ABSTRACT
Governance) INTASC Standards: 1 (Subject Matter), 4 (Instructional Strategy) Topics: history, historical understanding, Christopher Columbus, indigenous peoples, historical
fi gures, historical content knowledge, multiple perspectives, creating teaching materials, jig-saw, children’s literature
I’m a big fan of Christopher Columbus. Not the man, the phenomenon. Columbus plays a major role in how historians, teachers, and popular media talk about the past. For the big winners of the Atlantic encounter-those Europeans who settled North America and accumulated vast wealththe story has typically been told as a triumph, a grand narrative with a happy ending. For those people who lost in the exchange-the people of Africa, the Americas, and others-the story is a disaster. Th e moment when Columbus touched land in the Caribbean marks the beginning of one of the greatest shift s in human history: the appropriation of the land and resources of two continents by the people of a third; the depopulation by accident or disease, or, some argue, by conscious policy, of tens of millions of people in North and South America; the abduction and wanton killing of tens of millions of Africans to work as slaves on that “new land.” In any case, triumph, disaster, or pivotal moment, Columbus, more than any other historical fi gure I have yet encountered, can serve to create the necessary cognitive dissonance for future social studies teachers to unlearn what society tells them history is for, what heroes are made of, and how social studies instruction can be a force for inequality and racism or, instead, for democracy and thoughtful inquiry.
