I thought the Zinn reading was really interesting because I love history.\u00a0 I was also amazed about how much I didn’t actually know about one of the first history stories we learn about in school.\u00a0 In high school, I had learned that Christopher Colombus was actually a pretty bad person, but I had never learned all of the specifics and this reading taught me the extent of the harm he did.\u00a0 The article mentioned that by 1650 there were no more Arawaks or their descendants left on the islands because they had all been taken and ended up dead.\u00a0 This is genocide and it is crazy to me that we are not taught more about the harm that Christopher Columbus inflicted on others.<\/p>\n
It is interesting to think of this in connection with the systems theory readings from last week and see the drastic effects that come from oversimplification.\u00a0 Oversimplification does not only leave parts of the whole story out, but it distorts the story and changes the entire narrative.\u00a0 Christopher Columbus’s story has been so oversimplified in our history that despite the fact that he committed genocide, our country still has a national holiday for him and has statues and other commemorations of him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I thought the Zinn reading was really interesting because I love history.\u00a0 I was also amazed about how much I didn’t actually know about one of the first history stories we learn about in school.\u00a0 In high school, I had learned that Christopher Colombus was actually a pretty bad person, but I had never learned […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4680,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-responses"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4680"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5474\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}