Christopher Columbus Informative Essay

“In the Year fourteen hundred ninety two, Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” ask any child above grade level 5 and they’ll be able to recite these exact words. Growing up as a child in America one is ‘taught’ this over and over until those words are drilled into their head like nothing else. America has been founded on arguably one of the most bloodiest histories starting even before Christopher Columbus ‘found’ America. Christopher Columbus is known to be the one who founded America, as stated in the previous statement, but people (historians, ect) like to erase or omit other key details about his journey and who he was. We know Christopher Columbus as the great man who opened the door for European people to expand and grow. He was a kind person who was graced by Isabella and Ferdinand themselves. He’s essentially a hero and should be remembered as one. In reality,
as stated in the text, Columbus never really knew he discovered the ‘New World”. He was first dismissed by Ferdinand and Isabella, but finally got a chance when Isabella allowed him to go on a small expedition. She gave him three tiny ships, known and glorified as the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria. During the trip, which was a very lengthy and strenuous trip, the crew almost rebelled against Columbus and threw him off the ship. After Columbus found America, he made three more trips without knowing what he had really came upon. He died alone and penniless. In order to make the story sound less brutal, people have left out key facts about who he was to appeal to the masses. However, Christopher Columbus is only the first on a long, long list of people who have been ‘humanized’ in order to appeal to history. History has been shaped and it’s shifted throughout the years in America.

America has millions of people’s blood on their hand and yet we rarely learn about it. In the lower grades, we scratch the surface as to what American tribes lived here before us, but we don’t ever really find out what happened to them. Aside from slavery, America has done well to hide the horrors Europeans released on the American Indians. At the beginning of the 1830’s about one hundred and twenty-five thousand Native Americans lived across Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama. These Native Americans had lived and cultivated that those millions of acres for many generations. However, by the end of the decade, very little Natives lived anywhere within the southeastern of the United States. The European people wanted to grow crops such as cotton on the Indians’ land and therefore forced them to leave their land. The federal government forced the Natives to walk thousands of miles to an “Indian territory”. This horrific journey is known as the Trail of Tears. Since Andrew Jackson, the president at the time, had been a long time advocate of “Indian removal” transferring the thousands of Natives was a victory for him. In the Indian Removal Act, which was signed by President Jackson in 1830, it required the government to remove the people peacefully and voluntarily. However, President Jackson along with his government ignored this part of the law. They made the Natives march on foot with some bound in chains, without food, any supplies or other help from the government. Along the 1,200 mile journey, whooping cough, typhus, dysentery, cholera, and starvation added to the death count. By 1840, about tens of thousands of Native Americans had been driven off their own territory, with thousands of Natives dead. It’s important parts of history like this that historians tend to leave out of the textbook. Thousands of people were essentially murdered and yet we learn very little about this. This relates back to the idea that America likes to humanize its history to idolize it’s white supremacy over the world and over the people they have murdered for the sake of their own comfort. Furthermore, people like to also erase the ideas of slavery in the United States. They like to pretend that slavery was over and done with hundreds of centuries ago, when in reality it was less than 200 years ago. Although slavery was “abolished” in 1865, it was a long road to actually freeing the slaves. The road to equality between whites and blacks/African americans however did not stop there. It was only almost 50 years ago that Martin Luther King gave his “I have a Dream” speech due to inequality and violent racism against African Americans. Lynchings, torture and violent crimes to Black people was still very much alive back then. These ideas of POC being lesser than human is still alive since the people against the equality could very possibly still be alive. People like to commemorate September 11th, as a day to never forget due to the terrorism on the American people by Muslims but fail to see that the Taliban, the group that attacked the twin towers, was a group that was formed by the United States.
People call out Hitler and Stalin and criticise them for murdering millions of people, yet we know nothing of King Leopold II of Belgium. He “owned” the Congo and during his reign he murdered of 10 million people in the Congo, yet we know nothing about this. Even today we are facing the problems that people like to gloss over due to systematic racism and white supremacy. POC are murdered by police daily, from Emmett Till, to Michael Brown, racism has always been a problem and it will continue to be a problem. Mainstream coverage in American help add to this problem by spouting out whatever ‘facts’ they can without finding out the actual facts. In Germany, any acts that relate back to the Nazi’s is illegal, however in America the KKK is still allowed to come together for a simple fact; Germany is ashamed about what they did, America is proud of
it.