Christopher Columbus Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

No, We’re Not Tearing Down the Washington Monument—But Contextualizing It Might Be a Good Idea

If you’ve been following the news lately, you’ve probably heard a lot of hype about how the mayor of Washington D.C. supposedly wants to tear down the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial. That’s not even remotely true. Right-wing media outlets and conservative pundits have been blatantly distorting the truth and blowing things totally out of proportion.

Here’s what actually happened: Muriel E. Bowser, the mayor of Washington D.C., commissioned a research committee known as the District of Columbia Facilities and Commemorative Expressions Working Group to come up with a list of federal monuments in the district that they think the government should “remove, relocate, or contextualize.”

The committee itself has no power to actually do anything to any of the monuments on its list. All it has the power to do is make recommendations. Furthermore, when it comes to structures like the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial, it’s pretty clear that the committee isn’t advocating for the government to just tear them down; what they’re probably thinking of is something more along the lines of putting up a sign noting some of the less-than-savory aspects of Washington and Jefferson’s lives. That’s what “contextualize” means.

Unfortunately, Fox News and other conservative media outlets are so hellbent on portraying liberals as deranged, frothing-at-the-mouth communist radicals who want to destroy American culture that they’ve seized on this committee’s recommendations of contextualization and spun it into a wildly distorted narrative of “the evil liberals want to tear down all the monuments in D.C.!”

Should We Judge Historical Figures by Contemporary Standards?

There has been a lot of political controversy in recent years about the question of whether it is appropriate to judge historical figures by “contemporary standards.” This controversy often particularly flares up surrounding figures who are traditionally seen as “heroes” of United States history and yet actually committed horrific crimes, such Christopher Columbus, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson.

I think that the issue is a lot more complicated than most people realize and I think that, in most cases, it is extremely misleading to frame the debate in terms of judging historical figures by “contemporary standards” because this implies that people during the period in question had no way of knowing that the things they were doing were wrong, when, in fact, we know there were people at the time who did know that these things were wrong.

Debunking the Misconception of the Flat Earth

Hardly anyone nowadays believes the earth is flat. Many people, however, wrongly believe that people during the Middle Ages thought the world was flat. In reality, however, the sphericity of the earth was common knowledge throughout the entire Middle Ages. The idea that people in the Middle Ages thought the earth was flat is a canard invented in the Early Modern Period by authors who wanted to portray the Middle Ages as a time of backwardness and superstitious regression.

Why Are We Still Celebrating “Columbus Day”?

October 12, 2018 marks the 526th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival on the island of San Salvador in the Bahamas in 1492. You have doubtlessly heard much about the controversy surrounding Columbus Day (which actually fell on October 8 this year), but, surprisingly, most people do not know the full reasons why so many people are opposed to it.

This is because, for over a century and half, students have been taught a thoroughly inaccurate and glamorized tale about who Columbus was and what he did. Even today as educators and activists work to disseminate the horrifying truth about Columbus, the legend remains strong. In this article, I want to debunk a few of the most popular misconceptions about Columbus and expose some of the atrocities he committed.

Continue reading “Why Are We Still Celebrating “Columbus Day”?”