edge of the World, a mesmerizing new account of the great explorer. Christopher Columbus's 1492 voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in search of a trading route to China, and his unexpected landfall in the Americas, is a watershed event in world history. Yet Columbus made three more voyages within the span of only a decade, each designed to demonstrate that he could sail to China within a matter of weeks and convert those he found there to Christianity. These later voyages were even more adventurous, violent, and ambiguous, but they revealed Columbus's uncanny sense of the sea, his mingled brilliance and delusion, and his superb navigational skills. In all these exploits he almost never lost a sailor. By their conclusion, however, Columbus was broken in body and spirit. If the first voyage illustrates the rewards of exploration, the latter voyages illustrate the tragic costs- political, moral, and economic. In rich detail Laurence Bergreen re-creates each of these adventures as well as the historical background of Columbus's celebrated, controversial career. Written from the participants' vivid perspectives, this breathtakingly dramatic account will be embraced by readers of Bergreen's previous biographies of Marco Polo and Magellan and by fans of Nathaniel Philbrick, Simon Winchester, and Tony Horwitz.

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

ISBN: 9780807000403

Publication Date: 2014-09-16

Now part of the HBO docuseries "Exterminate All the Brutes," written and directed by Raoul Peck 2015 Recipient of the American Book Award The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire. With growing support for movements such as the campaign to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoples' Day and the Dakota Access Pipeline protest led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is an essential resource providing historical threads that are crucial for understanding the present. In An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: "The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them." Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples' history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative. An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is a 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature.

The Other Slavery by Andrés Reséndez

ISBN: 9780547640983

Publication Date: 2016-04-12

A myth-shattering work that draws on new evidence to reveal the massive enslavement of tens of thousands of North American Indians, from its beginnings in the early 1500s to its last gasp in the late 1800s Since the time of Columbus, Indian slavery was illegal in much of the American continent. Yet, as historian Andres Resendez illuminates in 'The Other Slavery', it was practiced for centuries as an open secret. There was no abolitionist movement to protect the tens of thousands of natives who were kidnapped and enslaved by the conquistadors and later forced to serve as domestics for Mormons and rich Anglos, or to descend into the "mouth of hell" of eighteenth-century silver mines, where, if they didn't die quickly from cave-ins, they would die slowly from silica in their lungs. Resendez builds the incisive, original case that it was mass slavery, more than epidemics, which decimated Indian populations across North America. New evidence, including testimonies of courageous priests, rapacious merchants, Indian captives, and Anglo colonists, sheds light on Indian enslavement of other Indians -- as what started as a European business passed into the hands of indigenous operators and spread like wildfire across vast tracts of the American Southwest. 'The Other Slavery' is nothing less than a key missing piece of American history, one that changes an entire national narrative. AUTHOR: Andres Resendez is a professor and historian at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of 'A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca', which Carolyn See called "impossible to put down" (Washington Post Book World). REVIEWS: "This eye-opening exposure of the abuse of the indigenous peoples of America is staggering; that the mistreatment continued into the 20th century is beyond disturbing." - Kirkus January 15 "Every now and then a new book comes along that throws a switch on our historical valences and makes us see ourselves anew. 'The Other Slavery' is one such book. Much as 'Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee' did when it first appeared in the early 1970s, Andres Resendez's carefully sifted work fundamentally reshapes our understanding of a great enduring mystery: 'What really accounts for the swift and tragic demise of our continent's indigenous peoples?'" --Hampton Sides, author of 'Blood and Thunder' and 'In the Kingdom of Ice' 23 b/w photos, 17 maps, 7 charts

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