American History Hit - Who Was Christopher Columbus?

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

Did Columbus really think the Earth was flat? Where did he come from? Where did he get to? To untangle the myths of Columbus and his complicated legacy, Don spoke to Elise Bartosik-Velez.Elise teaches at Dickinson college about Latin American history and literature, focusing in particular on the Colonial Period through Independence. She is the author of 'The Legacy of Christopher Columbus in the Americas: New Nations and a Transatlantic Discourse of Empire'.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Max Carrey. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for $1 per month for 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY sign up at https://historyhit.com/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It is September 30, 1934 at the White House. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, going on two years into his presidency, and deep in the trenches

in the fight against the Great Depression, is pushing his New Deal programs to provide relief to struggling Americans. Jobs are still scarce, but many of those employed have mobilized, striking for better wages, calling for safer working conditions, and demanding an end to bias based on religious and ethnic discrimination. Leading the charge are the Knights of Columbus, founded in 1882, to advocate for and support Italian Americans in their adopted society. The Knights have petitioned the federal government to recognize October 12th as a national holiday to honor their patron Christopher Columbus, the Great Explorer, and symbol for Italian Americans

of acceptance and belonging on the shores he once claimed for Spain. Inside the Oval Office, surrounded by leaders of the Knights and other organizations, FDR signs a proclamation. I Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of the United States of America, under and by virtue of the authority vested in me by the aforesaid public resolution, do by this proclamation designate October 12th of each year as Columbus Day, and direct that on that day the flag of the United States be displayed on all government buildings. And further, I do invite the people of the United States to observe the day with appropriate ceremonies in schools and churches.

or other suitable places. Nearly 40 years later, in 1968, Columbus Day becomes a federal holiday. Another 40 years after that, its meaning has shifted dramatically for many Americans, as the day is redefined and renamed as Indigenous People's Day in many quarters. So who was Christopher Columbus? What is his legacy? And how has he remembered across North and South America today? Greetings, American History Hit listeners. I'm Don Wildman. Thanks for stopping by.

In this cancel culture era, we are still passing through so many heroes of our past and present have tumbled down from on high. Effigies pulled from pedestals, celebrities outed on the internet. If somewhere in your past you did something terribly wrong to a person, place, or a thing, be warned, the culture may be coming. Still, there are figures so iconic, so much still a part of our present, that this process is not so automatic, such as the case with Christopher Columbus, who, despite his controversial career, has ridden the razor's edge of cancellation for decades. To this day in New York City, his 14-foot statue still stands in all its glory on a 76-foot pedestal in a traffic circle named for him. According to the Philadelphia

nonprofit Monument Lab, in the United States today, there are 149 sculptures still honoring the Great Voyager. Only George Washington and Abraham Lincoln outnumber him. Some 6,000 places over him their names. Whether or not you even believe he discovered it, let alone deserves to be celebrated for it, Christopher Columbus is everywhere across America. This hasn't really changed much, and it is a tale still seeking its final chapter. So let's discuss this with the author, Professor Elise Bartosik-Files, who has since the early 2000s taught at Dickinson College, Go Red Devils, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Her award-winning book, The Legacy of Christopher Columbus in the Americas, New Nations, and a transatlantic discourse of empire.

was published by Vanderbilt University Press for several printings. Hello and welcome, Professor. Elise, nice to be with you. It is great to be here, Don. Nice to meet you as well. This is very personal for me, Elise. In a small town called Pittman, New Jersey. I grew up on Columbia Avenue,

and my entire childhood went by before I realized the street I lived and played on was named for Christopher Columbus. Columbia is an eponym. I learned that last night, a noun named for a person, in this case a term for the land of liberty and freedom. and it more importantly associates the very meaning of the American continent with the man who supposedly found it. It's a whole bunch to impact, isn't it? It is, indeed.

We're going to get to the nuts and bolts of Columbus's bio and all this, but it's fascinating to me to discuss up front why Christopher Columbus is so famous in America. It was really a manufactured fame in so many ways, wasn't it? Oh, for sure. I mean, he never set foot on the North American continent. He was in Central America. and in South America, but he was never on the territory that later became the United States. So it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Indeed. I pin it to the 400th anniversary, 1892, 93, when the world Colombian exposition in Chicago starts. And that probably very driven by the Italian immigration to America claims Columbus as our own and all the liberty and justice and all the rest of it that gets attached to him, which he had very little to do with. Well, certainly the Italians were extremely passionate about Columbus and claiming him as a hero to, you know, help their assimilation into American culture, but also the acceptance to try to lobby for the acceptance of Italians in American culture. But the Knights of Columbus were started by Irish Americans. So that was 18, well, towards the end of the 18th century, 1882,

I believe, in New Haven, Connecticut. Yeah. It's a part of this conversation. we'll get back to because it has a lot to do with Christopher Columbus and his relationship with Native Americans, or at least those in the Caribbean, and our relationship here with us. It's very complicated. So let's simplify things and start with his life and times and get that straight, and then we'll come back to this. Well, let's talk about his origins, a name which many people have never heard. Christophero Colombo was his actual name, born and raised in Genoa, which is not to say he's Italian because there was no such thing, right? Correct. Yeah, the Italian state is only created in 1850. But you know, you said, well, let's first get clear his biography. And that's not clear. There's a lot that we know, but there's also a lot that we don't know. So, for example, the fact that he was born in Genoa, that's contested, highly contested today. In fact, the University of Granada is currently doing DNAX testing. They've been at it for years. try to confirm his origins, but there's a current theory being floated that people believe quite passionately, so I don't want to offend anyone by saying that it's a theory, but that Columbus

was from Galicia, but others say he was from Valencia, that he's from Catalonia, that he's from Corsica, Croatia, Poland, I mean, everywhere. At least we know this. He's a commoner, and that really has a lot to do with the question marks, because if he was, you know, in some military family or some such guy, he would be, there would be records more clearly written. But interestingly, it also happens on the other end of his life, isn't it? They don't really know where he's buried, for that matter. You know, there's all kinds of questions about that. Right. It seems that he's buried, that his remains are in multiple places. That's probably the case. I think we can say for sure that he was born in Liguria. Okay, which is part of what is today, Italy. We don't have proof positive,

at least that I would accept that I think most experts would accept that it's Genoa and Genoa, except if you go to Genoa, there's a house there that is Columbus's house. But we can say Liguria, the general area. He's born into what becomes known as the Great Era of Sail, the Age of Discovery eventually, which he really begins. But they were not a sailing family. They weren't even a trading family, were they? Yeah, they were, well, they were into the wool.

industry. They sold, they sold wool. And his father was also, it appears, that his father was a tavern keeper. He becomes a sailor and navigator when he begins to work in the merchant marines, which is for the Portuguese. It's interesting to note this time, we really have to be careful. When you're talking about this these centuries ago, the borders are very blurry in these days. It's mostly city states rather than nation states. And so he's going to be sailing for the Portuguese, but that's also more specific, actually. Agreed. So he learns his trade basically as on the trade routes up and down from Europe to Africa. You know, he's really working those trade routes, which incidentally will be the beginning of his famous voyages to the

west. So he really gets to know how to be a sailor from the ground up. Right. And he himself said that he sailed other places as well, including the British Islands, Iceland, which is somewhat debatable. I mean, juries out on that. But definitely. down the African coast for the Portuguese, absolutely, which is also where he had experience with the beginnings of the slave trade. Yeah. He does not die an old man, so his life is really on a pretty fast track when you consider it. He has to be from a very young age thinking of great things, right? I'm not sure about that. I mean, it's a nice story. I think he was very astute, but I also think that he was very lucky. He was at the right place, at the right time,

in a lot of moments. Yeah, but, I mean, hey, I'm going to defend Christopher Columbus here, at least I think that, I mean, to become what he becomes takes a pretty big vision. And to be in the rooms with kings and queens eventually, it really does, you know, take a certain spine. Agreed. So I'm going to give that up for the kid. At some point, really in the mid-70s, I guess in his 20s or so, he's married to a member of a noble Portuguese family, a woman whose name I will leave to you to pronounce, Philippe. Peristrello. Right. I'm on Tees. I did a good job.

You did. Thank you. And this really begins his life as so many marriages do. He's suddenly, probably in much higher elevated circles and so forth. And maybe this is where we attribute his greater vision of his career. Maybe it's his wife who says, get a job. Well, also his brother had been working as a map maker in Lisbon. So he had been working with his brother. We think that there was quite a bit of contact. with the noble circles and the court. So he would have been in contact with everyone who, you know, with the sailors and the navigators already. So this was his milieu.

This was his world. Let's talk early here in the conversation about the idea that is very often associated with Christopher Columbus. The idea that the earth was flat versus round. This is such a piece of mythology. And we really, let's just dispose of it right now on this to podcast. Thank you. It was already proven with the Greeks in the B-C-E era. It was already mathematically proven that the Earth was round.

It takes a pea brain to figure this out, really, when you see a ship disappear over the horizon. And the last thing you see is it's masked. Of course you're dealing with a spherical shape. Right. And the myth that the world was flat starts around in the 19th century. And one of the major biographers in the United States, Washington Irving, was partly responsible for that. He kind of left the door open. He didn't say the world is flat, but in one passage, he sort of alludes to the fact that it might be that, and that definitely fanned the flames of that myth. Right. And so Columbus's theory would have been a theory started by many people, would have been owned by many people, that we could conceivably sail the other way towards these lands of spices and riches if we just head to the west. Of course, it was only recently that someone had gone around the Cape of Good Hope, thus opening that route to the east.

But that was really dangerous route to go on. Right, agreed. And that was Bartolomeo Diaz in 1488, so five years before, so not that long. But Columbus had underestimated the space, the distance between what he thought was Europe and Asia. So he thought, well, you know, we should be able to do it. problem. And that's why, incidentally, why the first, the court of John the second in Portugal, and then Ferdinand and Isabelle originally said, no, no thanks, we're not interested, because his estimation was way off. I just want to be sure. This was an entrepreneurial mission

that he kind of dreamed up, probably with his brother. We can figure this out for ourselves, go on a Western route, get there a lot faster, when in fact his math was wrong. And that was was argued right in the courts of these people because they knew how to measure the earth in those days. And he had literally used the wrong calculations to determine how far away India was from Europe. Correct. Thus, creating a whole bunch of problems for himself.

Indeed. Not least of which was landing in the wrong place. But this happens, of course, in 1492. He takes the famous trip, which is one of four voyages eventually. And that's the part of the tale that really isn't clear to a lot of people. We, of course, all learn in fifth grade that there are three ships, the Santa Maria, the Pinta, I can say right off the top of my head that's so well beaten into our brains when we were little kids. Those three ships, the Santa Maria, the Pinta and the Nina, all head out, one being bigger than the others.

I remember. There was some poem about that, I remember. Right. And 10 weeks later, they reached the shores of a Bahamian island, later called that, called San Salvador, which he names. 12th of October 1492, thus setting in stone the Columbus Day weekend we've all taken a vacation on for the rest of time. Again, a myth, but whatever. Tell me what he expected to find and what was the mission really he hoped to create. Well, it was a trading mission.

And so that is clear in the document that we have that is sort of serves as the contract with the crown, the capitulations signed at Granada after the reconnought. conquest, quote unquote, of Granada. And it's clear that it's a trading mission. He hoped to find what he called Cathay. You know, he hoped to find Asia and the riches of Asia. This, of course, would have been appealing to the king and queen of France, who had recently sort of consolidated their power. They'd beaten down the moors. They've chased them off the Iberian Peninsula. And here we are in, are they in Alhambra yet? I guess they are, because there's a room you can actually stand in that Christopher Columbus talked to them.

Yes, the agreement was signed at the military encampment called Santa Fe, right outside of Granada. But Columbus was supposedly there when they took Granada in January of 1492. And he talks a lot about that. You know, I was there and I witnessed it. He makes a really big deal about that. Right. So these voyages, we think of them as one-stops. They're actually not at all.

There are whole explorations of the different islands in this area, which, of course, he thinks he's found some version of Asia, right? He's found some outlying lands that are leading him to the mainland of Asia. Absolutely, yeah. He thinks these are the islands off the coast of Asia. He's absolutely convinced of that. And he would have known about this from the tales of Marco Polo. I mean, this is a very interesting factor in this story, which I had forgotten about until the last night. Most recently, because of the rise of the Ottoman Empire, the Silk Road had been closed,

that which had been bringing these spices and riches from the East to Europe and probably thrilling people as they actually could taste their food and they were spiced with things that they'd never tasted before. And suddenly this road is closed by the Ottoman Empire taking over Constantinople. This is really what prompts these ideas of Western ship routes, right? Absolutely. And so Constantinople, is taken by the Ottomans in 1453. So this is very recent history. And the reaction is also coinciding with navigational technology that allows long-term sailing and ideologically the encroachment of the Ottoman Empire closer and closer to Europe. I mean, we should remember that the Ottomans

try to take Vienna in 1529. This was terrifying. And so there was a renewed call for a, for a crusade and to retake Jerusalem and all of this becomes along with the closure of the Spice Road is very, very important in the context of what Columbus was trying to do. It really is this phenomenon, the Ottoman rise and the cutting off of the Silk Road that really starts the Age of Discovery. I mean, what we call the Age of Discovery now is really a sense of, well, we've got to find new roots to find this treasure, this new place where we can get this stuff from. And Columbus is part of that whole race.

Absolutely. Keeping in mind, too, that there were precedents, right? So there was the Portuguese activity down the coast of Africa, Fatoreas, right? They're trading activities off the coast of Africa, but also Ferdinand's and the Spanish efforts to colonize the Canary Islands. And those were commercial adventures, absolutely. But they learned things. And the ideological context of the encroachment of the Ottomans and the expansion of the Ottoman Empire was absolutely huge. And especially when that trade route gets cut off before Venice was absolutely the hub of trade between Europe and Asia. And it becomes dangerous. There's a fascinating little subplot of how much were the Crusades about opening up that

trade route versus recapturing Jerusalem? A little cynical problem there. Oh, absolutely, 100%. I agree with you. We'll be right back after the break with more from American History Hit. While you're listening, make sure you never miss another episode by clicking like and follow. And while you're at it, please share this episode with a friend or family member. You're our best means for building our audience, and we are most grateful for the help. Thanks. Okay, so the first voyage to the so-called new world, which of course he's not calling it that,

what does he think he's found and what's the result of this mission in terms of Spain and Ferdin and Isabella? So he thinks that he has found the islands off the coast of Asia. And he proposes, he goes back and he proposes to Ferdinette and Isabel, basically let's colonize this spot. He says as a commercial venture, but also for evangelization. So he brings that up himself right away. What's interesting is that the king and queen respond in a very sort of, matter-of-fact way, and they ignore the religious element of what Columbus has proposed. And I have argued that it sure looks like if we look at their letters going back and forth and their instructions to him, et cetera, et cetera, it really does look like he was suggesting, hey, you know, this can be a much bigger deal in terms of your expanding Christian empire. and they said, no, this is a commercial, this is a trade enterprise. I would think that anything having to do with evangelizing in the world would be very political-oriented

thing because of so much with the Pope. Absolutely. Well, and there's an argument, too, to be made that, I mean, they quickly come around. They quickly see Columbus's argument. I mean, he sort of hitched his wagon to this discourse that was circulating about the expansion of a Christian empire that. that Isabel and Ferdinand had been promoting and had been taking advantage of. Well, that becomes, you know, you can fast forward to the rise of nation states in the face of

the papacy. You know, it's a whole thing that's going on over hundreds of years. Right. Well, and there's an argument to be made, too, that Ferdinand and Isabel wanted to basically get the Pope's blessing and get the Pope's permission. So the Pope's signs a bull granting the Spaniards, you know, the rights essentially in the New World. And that was in May of 1493. And it shortly after that happens, they basically, then they say, you know what, evangelization is the number one motive here. But it was not their initial response. It was not about gold, although that was of course mentioned, and that, of course, becomes later on the very reason for it all. But in the Columbus days, it was really about these other aspects, finding the passageway

that he still believes he will find and utilizing this for trade. Although he does mention gold quite a lot. And he says, I mean, and this is quite early on in the diary of this first voyage, he says we could find enough gold that would finance the final crusade to Jerusalem. Okay, never mind. That's exactly what's on his mind. Is there gold in the Caribbean? I didn't even know.

There actually was. Yeah, in small amounts. It's interesting, though, because part of his, you know, crackdown on the natives was he required that they pay tribute. And part of the tribute was to bring a certain quantity of gold. But they actually, they couldn't do it because there wasn't enough gold. Sure. I'm going to generalize about these voyages because there's, you know, they take some time and it's, they are in themselves stories, but he really does explore a great deal of the Caribbean, including Cuba. He even makes his way to Honduras. And these are all over this, you know, multi-year period of time where he's doing four different voyages. What's interesting for this conversation to me is, is the effect that he has on these lands and the future identity of this new way. world and how he ushers in Spain as a colonial power and all that sort of thing. It's amazing. That really is what Columbus, intentionally or not, is the agent for, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, without a doubt. But, you know, I think it's important to remember that he is not

the only one. But in the story that we tell, he is the primary character. Whether he didn't attend it necessarily, it just happened to be, you know, it was happenstance of being the first. So everything follows from him. Then we, as we will discuss, he becomes a myth that then is utilized in various pockets of the world, especially the United States or the emerging United States, America, which is named, by the way, for somebody else, but never mind. And that's a fascinating aspect of our lives. And as I mentioned in the beginning, it filtered down to the very, very granular details of American life. And ultimately, really has nothing to do with Christopher Columbus. Our use of him is what's important.

But let's finish with these voyages. The treatment of the natives is, of course, something that has emerged in the later period of time. He is a very unkind man to those people. Yes, indeed. Well, and he was unkind to Spaniards, too, but more unkind to the natives. Was this a developing thing, or did he come with, was he just a gnarly guy from the start? Well, I think he was a gnarly guy for sure, but I don't think that that was particularly unusual. And like you said, he had ambition.

He was, I think, a passionate person. and he, you know, no-holds-barred kind of situation. But his punishments with both Spaniards and natives were quite cruel. And that was actually something that was he was officially charged with in 1500. And we have witness testimony about his cruel punishments to both natives and Spaniards. It's in his third voyage that he's actually arrested and shipped home, right? At the end of his 1,500, he is taken back to Spain by a guy named Francisco de Bobadilla, and he is enchained, and according to the myth, Columbus refused to take off his chains

when he finally gets an audience at the royal court. There's a trial. We only recently in 2005, I believe it was, witness testimony was found from 22 witnesses, and there were three charges, but the first charge was that his punishment was quite harsh. He was also charged with not allowing the natives to be baptized, because if the natives aren't baptized, you can enslave them, according to official rules and theology. How much was this part of him becoming too powerful in that part of the world? Oh, I think this is all about him becoming too powerful.

I mean, I think it really helped that he was a nasty guy and that he was not a good governor. I mean, so he was governor of Hispaniola and he left his brother in charge while he was off, you know, doing recon missions in the Caribbean. And neither of them were very good. And there were different factions that were fighting against each other among the Spaniards. It was a mess. And Columbus just, neither he nor he, nor his. his brother handled it very well. In some ways he was a convenient fall guy, but he had certainly brought it on himself.

Yes. So he emerges from a significant imprisonment. I mean, I'm not really sure how long it went on, but he was definitely jailed in some regard. And then reembarks on yet one more voyage back to the new world. He's still looking for the passage, isn't he? He is still looking for the passage. So that's in 1502, in March of 1502 that he leaves on his fourth voyage. And he still wants to serve the king and queen.

And I think that part of this is protecting. He's already thinking about his legacy and what's going to happen with his sons. He has two sons. One is illegitimate, but he recognizes him. So I think he's concerned about his legacy in terms of his service to the crown. but what he wants to find, I think he is looking for that passage and for the cities of gold and all that stuff. Sure. But this is actually in a lot of ways it's his saddest voyage because he spends about a year stranded shipwrecked on Jamaica.

And he's not allowed to go back to Hispaniola as a result of the trial. And so he can't go to Hispaniola. And finally the governor of Hispaniola sends a ship to rescue him, and he goes back to Spain. But it's quite a sad ending for him. Sure. Yeah, he dies in 1506, about four years after that last thing. One note I made was that he was so close to Panama, which is so ironic, given that that's exactly what happens, is that's where the eventual canal connects the two bodies of water, what he was looking for.

Little did he know. He dies still believing that he has made a new route to the East Indies, but indeed he had not. Where did he die? In Valladolete, and toward the kind of the north of Spain. Oh, okay. It's where the court was at the time. It was an itinerant court, so it moved around. But as you said before, his death is claimed by so many people as almost as many people has claimed his birth.

This is the beginning of the myth, isn't it? Right. So his own will, he requests to be buried in Santo Domingo. The circumstances around his burial are a little hazy, but it does seem that he was at one point buried in Santo Domingo. And then his remains were transferred to Cuba, but part of them were also brought back to Sevilla. So there's a huge tomb in the Cathedral of Sevilla where there are remains of Columbus there as well, but also in Santo Domingo. I think our audience is most interested, of course, in how Columbus, his myth, his legacy has affected American life, which is everywhere, as I said at the top of the show. It really begins very early on, right?

1792 is the first U.S. federal holiday named after him. I did not understand that. So the history of Columbus Day is a little confusing, but so it's only made a federal holiday in 1968, but it is celebrated in 1792. especially on the East Coast in New York and Boston. It begins a whole path of appropriation, right? Everyone is utilizing this Columbus idea for their own storytelling purposes, I suppose. Agreed. And I think that you could say that even very early on in the colonial period when people are

comparing sort of English colonization efforts to Spanish colonization efforts, all of the English are reading the chronicles that we have of Columbus's voyage and the depictions that we have of Columbus's voyage. What would have been the advantage to America to sort of claim this? Pretty much everyone knew that he never even stepped foot here. I think that they, in some sense, they latched on to the fact that he himself was not treated well. He was sort of like, you know, the Sesame Street game, which one doesn't belong. You know, Columbus didn't belong with the other Spaniards. He was, well, one, he was, well, one, he, himself was a foreigner, but he was a victim of the Spaniards himself, right? They did not treat him justly. They didn't compensate him for his service properly and recognize his greatness. They sort of thought that they were rescuing him. Yes. Well, this begins this kind of big picture

rewrite, which has to do with our own colonial aspect of being in this new continent, this new world. We need to grab onto this symbol, this hero, who has left behind the old world as well. So the idea of this new land of liberty and freedom and moral right in reaction to all of that old Europe stuff is personified in Christopher Columbus, who was willing to get on a boat and sail all the way across here, like we did. Yeah, absolutely, 100%. And the argument was made by many early Americans. So we're talking 17th century.

they picked up on this argument that the continent should be named after Columbus instead of a merigo vespucci. Well, as I said, I grew up on Columbia Avenue. The idea of Christopher Columbus as an ideal becomes Columbia. And that word is actually drawn from his name, of course. But that's really how this gets repackaged throughout really the 19th century especially because you have this huge immigration of Italians as well who are, they sort of claim him as their own as a national hero.

They don't have one until then. Right. And I think also in the 1770s, it's important to kind of put a pin in that period right before independence. There becomes a sort of a Columbus craze. So the phrase, Colombia, becomes really popular during that period. The version of that where it starts is actually with the Spanish, right, Bartolome de Las Casas, suggested that the continent be named Colombo or Colombo. in honor of Columbus. And so that is picked up by several other authors. And we see that, for example, in, I mean, Cotton Mather talks about Nicholas Fuller's 1617 reference to Columbina was his

favorite term. But using Columbus that we should honor Columbus instead of Amerigo Vespucci, A lot of that was because he was seen as a Christ bearer, because he brought Christianity to the new world. There you go. Easy for Puritans to relate to that. And indeed, that becomes another period of appropriation because it's really important to those colonies to sort of claim that this is a unique land, that it wasn't the British who made it here first, that it was Columbus. And so we associate ourselves with him instead of the British. For sure. And the term Colombia made a nice counterpart to British. And so they took a lot of some of the songs that were used to, you know, rule Britannia. I mean, that probably didn't exist back then. But instead of Britannia, they would replace it with Columbia.

So the idea was, you know, it has the same cadence. It fit very well as an alternative to Britannia. We'll be right back after the break with more from American History hit. Also, that goes hand in hand as we move on into the 19th century. and this struggle that the American federal government, especially in all the states, are having with Native American populations. And so they relate to the way that Columbus dealt with the same issue.

And so that had a lot to do with them glomming on to Columbus as a hero. I'm not really sure. It gets cloudy for me there because I don't know what the advantage would be. I suppose they just didn't know about his cruelty or something, but he had to deal with conquering the native populations. And that was okay because, If Columbus did it, then so should we, right? Well, I do think that Columbus was seen as a civilizer.

And so now, and I'm using that term in quotation marks, right? But for people in the United States in the 19th century that are expansionists, for example, that believe in manifest destiny, this idea that we need to civilize the indigenous peoples that are living, you know, beyond the frontier. Yep. Columbus was very much also a civilizer. Yeah. And so that idea that you bring your civilization from elsewhere and impose it on the barbarians, I mean, Columbus

fit right in with that. It's a new world. You know, that's the idea that this world, even though thousands of years people have been living here, it is a new world because the Europeans and Christianity has come. Right. We're talking in terms of North America, or at least the Caribbean and stuff. His whole impact on South America is equally, if not greater. you know, in terms of his impact. Tell me about his legacy in South America at this time.

Well, you know, it's interesting because there's less of a story to tell there. In other words, a fabricated story. You don't have to make up a story about Columbus's footprints in Spanish-American. Right. That happens in 1819. But even, you know, before then, I mean, Columbus was, you know, really the first representative of the Spanish Empire in the new world, given that Spain ruled over Spanish America, what they called the Indies for almost 300 years, that, you know, you didn't have to make up a story. People that were advocated for the patriots that advocated for independence from Spanish America, eventually they latch on to Columbus because something that we alluded to earlier, they see him as a victim of the Spanish crown,

who did not appreciate his greatness and did not reward him for his service. You've answered my next question, because I wondered if those Spanish conquistadors related themselves to Columbus, they may have, but in the end, he's seen as someone who was rejected by the Spanish, right? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, 100%.

Interesting. So he therefore, of course, figures into the independence movements that took place all around there. So, yes, he absolutely becomes a figure in the independence, an important figure in the independence movements. I would say that he wasn't sort of ever present in the sense that Colombia, the figure Colombia, was present in British America. But he definitely becomes important. And I think the idea that he started a great empire in this very fuzzy, nebulous sense of power and glory. Going back to Rome, this empire that was inherited from Rome, was a useful concept to many of the thinkers of the independence generation.

You know, even as we speak, at least names are coming to my mind, British Columbia. I mean, it's just everywhere in this world. It really worked. The mission that was set out upon by so many different factions, so many peoples, to claim this man as a symbol for their own use, for their own storytelling absolutely worked, to the point of a cultural permanence on the land. You know, I live near New York City. I'm always cognizant in the fact that there's Christopher Columbus

in the middle of New York City, a very liberal place that has a lot of things to say about how Native Americans are treated, and yet it hasn't gone anywhere. Columbus Circle is not going to get renamed anytime soon. It's an extraordinary fact that while we pull down Civil War generals and so forth, we're leaving that guy up there because it's too much to undo.

Right? I don't know. I mean, before 2021, apparently something like 36 Columbus monuments have been removed. Yeah, but there's 150 more to go. I've always wondered about Columbus Circle whether Columbus is up there too high and nobody notices him. I think that's what they did. They just decided to stick it's so high up that you can walk right by and not thinking about it. But that's true of the word Columbia, for that matter. You can confuse Columbus and Columbia and not realize that you're even talking about the same thing. Agreed. I think he's so prevalent. as a symbol and an idea because the story is so prevalent. The story is about imposing your civilization on somebody else.

It's about power. So even if you're a film company or a record company, and I'm not saying that people, I'm going to take the term Columbia, because I'm going to dominate. It's just sort of seeped into our culture. Well, we relate it with Lady Liberty more than we do with Christopher Columbus now. Right. I mean, Jefferson talked about we're going to have an empire of liberty. Yeah, exactly. I want to talk about the title of your book, The Legacy of Christopher Columbus in the America's New Nations and a Transatlantic discourse of empire. That last term, what exactly does that mean?

So I call it a transatlantic discourse of empire because this was a discourse of empire that I refer to that is circulating in Spain at the end of the 15th century that Columbus appropriates, right? So he's a consumer but also a producer of this discourse. And that discourse had a long, long history in Spain that goes back to the Visigoths and Isidore of Seville's writing and the history of the Visigoths. And when Spain sees itself as a chosen people, and the idea that they would be the last empire of time before the end of time, there's the prophecies of Merlin and the Sybils. I mean, and we're talking about from Jeffrey of Monmouth. All this stuff, Jeffrey of Monmouth's texts about the prophecies of the last empire of time. And, you know, that's King Arthur's stuff. That's very, very popular in Spain in the 15th century. century. Isabel has a copy of these prophecies. So his representation of himself, while he's using this

discourse, he writes a lot. We have a lot of texts of his, and he portrays himself as a figure of empire, using this discourse. And then the first historians who write about him also use that discourse, and they sort of frame it within a humanist frame, and they bring in things like the Aeneid. And they portray Columbus as a neo Aeneas, you know, the founder of the Roman Empire. And then it just snowballs. And I'm not saying it never changes and there's never other representations of Columbus, but it becomes a dominant narrative. So I think that the meaning of Christopher Columbus in the United States becomes clearer if we adopt a perspective that includes more than just the United States or British America and definitely more than just the 19th and the 20th centuries.

because that meaning is conditioned by a long tradition of interpretation that I think starts with Columbus himself. As I alluded to earlier, Columbus represented himself and his enterprise using the terms of a discourse of empire that was circulating in Spain at the end of the 15th century, which itself had a long history that touches on the Crusades and Spain's destiny to recapture, Jerusalem, and of course, the Spanish reconquest, the effort to take back the lands that had been invaded by the Moors in the year 7-11. So when Columbus writes about his voyage to the new world, he portrays it and his whole enterprise, he always called it his enterprise, as an integral part of this fight against the infidel and this fight to create a universal Christian empire that Ferdinand and Isabel are engaging in. Then the earliest historiographers who write about Columbus,

they take up that representation and they compare him to Aeneas, the legendary founder of the Roman Empire. Their texts were in turn widely read in Europe and often translated. But when the English begin their own colonization efforts, they read these same texts which portray Columbus as a quintessential figure of empire. Then in the 1770s, British Americans, like the poet Philip Frenno, start using Colombia, the feminized version of Columbus's own name, which the word, the term Columbia comes from, was first used by Bartolome de las Casas in the 16th century. So they use Columbus's name, this Columbia, as a symbol of America and as an allusion to its future as a great empire, thus drawing on Columbus as a figure of empire that he himself constructed centuries earlier.

So I think it's within that context, that telling of the story of an expanding empire that Columbus symbolized, that we can make more sense of how he was used at the 1893 Colombian World Exhibition, for example. That exhibition was supposed to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus's landing in the new world, but it was such a big event that the organizers postponed it for a year, hence 1893 instead of 1892. But Columbus was everywhere at the fair. He was on all of the promotional materials and there were replicas of his ships and there were artistic representations of him all over the place. But he shows up even in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. That was a privately staged event, not far.

from the midway, the fairs midway, but it celebrated the, basically, the white man's conquest of Native Americans. But Buffalo Bill's publicist compared Buffalo Bill to Columbus, saying that they were both intrepid explorers and that, you know, they both represented this spirit of individualism and territorial expansion, essentially. But the stationary of the Buffalo Bill show of that year featured the portraits of both Columbus and Buffalo Bill with the words the first pioneer and the last pioneer. So I think that the history of Columbus and the United States has very, very long roots that go across the ocean into Spain. Yes. So much of the world at that time was about reflecting back on Rome. For goodness, it's still a part of our lives. How do we recreate this ideal empire that taught the world so much and conquered so many lands?

the Spanish would have been thinking about that at this time. Oh, absolutely. 100%. In fact, they said that they were the descendants of Aeneas and Jason of the Argonauts, right, who was the precursor. And on and on it goes with us building our neoclassical buildings in the 17 and 1800s, and we're going to claim that for ourselves. Christopher Columbus sits right in the pocket of all of that, and it's a fascinating center point to really understand how little of it he would have had to do with making. You know, much of it was imposed upon him. Thank you so much, Professor Elise Bartosik-Files, who works at Dickinson College,

and I recommend her book that we were talking about, The Legacy of Christopher Columbus in the America's New Nations and a transatlantic discourse of empire. Now we know what that means. Thank you, Elise. Nice to meet you. Thank you, Don. Nice to meet you. Hello, folks. Thanks for listening to American History Hit. Each week, we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays. All kinds of great content, like mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements,

to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support. Bye for now.