common with the Arawaks than he did with Columbus?
10. Zinn argues (p. 10) that most history texts pretend that there is such a thing as “The United States”—a community of people with common interests.
a. What are the “communities” that Zinn identifies? What “interests” do you think these groups have in common? What “interests” do they not share? What “interests” of one group might be in opposition to an “interest” of another group?
b. Identify the community that you belong to, your community’s interests, and other communities that share your interests, as well as those communities that do not share or oppose your interests (possibilities: students, teachers, administrators, male, female, young, old, ethnic and racial identities, neighborhood, city, suburb). Do the policies of the United States government favor some communities over others?
11. Brainstorming from details:
a. Choose a detailed description of an event from the text.
b. Then write down a series of questions that knowledge of the event may enable one to answer.
c. Choose two of the questions and answer them.
Example
a. detailed description of an event from the text: on page 5, Columbus “got into a fight with Indians who refused to trade as many bows and arrows as he and his men wanted. Two [Indians] were run through with swords and bled to death.”
b. a series of questions that knowledge of the above event may enable one to answer: What does the above event reveal about Columbus’s personality? about the purpose of the voyage? about Spanish culture? about Arawak culture? about the comparative military strength of the Spanish and Arawaks?
c. answers to two of the questions above: The Spanish had military superiority—swords versus bows and arrows. Columbus wanted to dictate the terms of trade.
12. Hollywood Movies: Fact or Fiction? Much controversy has surrounded the making of the films Mississippi Burning and JFK. Many critics complain that when Americans see these films, they will believe falsely that the events and circumstances dramatized in these films accurately represent what happened during the periods in question. And for unstated reasons, this is wrong. The Left has criticized Mississippi Burning for leaving the impression that the FBI was honestly trying to help the civil rights advocates when “in fact” the FBI was aiding the KKK. Most of the mainstream media excoriated JFK for implying that John Kennedy’s assassination was engineered by Lyndon Johnson. Several questions are begged by this criticism. Do fictional movies (as opposed to documentaries) have a responsibility to reflect history accurately? Or do they have poetic license with reality, as art claims to have, in order to make a point about universal truth? But, more to the point with regard to Columbus, is “history” accurate? If films are supposed to convey “accurate” history, who decides what is the official version of the past? In order to explore this issue in more depth:
a. Watch a movie made about Columbus.
b. Compare the content of the movie with Zinn’s chapter about Columbus in addition to any other historical sources you may wish to consult (the more the better).
Possible points comparison: reasons for the voyage, Columbus’s first perceptions of the native inhabitants, Spanish treatment of the native inhabitants, success of the voyage(s), failures of the voyage(s), degree of Columbus’s navigational skills, Columbus’s leadership skills, the nature of the reception of Columbus by the native inhabitants, the portrayal of native inhabitants.
c. Respond to any of the questions raised in the introduction to this assignment above. For example:
There is not a country in world history in which racism has been more important, for so long a time, as the United States. And the problem of “the color line,” as W. E. B. Du Bois put it, is still with us. So it is more than a purely historical question to ask: How did it start?—and an even more urgent question: How might it end? Or, to put it differently: Is it possible for whites and blacks to live together without hatred?
If history can help answer these questions, then the beginnings of slavery in North America—a continent where we can trace the coming of the first whites and the first blacks—might supply at least a few clues.
In the English colonies, slavery developed quickly into a regular institution, into the normal labor relation of blacks to whites. With it developed that special racial feeling—whether hatred, or contempt, or pity, or patronization—that accompanied the inferior position of blacks in America for the next 350 years: that combination of inferior status and derogatory thought we call racism.
Everything in the experience of the first white settlers acted as a pressure for the enslavement of blacks.
The Virginians of 1619 were desperate for labor, to grow enough food to stay alive. Among them were survivors from the winter of 1609–10, the “starving time,” when, crazed for want of food, they roamed the woods for nuts and berries, dug up graves to eat the corpses, and died in batches until five hundred colonists were reduced to sixty.
They needed labor, to grow corn for subsistence, to grow tobacco for export. They had just learned from the Indians how to grow tobacco, and in 1617 they sent off the first cargo to England. Finding that, like all pleasurable drugs tainted with moral disapproval, it brought a high price, the planters, despite their high religious talk, were not going to ask questions about something so profitable.
They couldn’t force Indians to work for them, as Columbus had done. They were outnumbered, and while, with superior firearms, they could massacre Indians, they would face massacre in return. They could not capture them and keep them enslaved; the Indians were tough, resourceful, defiant, and at home in these woods, as the transplanted Englishmen were not.
There may have been a kind of frustrated rage at their own ineptitude, at the Indian superiority at taking care of themselves, that made the Virginians especially ready to become the masters of slaves. Edmund Morgan imagines their mood as he writes in his book American Slavery, American Freedom:
If you were a colonist, you knew that your technology was superior to the Indians’. You knew that you were civilized,
