If pigs could fly

A list from Katie Couric Media, “10 American History Books Every Citizen Should Read” (26 June 2023) caught my attention when it was shared last month on Society for U.S. Intellectual History’s Facebook Page. I had read three of the ten, and had a fourth on my shelf. I quickly added a fourth I had read: Ijeoma Oluo, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America (2020). It is a good book worth recommending, but I think it could have gone much further unpacking unmerited privilege and its consequences. Oluo does an excellent job of bringing forth example of oppression through compelling anecdotes well-written.

Other books on the list that I had read previously are Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (1980); James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me (1995); and Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (2005). I bought with intentions to read another, but then my teaching schedule became busier than expected and sent my reading in other directions. Now, however, I may find the time to read Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016). Zinn, of course, is part of the initial focus of Patriots and Peoples (see “Patriots' and Peoples' Histories”). I have referenced Mann several times.

Last week, I started into the Kindle sample of Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (2018). The sample had been sitting idle in my app for two years. Early in the book was an egregious error that gave me considerable doubts about reading further.

In a paragraph that begins, “In 1492,” Lepore wrote:

…most people in the Americas lived in smaller settlements [Tenochtitlán is mentioned as having at least a quarter-million] and gathered and hunted for their food. A good number were farmers who grew squash and corn and beans, hunted and fished. They kept pigs and chickens but not bigger animals. (8)

They did not keep pigs. Lepore should know this. If she does not, perhaps there is a great deal about the Columbian Exchange that she is missing as well (see “The Columbian Exchange”). In the same paragraph is a confident assertion that the population of the Americas in 1492 was 75 million. It is a plausible number and within the range of what I consider likely, but should have been presented with more nuance. We do not know. All figures for the aboriginal population of the Americas are speculative, but some are far better estimates than others. There is a footnote, but the sample does not offer access. Now that I have the book, I can find the reference is to Mann, 1491. I would prefer a reference to scholarship by a specialist in the field of American Indian studies.

Chickens, too, came to America via the Columbian Exchange, although turkeys originated in the Americas. 

Even so, I pressed on through the sample. As I was doing so, I kept musing about how pigs, originally from Eurasia, made it to the Americas ahead of Columbus. Maybe they had wings and could fly.

A few pages later, Lepore begins to describe the Columbian Exchange, albeit without deploying the term (it is absent from the index, as well). She correctly credits Columbus with introducing pigs:

When Columbus made a second voyage across the ocean in 1493, he commanded a fleet of seventeen ships carrying twelve hundred men, and another kind of army, too: seeds and cuttings of wheat, chickpeas, melons, onions, radishes, greens, grapevines, and sugar cane, and horses, pigs, cattle, chickens, sheep, and goats, male and female, two by two. Hidden among the men and plants and the animals were stowaways, seeds stuck to animal skins or clinging to the folds of cloaks and blankets, in clods of mud. (18)

The process of ecological transformation that was fundamental to the European conquest is described well as this paragraph continues, including the astounding destructive success of eight pigs who quickly became thousands, spreading well ahead of Europeans. That paragraph rescued the book from its earlier error and I placed the order. Having the book in hand, I can also confirm the paragraph’s footnote offers Alfred Crosby’s two vital books on the subject: Columbian Exchange (1972) and Ecological Imperialism (1986).

Lepore's focus in the book concerns the political ideals expressed during the American Revolution and in the Constitution. Small errors about pigs arriving ahead of Columbus are a minor distraction.

Spokane City Council votes in favor of Indigenous Peoples' Day

Spokane City Council votes in favor of Indigenous Peoples' Day: SPOKANE, Wash. - The Spokane City Council voted 6-1 Monday in favor of renaming Columbus Day Indigenous Peoples' Day. More than 100 people showed up to Monday's meeting to testify about the decisio...

The Columbian Exchange

The Columbian Exchange (1972) by Alfred W. Crosby is among a small number of texts with which every American historian has some familiarity. Although many historians, perhaps even most, have read Crosby's text by extract, few are ignorant of its thesis.*

Crosby expresses the thesis succinctly: "the most important changes brought on by the Columbian voyages were biological in nature" (xiv). He then proceeds to elucidate the impact of disease, the spread of Old World flora and fauna in the Americas, and examines the impact of New World plants on the Old World. He also offers a reconsideration of the origins of syphilis, although others have reconsidered it since the publication of his seminal work.

Efforts to minimize the significance of the Columbian Exchange characterize A Patriot's History of the United States, as I have expanded upon at length in this blog. Michael Allen and Larry Schweikart dispute the significance of disease, while almost wholly ignoring the impact of pigs, cows, wheat, peaches, Russian thistle, and so on. Howard Zinn errs another way. In A People's History of the United States, he uncritically accepts and transmits the crude and almost certainly exaggerated population estimates of Bartolomé de Las Casas (see "Fragments from Bartolomé de Las Casas"). He does little better than Schweikart and Allen on the history of the peach, as well as cows, pigs, wheat, and thistle. Both A People's History and A Patriot's History are driven by politics. One serves the cause of today's conservatives, while the other serves socialist-leaning liberals.

Among the enduring impacts of the Columbian Exchange:

• The peppers in General Tso's chicken
• Tomato sauce on spaghetti
• The Irish Potato
• Kansas Wheat
• Lakota horses, the American rodeo, and everything associated with cowboys
• Mullein along the Spokane River (see photo)

*"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others..." Francis Bacon, "Of Studies" (1597).

Columbus: the Truth

Here's a video from YouTube:



When "their" appears as "they're," the author's close reading of texts seems less than credible. Even so, the allegations raise interesting questions.

A Literary Artifact

A literary artifact in honor of Columbus Day. In this passage from a Brazilian novel of a century ago, the protagonist reflects on the memory of his first kiss.

Even now I have the echo of it in my ears. The satisfaction I felt was tremendous. Columbus felt no greater when he discovered America, and pardon the banality in consideration of the aptness: every adolescent has within him an undiscovered world, an admiral and an October dawn. I made other discoveries later; none so dazzled me.
Machado de Assis, (trans. Helen Caldwell), Dom Casmurro, 71-72.

Dom Casmurro was published in Brazil in 1900; the English translation appeared in the United States in 1953. It is a tremendous book.

Fragments from Bartolomé de Las Casas

I have remarked previously that Voices of a People’s History of the United States (2004) by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove offers a generous selection from the writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas. There are extracts from The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account (1542) and In Defense of the Indians (1550). These are placed in company with extracts from the diary of Columbus and a brief passage from Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire (1982) in a chapter designed to correspond with chapter one of A People’s History. Both Voices of a People’s History and A People’s History have twenty-four chapters.

Zinn and Arnove’s assertion that Columbus “is universally portrayed as a heroic figure” (29) is much harder to swallow now than when Zinn wrote the first edition of A People’s History (1980). But they are describing his portrayal for generations of Americans up through the time they were in school. Several pages later, in the headnote to the selections from Las Casas, they observe that “the idealized, romanticized picture of Columbus has begun to be reconsidered” (35).

Estimating the Dead

The passage they offer from The Devastation of the Indies focuses upon depopulation and Spanish cruelties. Bartolomé de Las Casas depicts the islands of the Caribbean as a paradise formerly heavily populated by peoples that were “docile and open to doctrine, very apt to receive our Holy Catholic faith” (36). Las Casas arrived in Hispaniola in his eighteenth year in 1502, and claims to recall such a population of Indians that “it is as though God had crowded into these lands the great majority of mankind” (36). He offers general estimates of the aboriginal population of three million on Hispaniola (36), as many as one million on San Juan and Jamaica (40), and “a countless number” on the island of Cuba (42).

We can estimate very surely and truthfully that in the forty years that have passed, with the infernal actions of the Christians, there have been unjustly slain more than twelve million men, women, and children. In truth, I believe without trying to deceive myself that the number of the slain is more like fifteen million.
Las Casas, in Voices of A People’s History, 37.

Few scholars today accept these numbers, although Zinn advances them in A People’s History with minimal discussion and argument, as noted in “Howard Zinn on Depopulation.” Las Casas’s tendency toward hyperbole should give us pause. When Las Casas declares that Hispaniola “was perhaps the most densely populated place in the world” (35), we might take it as an effort towards census. But we find more exceptionalism on the next page: “of all the infinite universe of humanity, these people are the most guileless, the most devoid of wickedness and duplicity, the most obedient and faithful” (36). They lack only the gospel, or “they would be the most fortunate people in the world” (36). The Spanish, on the other hand, are the world’s most vile sinners: “their insatiable greed and ambition [is] the greatest ever seen in the world” (37). The most people, who are the most innocent, were abused by those with the most greed. Did Las Casas have enough experience throughout the world to render such judgment? Such comparisons come not from his breadth of knowledge, but from the ethnocentrism and cultural arrogance that he both advances and critiques.

Spanish Cruelties

Las Casas blames the killing and cruelty on the Spanish motives, and the opportunities for wealth out of proportion to individual merit.

Their reason for killing and destroying such an infinite number of souls is that the Christians have an ultimate aim, which is to acquire gold, and to swell themselves with riches in a very brief time and thus rise to a high estate disproportionate to their merits.
Las Casas, in Voices of A People’s History, 37.

He illuminates Spanish greed through a story of Hatuey who fled to Cuba from Hispaniola with many of his people in hopes of escaping the cruelties. Upon learning that the Spanish were coming to Cuba, he conducted a ceremony designed to appeal to the European god.

He had a basket full of gold and jewels and he said: “You see their God here, the God of the Christians. If you agree to it, let us dance for this God, who knows, it may please the God of the Christians and then they will do us no harm.” And his followers said, all together, “Yes, that is good, that is good!” And they danced round the basket of gold until they fell down exhausted. Then their chief, the cacique Hatuey, said to them: “See there, if we keep this basket of gold they will take it from us and will end up killing us. So let us cast away the basket into the river.” They all agreed to do this, and they flung the basket of gold into the river that was nearby.
Las Casas, in Voices of A People’s History, 40-41.

Later Hatuey was burned at the stake, but was given the opportunity to convert to Catholicism when he was “tied to the stake.” When told that Heaven was populated by Christians, he declared a preference for Hell. Las Casas comments, “Such is the fame and honor that God and our Faith have earned through the Christians who have gone out of the Indies” (41). Las Casas is clear. His concern was to save the souls of the Indians. This mission was rendered more difficult by the rapid depopulation of the aboriginals at the hands of Spanish who should have been model Christians, but appeared rather to be servants of their own greed.

From Chiasmus to Columbus

Chiasmus to Columbus

Lewis and Clark did not bring the West into U.S. history, they brought the United States into western history.
Colin G. Calloway, One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark, 2003

We did not come to the United States at all. The United States came to us.
Luis Valdez, Aztlan, 1972

Where does American history begin? The term American history more often than not refers to the history of the United States, rather than to all of North America, let alone the Americas—something about which my teenage son was ranting last night: “What about Canada, Mexico, and South America? Isn't Canada part of America?” Even when writers are concerned with this sort of semantic precision, they do not produce a national story of American history that begins with the Declaration of Independence. Rather, the beginning gets pushed back in time, nearly always creating a long story of colonization that culminates in revolution. Nation building begins after the revolution.

The story often begins with Columbus and Indians. It might begin with Columbus setting sail, or with Indians greeting him when he lands. American history sometimes begins with the precursors to Columbus, such as the Norse and their lost colony of Vineland or Prince Henry the Navigator’s orchestration of discoveries along the coast of Africa. It also could begin with the origins of human life in America, as in The Oxford History of the American People (1965) by Samuel Eliot Morison.

Morison concluded that people began crossing into America from Asia “prior to 10,000 B.C.” (8) on the basis of archeology. Scientists since Morison’s day have pushed back the dates of this migration, some as far back as 50,000 years. Morison expressed skepticism regarding whether the first migrants were indeed the ancestors of modern American Indians, or whether their ancestors displaced earlier peoples. These questions have gained new currency since 1996 when a couple of young men tripped over a skull on the banks of the Columbia River while trying to sneak into the hydroplane races; their discovery of bones led to the arrival of forensic archaeologist James Chatters on the scene. Chatters’s Ancient Encounters: Kennewick Man and the First Americans (2001) is one among many texts reassessing human life in early America, and the controversies generated by such study. Chatters is one among those now offering the view that so-called Kennewick Man is more closely related to the Ainu than to American Indians.

The Bering land-bridge hypothesis did not originate in archeology, as that science was still far in the future when José de Acosta wrote Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590). Acosta concerned himself with universal history as a theologian. His work “accorded with the 1537 declaration of Pope Paul III that Indians were human, hence descendants of Noah,” as I wrote in “Native Americans: An Overview,” Encyclopedia of American Studies (2001).

American history could begin with speculative accounts of migrations through a land-bridge, and with alternate theories of water routes. Such narratives would need to delve into the science of archeology and related disciplines, such as methods of garnering evidence of human migrations from comparative linguistics. On the other hand, American history could begin with Native stories of origins as Vine Deloria, Jr. recommends in Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (1995). As Colin Calloway points out in the epigraph above, there was a long history of peoples in America before European-American settlers arrived. History as we have come to know it finds its structure and plot in European metanarratives—the rise of civilization,—but an accurate account of the American past need not conform always to these imported structures.

Bereshit

The very remote history of all nations is disfigured with fable, and gives but little encouragement to distant enquiry, and laborious researches. … From the most exact observations I could make in the long time I traded among the Indian Americans, I was forced to believe them lineally descended from the Israelites, either while they were a maritime power, or soon after the general captivity; the latter however is the most probable.
James Adair, The History of the American Indians, 1775

Many writers past and present have stressed American exceptionalism—the notion that the United States is a light to the world, the world’s best hope. Despite such quasi-religious assumptions, or even explicitly religious arguments, these writers do not write their stories with the sort of language found in the B'reshit or Bərêšîth, the first of the books of the Torah. Even if they started in such a manner, we are unlikely to find such sentences as these:

In the beginning of American history, the land was occupied. As Europeans began to arrive, lands and peoples were transformed; nations vanished and new nations were born.

We do find frequent efforts to draw upon Hebrew scriptures in order to frame the American story of the past. James Adair’s view that American Indians were descended from Israel neither found adherents in his day nor in ours unless we consider the impact of Joseph Smith imbibing the idea, and then promoting it through his sacred text. On the other hand, Cotton Mather’s expression of the Puritan colony as a “New English Israel” has produced many proselytes. In Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), Mather expressed his sense of the purpose of the colony of New England: a sense of mission akin to that uttered in 1630 by John Winthrop as he drew upon Matthew 5:14 for his sermon to the recently arrived Puritans that soon would overwhelm the Separatists whom had arrived on the Mayflower. Mather wrote:

This at last is the Spot of Earth, which the God of Heaven Spied out for the Seat of such Evangelical, and Ecclesiastical, and very remarkable Transactions, as require to be made an History; here ‘twas that our Blessed Jesus intended a Resting-place, must I say? Or only an Hiding-place for those Reformed CHURCHES, which have given him a little Accomplishment of his Eternal Father’s Promise unto him; to be; we hope, yet further accomplished, of having the utmost Parts of the Earth for his Possession?
Mather, Magnalia, 122-123, emphasis in original

The Sense of Mission

Rush Limbaugh interviewed Larry Schweikart, author of A Patriot’s History and published the interview in The Limbaugh Letter (March 2005). This interview is reprinted in the updated version of A Patriot’s History. Limbaugh asked Schweikart about his view of American exceptionalism. Speaking for himself and for co-author Michael Allen, Schweikart was clear: “We believe that America was a city set on a hill” (xv). He continues by asserting that all of the English colonies, except Jamestown, were religious colonies. His central point is that the U.S. has “a Judeo-Christian basis. We [the U.S.] embrace private property rights, and we are a democratic republic” (xvi). We are to understand that God did the setting.

The first sentence of the narrative in A Patriot’s History reflects this bias. “God, glory, and gold—not necessarily in that order—took post-Renaissance Europeans to parts of the globe that they had never before seen” (1). From there the first two pages of narrative give an account of the influence of Marco Polo, ancient trade routes to Cathay, and developments in technology: the Arabs’ astrolabe, Viking hull construction, and sternpost rudders from the Baltic coast. They note also the growth of European monarchies, mercantilism, and the rift between Protestants and Catholics “that reinforced national concerns” (2). After a brief timeline of twenty-one events from the four voyages of Columbus to the Salem witch hunts, they resume the narrative with three paragraphs concerning Prince Henry of Portugal.

In contrast to A Patriot’s History, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History opens with a description of the actions of Natives: “Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island’s beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat” (1). Zinn goes on to emphasize Native hospitality and “belief in sharing,” suggesting “[t]hese traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance” (1). He also mentions Marco Polo and the silks and spices of Asia, as well as political developments of monarchies. He offers less preliminary context to the voyage of Columbus, but does mention the relative distribution of wealth in Spain, “2 percent of the population … owned 95 percent of the land” (2).

Both books begin with the voyages of Columbus, and each constructs this story in a manner consistent with the authors’ overall purpose. Schweikart and Allen labor to promote a Judeo-Christian based sense of national mission; Zinn aims to highlight racial and class inequalities, as well as “fugitive moments of compassion” (11) from which we might craft our future.

-

Expanding the Footnote: Inventing the Flat Earth

Expanding the Footnote

Was the myth of a flat earth promulgated by liberals seeking to ridicule religion?

Rob and Cyndy Shearer intimate that it was, although not quite in those words. See the quote from their Homeschool World article in Footnote to “Columbus and the Flat Earth.” Jeffrey Burton Russell is more explicit:

…the falsehood about the spherical earth became a colorful and unforgettable part of a larger falsehood: the falsehood of the eternal war between science (good) and religion (bad) throughout Western history. This vast web of falsehood was invented and propagated by the influential historian John Draper (1811-1882) and many prestigious followers, such as Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918), the president of Cornell University, who made sure that the false account was perpetrated in texts, encyclopedias, and even allegedly serious scholarship, down to the present day. A lively current version of the lie can be found in Daniel Boorstin's The Discoverers, found in any bookshop or library.
“The Myth of the Flat Earth Summary”

Russell continues by offering the explanation that Christian opposition to Darwin’s theory of evolution motivated perpetrators of the falsehood:

The reason for promoting both the specific lie about the sphericity of the earth and the general lie that religion and science are in natural and eternal conflict in Western society, is to defend Darwinism. The answer is really only slightly more complicated than that bald statement. The flat-earth lie was ammunition against the creationists. The argument was simple and powerful, if not elegant: "Look how stupid these Christians are. They are always getting in the way of science and progress. These people who deny evolution today are exactly the same sort of people as those idiots who for at least a thousand years denied that the earth was round. How stupid can you get?"
“The Myth of the Flat Earth Summary”

Serendipity and Columbus

Umberto Eco repeats Russell’s claim, but first mentions controversy regarding the heliocentric hypothesis. The Church opposed Copernicus before Christians objected to Darwin. This conflict, too, may have been exaggerated, but Eco does not go into that. With respect to the shape of the earth, Eco discusses the fourth century Byzantine geographer Cosmas Indicopleustes, about whom Russell devotes a fair portion of Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (1991). Eco cites other texts that dwell on Cosmas at some length, pointing out “the text of Cosmas, … was revealed to the Western world only in 1706, … No medieval author knew Cosmas, and his text was considered an authority of the ‘Dark Ages’ only after its English publication in 1897” (Serendipities: Language and Lunacy, 5).

Eco continues with a catalog of scholars including Ptolemy, Augustine, Dante, Thomas Aquinas and others that all knew the earth was round. His discussion leads up to the paragraph that expresses the heart of Serendipities: Language and Lunacy:

So what was the big argument all about in the time of Columbus? The sages of Salamanca had, in fact made calculations more precise than his, and they held that the earth, while assuredly round, was far more vast than the Genoese navigator believed, and therefore it was mad for him to attempt to circumnavigate it in order to reach the Orient by way of the Occident. Columbus, on the contrary, burning with a sacred fire, good navigator but bad astronomer, thought the earth smaller than it was. Naturally neither he nor the learned men of Salamanca suspected that between Europe and Asia there lay another continent. And so you see how complicated life is, and how fragile are the boundaries between truth and error, right and wrong. Though they were right, the sages of Salamanca were wrong; and Columbus, while he was wrong, pursued faithfully his error and proved to be right—thanks to serendipity.
Eco, Serendipities, 6-7.

Correcting Error

The Shearers show evidence that they might have read Russell’s text, although they do not cite it. Their narrative of the facts highlights points made by Russell and others: understanding the earth to be a sphere has a long lineage; Columbus erroneously estimated of the size of the earth; and the main elements of the myth of the dispute at Salamanca was concocted by Washington Irving in his historical fiction, The Voyages of Christopher Columbus. They refer their readers to Samuel Eliot Morison’s Admiral of the Ocean Sea (1942) and the hagiography, George Grant’s The Last Crusader: The Untold Story of Christopher Columbus (1992).

The Shearer’s article begins with a composite of “howlers”—their term—that they have encountered over the years. Their composite is focused almost exclusively on the flat earth myth. James Loewen offers a more detailed composite in his detailed study of twelve representative textbooks, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (1995). I’ll quote only a portion of his collective textbook mythistory:

His adventures convinced him that the earth must be round and that the fabled riches of the East—spices and gold—could be had by sailing west, superseding the overland routes, which the Turks had closed off to commerce. … After an arduous journey of more than two months, during which his mutinous crew almost threw him overboard, Columbus discovered the West Indies on October 12, 1492.
Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, 44.

Loewen examines the errors of fact and of emphasis in extensive detail through his chapter, “1493: The True Importance of Christopher Columbus.” Textbooks, he argues, miss or deemphasize “advances in military technology,” “new forms of social technology,” “the pursuit of wealth,” a “proselytizing religion that rationalized conquest,” and recent successes “exploiting various island societies” facilitated by disease (33-35). Loewen’s key point: “The way American history textbooks treat Columbus reinforces the tendency not to think about the process of domination” (35).

Loewen suggests, “American culture has perpetuated the idea that Columbus was boldly forging ahead while everyone else, even his own crew, imagined the world was flat” (45). But he notes, of the twelve textbooks he studied, only The American Pageant (1991) “repeats this hoax” (46). On the other hand, it is also the only one of the twelve that mentions disease as a factor in the conquest.

The American Pageant has a new edition since the publication of Loewen’s book, as do many of the others. My son finds it dull, and his high school history teacher doesn’t like it either. Nevertheless, the 2002 edition no longer repeats the flat earth hoax, or at least modifies it slightly: “His superstitious sailors, fearful of venturing into the oceanic unknown, grew increasingly mutinous” (The American Pageant, 14).

Probably the only text that today’s high school students are reading that appears to perpetuate the myth is the troubling sentence in Schweikart and Allen, “But knowing intellectually that the earth is round and demonstrating it physically are two different things” (A Patriot’s History, 4). Of course, high school teachers are another matter, as are those teaching lower grades. It would require extensive time consuming investigation to survey myths that teachers might perpetrate or correct.

Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen list three principal sources for their narrative of Columbus, two tertiary sources, and one primary source. They list Oliver Perry Chitwood, A History of Colonial America, 3^rd edition (1961)—the first edition dates from 1931; and Esmond Wright, The Search for Liberty: From Origins to Independence (1995). Wright’s book is cited several times throughout their first chapter. Facts carried forward from these tertiary sources are augmented by a few quotes lifted from a key primary source, The Journal of Christopher Columbus, trans. by Cecil Jane (1960).

Science and Religion

By his own account Columbus was a devout Christian. Legions of historical narratives since his death only rarely have questioned this devotion, and then most often by emphasizing his quest for wealth. Likewise, the sages of Salamanca were devout men concerned with orthodox Christianity and, presumably, the wealth of the Spanish Crown. Their dispute, such as it was, was not one of secular knowledge against religious knowledge; it was not one of medieval knowledge versus modern knowledge. It was a dispute regarding the size of the earth.

Accounts of this dispute rarely appear in school textbooks; nor does an account appear in A Patriot’s History. On the other hand, my representative “liberal artifact” from my own hand highlights this dispute, as does A People’s History.

We might ask who is best served by the creation of hostility between modern science (whether Copernican heliocentrism, Columbian geography, or Darwinian evolution) and biblical religion. John William Draper (1811-1882) had his reasons for fomenting this conflict. He was almost entirely ignored as he spent an hour reading his paper, “The Intellectual Development of Europe Considered with Reference to the Views of Mr Darwin” at Oxford in 1860. The crowd had gathered for the anticipated showdown between Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley, which occurred after Draper sat down. Wilberforce’s speech, Huxley’s reply, and their subsequent exchange have become the stuff of legend.

The exact words, either of Wilberforce or Huxley, are now uncertain. Their effect is not. One lady fainted. The undergraduates cheered. Most of the audience applauded. To reply in such a vein to a Bishop, especially in his own diocese, was rare indeed. The Bishop himself sensed that Huxley had won the day and did not rise again.
Vernon Blackmore and Andrew Page, Evolution: The Great Debate (1989), 103.

Of course, Draper went on to write History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874). His views were augmented by Andrew Dickson White, History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). Russell mentions these two in his summary, and Eco disputes some of White’s analysis in Serendipities. The intellectual history of this myth, and its historiography, are the themes of Russell’s work. Of the two core American history texts that are my central concern here, Zinn’s A People’s History, published more than a decade prior to Russell’s text, better reflects its findings than Schweikart and Allen’s A Patriot’s History, published more than a decade after Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians.

Footnote to Columbus and the Flat Earth

Footnote

For an example of the portrayal of Columbus in textbooks a century ago, I look to D.H. Montgomery, The Leading Facts of American History (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1899).

Some excerpts:

1. Birth of Columbus; Ideas about the Earth; the "Sea of Darkness."--Christopher Columbus, the discoverer of America, was born in Genoa, Italy, about the year 1436.
At that time the earth was generally supposed to be flat, to be much smaller than it actually is, and to be habitable on its upper side alone. (1)

4. What Land Columbus wished to reach; Marco Polo's Travels; First Motive of Columbus.-
…
This book [Travels of Marco Polo] made a deep impression on the mind of Columbus, and later he constructed a map of the world, based in large measure on the geographical discoveries made by Polo. He burned with a desire to visit those marvellous Eastern lands, with which all intercourse, except that of commerce, had long practically ceased. His purpose, as he himself repeatedly tells us, was, first of all, that of a missionary, --he hoped to convert the Khan and his people to Christianity. If they rejected the religion he offered them, then, according to the ideas of the time, any Christian king might seize their possessions, and make slaves of them.
Such was one great object with Columbus in going to the Indies, as all Eastern Asia was then called. Throughout his career he never lost sight of this purpose. In fact, he came at length to believe that the Most High had specially chosen him as his instrument to carry the light of faith into the kingdoms of Oriental paganism. That motive, whether wise or not, inspired the great Genoese navigator with a certain enthusiasm and dignity of character which mark his course throughout. His life was not always blameless,-he shared many of the errors of his time,--but it was always noble. (4-6)

7. Plan of Columbus for reaching the Indies by sailing West.--But Columbus thought that he could improve on the king of Portugal's project. He felt certain that there was a shorter and better way of reaching the Indies than the track Diaz had marked out. The plan of the Genoese sailor was as daring as it was original. Instead of sailing east, or south and east, he proposed to sail directly west. He had, as he believed, three good and solid reasons for such an undertaking: First, in common with the best geographers of his day, Columbus was convinced that the earth was not flat, as most men supposed, but a globe. Secondly, he supposed this globe to be much smaller than it is, and the greater part to be land instead of water. Thirdly, as he knew nothing, and surmised nothing of the existence of the continent of America or of the Pacific Ocean, he imagined that the coast of Asia or the Indies was directly opposite Spain and the western coast of Europe. (8-9)

8. Columbus seeks and obtains the Assistance of Spain.--
…
At last Columbus, now fast sinking into poverty, received permission from the Spanish rulers to lay his plans before a committee or council. That body listened to his arguments with impatient incredulity. To them such a voyage "appeared as extravagant as it would at the present day to launch a balloon into space in quest of some distant star."
The council ridiculed the idea that the earth is round like a ball. If so, said they, then the rain and snow must fall upward on the other side,--the side opposite where we stand,--and men there must walk with their heads downward: that would be inconvenient, nay more, it would be impossible. Finally, they objected that in case the earth could be proved to be a globe, that very fact would render such a voyage as Columbus proposed a failure. For how, they asked of him, could your ships come back when they had advanced so far west as to begin to descend the curve of the earth? Could they turn about and sail up hill to Spain again? No answer that Columbus could make seemed satisfactory to the council. After much deliberation and vexatious delays they made their report to Ferdinand and Isabella, joint sovereigns of Spain. The report stated that the scheme was "vain and impracticable, and rested on grounds too weak to merit the support of the government." (10)

Analysis

Immediately evident from these excerpts:
1. The religious and "patriotic" perspective of Schweikart of Allen is evident. In particular, it should be clear that Montgomery's emphasis on character, and his presumption that moral character is yoked to Christianity bears a strong resemblance to the views of Schweikart and Allen.
2. The myth of Columbus and the Flat Earth is promoted not by a liberal seeking to cast ridicule on religion, but quite the opposite. The claims to the contrary by the likes of Rob and Cyndy Shearer requires more evidence than they offer.

They suggest:

How all these misconceptions came to be repeated in numerous social studies texts is instructive. The idea of bigoted, superstitious, Bible-thumping churchmen opposed to Columbus is just too attractive to the modern mind. It's so much fun to picture Columbus as the young rebel, defying convention, defying the church, defying the unscientific primitive accounts of the Bible. It's all so convenient that it "simply must be true."
Homeschool World

I certainly see no evidence in Montgomery that he is attracted by an "idea of bigoted, superstitious, Bible-thumping churchmen opposed to Columbus" for any purpose other than to stress the heroic character of the admiral of the ocean sea.

Columbus and the Flat Earth

Many of us were taught in elementary school that Columbus sailed west to reach the East because he understood the earth to be a sphere in contrast to many others of his day. In this version of the story, the near mutiny that Columbus had to quell a few weeks into the voyage was rooted in the belief of his sailors that they would soon sail off the edge of the earth. This notion is easily disputed--even for those with bad textbooks and worse teachers--as soon as students gain access to Google, Ask.com, and a few of the sites to which they offer a portal of access. Google "Columbus and flat earth" and nearly every site in the first page of hits affirms that such assertions are nonsense. A few of these sites blame "liberals," "evolutionists," and "the modern mind" for using the notion to present a caricature of faith-based knowledge and of religious adherents.

Patriot's and People's Histories

It thus comes as no surprise that Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, authors of A Patriot's History of the United States, assert, "He [Columbus] did not, as is popularly believed, originate the idea that the earth is round" (4). Unfortunately, they do not stop there. The two sentences that follow this clear declaration seem to undermine its truth:

As early as 1480, for example, he read works proclaiming the sphericity of the planet. But knowing intellectually that the earth is round and demonstrating it physically are two different things.
Schweikart and Allen, 4.

Was Columbus seeking to demonstrate the proposition of a spherical earth to skeptics back in Spain? Readers might easily get that impression from Schweikart and Allen. The next paragraph mentions Columbus's "managerial skill" in quelling mutiny after they "passed the point where the sailors expected to find Japan" (4). On the other hand, at least the alleged fear of falling off the edge of the earth finds no support in their text. Their weak effort to contest the myth come closer to its perpetuation than most other survey texts.

Although the authors of A Patriot's History are a bit circumspect when commenting on the relationship between their text and Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, their title stimulates the urge to make comparisons. How does Zinn address the flat earth myth?

...like other informed people of his time, he [Columbus] knew the world was round and he could sail west in order to get to the Far East.
...
Columbus would never have made it to Asia, which was thousands of miles farther away than he had calculated, imagining a smaller world. He would have been doomed by that great expanse of sea. But he was lucky.
Zinn, A People's History, 2.

A Question of Bias

Schweikart and Allen are clear and honest with respect to their agenda:

...we remain convinced that if the story of America's past is told fairly, the result cannot be anything but a deepened patriotism, a sense of awe at the obstacles overcome, the passion invested, the blood and tears spilled, and the nation that was built.
...
The reason so many academics miss the real history of America is that they assume that ideas don't matter and that there is no such thing as virtue.
...
It is not surprising, then, that so many left-wing historians miss the boat (and miss it, and miss it, and miss it to the point that they need a ferry schedule). They fail to understand what every colonial settler and every western pioneer understood: character was tied to liberty, and liberty to property. All three were needed for success, but character was the prerequisite because it put the law behind property agreements, and it set responsibility right next to liberty. And the surest way to ensure the presence of good character was to keep God at the center of one's life, community, and ultimately, nation.
Schweikart and Allen, A Patriot's History, xi-xxiii.

Who is more fair in their treatment of Columbus, Zinn or Schweikart and Allen? Which account is more accurate? Does a fair account prove to be an accurate one?

A Liberal Artifact (circa 1992)

Schweikart and Allen call to memory the Quincentennial celebrations and protests:

The five-hundred-year anniversary of Columbus's discovery was marked by unusual and strident controversy. Rising up to challenge the intrepid voyager's courage and vision--as well as the establishment of European civilization in the New World--was a crescendo of damnation, which posited that the Genoese navigator was a mass murderer akin to Adolf Hitler.
Schweikart and Allen, 7.

Ward Churchill might have made a comparison along these lines, but he is hardly representative of the academy as a whole. Of course, in the early 1990s lots of things were said regarding Columbus and the impact of his journeys. In the cacophony of utterances were the ramblings of a graduate student at Obscure U:

Christopher Columbus was a tolerable geographer who knew, as did most educated people in his day, that the earth was round. He was also intensely interested in a particular academic debate (although his interest in the pursuit of gold was at least as important as his interest in the pursuit of knowledge; it is often argued that he was equally interested in the pursuit of souls). Experts disagreed as to the size of the earth. Columbus was among those who agreed with the smaller estimates; in fact, his estimate was almost the smallest anyone had ventured. As it turns out, his opponents were right. Because of his inaccurate calculations, when Columbus made landfall in what became known later as the Caribbean (another misnomer, resulting from a fear of cannibalism) approximately where he expected, he thought he was just east of India, Thus the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas have been labeled Indians ever since.
James Stripes, "An Introduction to the Cultural Word Wars," in Introduction to American Indian Studies Course Packet (Kinkos, 1992), 101.

This liberal artifact clearly puts forth a point of view at odds with the one in A Patriot's History, but consistent with A People's History. But it also bears striking consistency with the points made in the conservative Practical Homeschooling Magazine by Rob and Cyndy Shearer in 1998, available online. I hardly think that Schweikart and Allen include the likes of Practical Homeschooling Magazine in their lists of evidence of liberal bias in education.