A reading for Columbus Day
One of the mercies of adulthood is that you can use the Internet to track down books you liked when you were young. Last week, I happened to revisit a lovely two-volume anthology that I read when I took AP U.S. History – Portrait of America, edited by Stephen B. Oates. It has been reconstituted enough times that some of its earlier versions have become quite cheap. I own the ninth edition, from 2007.
It isn’t a doom-and-gloom sort of book, and I wasn’t especially thinking of Columbus Day, but the first reading in vol. 1 is apposite. It consists of the first two sections (pp. 57–75) of ch. 3 in David E. Stannard’s American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World (the link is to a PDF).
The description of pestilence and atrocity on various Caribbean islands is, of course, sobering to read. But the passage’s achievement is to link these catastrophes to the brutality of the perpetrators’ “Old World” society. The narrative is clear, gripping, perspective-altering. And terribly sad. Even Christian nations wander in darkness. Come, Lord Jesus.
It isn’t a doom-and-gloom sort of book, and I wasn’t especially thinking of Columbus Day, but the first reading in vol. 1 is apposite. It consists of the first two sections (pp. 57–75) of ch. 3 in David E. Stannard’s American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World (the link is to a PDF).
The description of pestilence and atrocity on various Caribbean islands is, of course, sobering to read. But the passage’s achievement is to link these catastrophes to the brutality of the perpetrators’ “Old World” society. The narrative is clear, gripping, perspective-altering. And terribly sad. Even Christian nations wander in darkness. Come, Lord Jesus.