Columbus Controversy

Planning a talk

A colleague who teaches Spanish at BSU is coordinating a Hispanic/Latinx month this month, with a series of events. She asked me to talk about Columbus, and I said, “sure, what the heck.” I talk about him every semester in my Modern World History survey, and I don’t exactly shy away from the controversy that surrounds him. In fact, I think the different ways the Genoese explorer is remembered are interesting in their own right.

So I’m planning to debunk both the Columbus as heroic discoverer myth as well as the more recent depiction of him as just a genocidal imperialist. Reality is almost always more complex and less black-and-white than we’d like it to be.

The Bella Ciao t-shirt is a shout-out to the Spanish TV series, Casa de Papel (Money Heist), which uses the Italian partisan song as a theme song.