Howard Zinn

            "Columbus, The Indians, and Human Progress- by Howard Zinn.
             The chapter "Columbus, The Indians, and Human Progress- tells history from the point of view of history's victims. One significant topic in history that Zinn mentioned was the topic of Christopher Columbus. What I understand from Zinn's explanations that how history was depicted Columbus as a hero when in reality, his attitudes led to the genocide of a population. Zinn presents the major historical facts of the first 250 years of American history starting from when Christopher Columbus's Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria landed in the Bahamas on October 12, 1492. It was there that Europeans and Native Americans first came into contact; the Arawak natives came out to greet the whites, and the whites were only interested in finding the gold. From the Bahamas, Columbus sailed to Cuba and Hispañola, the present-day home of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Shortly, Zinn tells the history about the discovery of America through the eyes of Arawaks, the captured slaves, and the Cherokees. I think Zinn looks at not only the history of the conquerors, rulers, and leaders; but also the history of the enslaved, the oppressed, and the led.
             Zinn focuses on the dominated Native Americans, whom he holds to be at least as advanced as their European masters. He writes: "Columbus and his successors were not coming into an empty wilderness, but into a world which in some places was as densely populated as Europe itself, where the culture was complex, where human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations among men, women, children, and nature were more beautifully worked out than perhaps any place in the world. They were a people without a written language, but with their own laws, their poetry, their history kept in memory and passed on, in an oral vocabulary more complex than Europe's, accompanied by song, dance, and ceremonial drama.