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Can anyone briefly explain chapter one, "Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress" from History Is A Weapon by Howard Zinn?
Quick answer:
In the first chapter, “Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress,” Howard Zinn reveals the murder and brutality committed by the Christopher Columbus expeditions and the English settlers. Zinn also reveals the primary aim of his book. His goal is to present a history from the viewpoint of common, ordinary people, not from the perspective of high-powered government leaders and their associates.
History Is a Weapon is the website for Howard Zinn’s book A Peoples’ History of the United States. It’s a place where you can read the entire book for free. The title of the site links to his belief that history holds a lot of power. A skewed interpretation of history could be used to maintain harmful policies and beliefs. While a less partial view of history could confront past representations and change present conditions.
In the first chapter, “Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress,” Zinn details Christopher Columbus’s expedition to the Americas. He uses history to challenge the notion that Columbus intentionally set out to discover America. Zinn writes Columbus intended to go to Asia. Zinn also counters the belief that the land Columbus stumbled upon was vacant or populated by savages.
Citing Bartolome de las Casas, Zinn clearly demonstrates that the indigenous people were civilized, generous,...
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and even pro-choice. Using herbs, indigenous women had the freedom to give themselves abortions.
Rather, it was Columbus and the European colonizers who behaved like savages. Zinn tells how colonizers burned and hanged indigenous people. He writes how they enslaved them and worked them to death.
In this first chapter, Zinn wants to make the following clear: Columbus was not a hero. Zinn uses Columbus to highlight how history is often told from the perspective of governments, conquers, diplomats, leaders, and other people who have ample to gain from placing the past of the United States on the side of progress.
With his first chapter, Zinn lays out the primary aim of the book. He’s not interested in perpetuating a history that makes American leaders and idols look good. He doesn’t want to continue the idea that nations are families and communities. He wants to reveal the
fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex.
In this first chapter, Zinn makes it clear that his history will be from the perspective of those without a lot of power or affluence. Zinn recognizes that his project might overly romanticize or glorify the common, regular, and perhaps downtrodden person. Yet as Zinn says, “The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don't listen to it, you will never know what justice is.”
Let me just add a couple points.
To Zinn, Columbus was pretty much a genocidal murderer. Zinn argues that Columbus came to the New World with a lust for gold and other riches. He was met there by innocent Indians who wanted only to share with him.
Because of his greed, Columbus systematically exploited the Indians. He did this by such things as
- taking hostages in an attempt to force them to tell him where he could find gold
- by enslaving them on encomiendas
Basically, Zinn argues that Columbus intentionally destroyed the Indians out of his own greed.