Rethinking History Class on Columbus Day | The Atlantic 

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The importance of exposing students to the many truths about the controversial explorer

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Generations of schoolchildren have memorized the rhyme chronicling the famous voyage of Christopher Columbus:

Factually, when it comes to Columbus, that’s pretty much where agreement ends. The lyrics then go into exhaustive detail about the sailors’ quest to make landfall, the hospitality of the Native Americans who greeted Columbus and his crew, and the Italian-born explorer’s many return trips to the Americas in search of gold, concluding that “Columbus was brave, and he was bright”—all of which has been a source of dispute in recent decades.

History, defined as the systematic narrative of past events as relating to a particular period or person, has increasingly become synonymous with controversy in classrooms and schools. Last fall, the Jefferson County, Colorado, school board’s decision to rewrite its Advanced Placement U.S.-history curriculum—stripping any mention of "civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law"—led hundreds of students to walk out of class in a protest against censorship. A similar backlash unfolded when the College Board released new AP U.S.-history standards this summer. It was the second revision to cause a storm of complaints, with dueling sides accusing the College Board of bending to political pressure in shaping its history curriculum. Yet even as the teaching of history in South Carolina, Texas, and other states grows more contentious, few famous figures in American history are as divisive as Christopher Columbus. And schools, reflecting society’s broad cultural and political values, must find ways to navigate without a compass.

Today, over 500 years after he sailed the ocean blue, Columbus is equally derided and praised. Starting with Berkeley, California, in 1992, cities started renaming the second Monday in October “Indigenous People\'s Day” to shift focus from the conqueror to the conquered. Since August, eight cities have replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples\' Day, including several in just the last week. This follows both Minneapolis and Seattle that adopted the new name in 2014, with a bevy of Native American groups and progressive activists applauding the changes.

Renee Roma Nose, of the Tulalip Tribe, told

, “We are asking for mutual respect and understanding. We hope that this holiday brings that.” Likewise in Minneapolis, Native leaders sought to separate Columbus the man from the myth. “He actually led a lot of devastating movements against indigenous people,” Native American Community Development Institute President Jay Bad Heart Bull stressed to MPR News.

But these name-changing efforts are not without their opponents. Italian-American civic and business leaders in Seattle strongly resisted any attempt to downplay Columbus Day. And in a show of diplomatic support the Italian ambassador to the United States sent a letter of criticism to Seattle’s mayor.

The picture grows even more complicated when you factor in teachers and schools, which often rely on textbooks, materials, and lesson plans inundated with Anglo-American, mono-cultural viewpoints. In

James W. Loewen, a history professor, reviews the common misstatements and misrepresentations in the retelling of American history—from the first Thanksgiving and reconstruction to the mythology surrounding Columbus. The result is “a whitewashed version of history,” Shannon Speed, Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote in a

op-ed last year. “Omission of the truth is, in fact, a form of lying. I would offer that the purpose of teaching history in schools is to create critical thinkers capable of meaningful participation in a democratic society.”

In San Francisco, Robert Sautter, a kindergarten teacher, agrees. Sautter, a recent recipient of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance award for culturally responsive teaching, is committed to telling his students “the truth about everything” including the Columbus legacy —in ways appropriate to their age and life experiences as 5-year-olds. A self-described anti-racist, self-reflective, white educator, Sautter strives to help youngsters learn “injustices happen, and have happened and will continue to happen, but those who experience injustice aren’t powerless.”

“He actually led a lot of devastating movements against indigenous people.”

The San Francisco Unified School District retitled the holiday “Columbus/Indigenous People’s Day/El Dia de La Raza,” giving Sautter wide berth to build his students’ conceptual framework of Columbus within the context of their own culture and community. Nearly two-thirds of the children Sautter teaches at Leonard R. Flynn Elementary School are Latino. “Facilitating children’s understanding of a wider view—a broader perspective—is always important [and] goes a long way as students grow up and encounter various forms of misinformation or disinformation about Columbus or The Mission District or Latinos or immigrants,” Sautter explains.

Thousands of miles away in Wisconsin, Jeff Ryan, an AP history teacher, finds his lessons on Columbus leave students intrigued with “jaw dropping, eye-opening moments” that come as new ideas are explored. Ryan emphasizes that his job is not to start a movement to ban Columbus Day or browbeat students into thinking Columbus was heinous. At Prescott High School—a small, predominately white school about 20 minutes from the Twin Cities—Ryan invites Native people into his classroom to tell their stories about Columbus and allows students to develop their own hypotheses and viewpoints on the topic.

“One of the things that we discuss extensively in class is the whole notion of discovery and of course, Columbus is always at the center of this conversation,” Ryan said. “The story of Columbus through Native eyes can be viewed as difficult [but] we do have some evidence that shows Columbus behaved in ways that certainly are not worthy of celebrating. Exposing students to this interpretation is crucial.”

Ryan’s teaching philosophy is bolstered by an unusual education law in his state. Act 31, passed by the Wisconsin State Legislature in 1989, mandates the teaching of American Indian history, culture, and tribal sovereignty in Wisconsin\'s public schools and teacher education programs. Ryan admits that screening

—a controversial 1990 film about a white man\'s experience with Native culture on America’s western frontier—is enough to satisfy the law’s requirements in some Wisconsin schools. But at Prescott High, it’s “Act 31 on steroids,” Ryan says, with a college-level course in First Nations History and American Indian topics infused into biology, English, civics, and the music department.

“I don’t understand why people find it threatening to present Columbus in a different way,” Ryan notes. “If there’s credible, rational, decent evidence to show a contrasting point of view, it’s just another story.”

The importance and meaning of this was driven home for Ryan two years ago when his 7-year-old daughter came home from school and told him they were talking about Columbus in her first-grade class. As a dad with a keen interest in the subject, he asked her what they talked about and what she learned about the famed Italian explorer. Her reply was consistent with lessons taught in many grade school classrooms: Columbus was a “very good sailor” and “very brave.”

Inquiring further, Ryan asked his daughter if she learned anything else—and the conversation took an unexpected twist. “She paused, put her head down and said, ‘He was very mean to the Indian people…I don’t know why he treated them so bad.’ I wanted to jump up and down and scream,” Ryan said.

The moment was one of realization and appreciation as his daughter explained in her child-like way what Ryan conveys to his high school students: interpreting history is hard. He then posed his final question that’s the source of heated and tense debates every year.

“Do you think we should celebrate Columbus Day in our country?”

And with a simple innocence yet profound insight that belies her age, the first-grader answered, “Yes, but we should tell the truth.  Not everyone liked Columbus.”

What’s the balance between preparing students for college and ensuring they aren’t killing themselves in the process?

Before it became the New World, the Western Hemisphere was vastly more populous and sophisticated than has been thought—an altogether more salubrious place to live at the time than, say, Europe. New evidence of both the extent of the population and its agricultural advancement leads to a remarkable conjecture: the Amazon rain forest may be largely a human artifact

The plane took off in weather that was surprisingly cool for north-central Bolivia and flew east, toward the Brazilian border. In a few minutes the roads and houses disappeared, and the only evidence of human settlement was the cattle scattered over the savannah like jimmies on ice cream. Then they, too, disappeared. By that time the archaeologists had their cameras out and were clicking away in delight.

Below us was the Beni, a Bolivian province about the size of Illinois and Indiana put together, and nearly as flat. For almost half the year rain and snowmelt from the mountains to the south and west cover the land with an irregular, slowly moving skin of water that eventually ends up in the province\'s northern rivers, which are sub-subtributaries of the Amazon. The rest of the year the water dries up and the bright-green vastness turns into something that resembles a desert. This peculiar, remote, watery plain was what had drawn the researchers\' attention, and not just because it was one of the few places on earth inhabited by people who might never have seen Westerners with cameras.

The Islamic State has made enemies of most of the world. So how is it still winning?

Nearly two millennia ago, the Romans built the Arch of Triumph in Palmyra, Syria. According to

Picturesque Palestine, Sinai, and Egypt, published in 1881, “The wonder in these ancient ruins is not that so much has fallen, but that anything remains.” Last week, ISIS blew the Arch of Triumph, which the group considers idolatrous, to pieces. Such acts of aggression and barbarism have mobilized a vast enemy coalition, which includes almost every regional power and virtually every great power (and notably the United States, often compared to the Roman Empire in its hegemonic strength). Yet, incredibly, this alliance seems incapable of rolling back the Islamic State. How can a group of insurgents declare war on humanity—and win?

Science says lasting relationships come down to—you guessed it—kindness and generosity.

Every day in June, the most popular wedding month of the year, about 13,000 American couples will say “I do,” committing to a lifelong relationship that will be full of friendship, joy, and love that will carry them forward to their final days on this earth.

Except, of course, it doesn’t work out that way for most people. The majority of marriages fail, either ending in divorce and separation or devolving into bitterness and dysfunction. Of all the people who get married, only three in ten remain in healthy, happy marriages, as psychologist Ty Tashiro points out in his book

Social scientists first started studying marriages by observing them in action in the 1970s in response to a crisis: Married couples were divorcing at unprecedented rates. Worried about the impact these divorces would have on the children of the broken marriages, psychologists decided to cast their scientific net on couples, bringing them into the lab to observe them and determine what the ingredients of a healthy, lasting relationship were. Was each unhappy family unhappy in its own way, as Tolstoy claimed, or did the miserable marriages all share something toxic in common?

An ongoing series on the trials, tribulations, and joys of adoption.

Scroll down for the latest in our ongoing series on the trials, tribulations, and joys of adoption. Email your own story, perspective, or disagreement to hello@theatlantic.com.

No defensible moral framework regards foreigners as less deserving of rights than people born in the right place at the right time.

To paraphrase Rousseau, man is born free, yet everywhere he is caged. Barbed-wire, concrete walls, and gun-toting guards confine people to the nation-state of their birth. But why? The argument for open borders is both economic and moral. All people should be free to move about the earth, uncaged by the arbitrary lines known as borders.

Not every place in the world is equally well-suited to mass economic activity. Nature’s bounty is divided unevenly. Variations in wealth and income created by these differences are magnified by governments that suppress entrepreneurship and promote religious intolerance, gender discrimination, or other bigotry. Closed borders compound these injustices, cementing inequality into place and sentencing their victims to a life of penury.

Factually, when it comes to Columbus, that’s pretty much where agreement ends. The lyrics then go into exhaustive detail about the sailors’ quest to make landfall, the hospitality of the Native Americans who greeted Columbus and his crew, and the Italian-born explorer’s many return trips to the Americas in search of gold, concluding that “Columbus was brave, and he was bright”—all of which has been a source of dispute in recent decades.

History, defined as the systematic narrative of past events as relating to a particular period or person, has increasingly become synonymous with controversy in classrooms and schools. Last fall, the Jefferson County, Colorado, school board’s decision to rewrite its Advanced Placement U.S.-history curriculum—stripping any mention of "civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law"—led hundreds of students to walk out of class in a protest against censorship. A similar backlash unfolded when the College Board released new AP U.S.-history standards this summer. It was the second revision to cause a storm of complaints, with dueling sides accusing the College Board of bending to political pressure in shaping its history curriculum. Yet even as the teaching of history in South Carolina, Texas, and other states grows more contentious, few famous figures in American history are as divisive as Christopher Columbus. And schools, reflecting society’s broad cultural and political values, must find ways to navigate without a compass.

Today, over 500 years after he sailed the ocean blue, Columbus is equally derided and praised. Starting with Berkeley, California, in 1992, cities started renaming the second Monday in October “Indigenous People\'s Day” to shift focus from the conqueror to the conquered. Since August, eight cities have replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples\' Day, including several in just the last week. This follows both Minneapolis and Seattle that adopted the new name in 2014, with a bevy of Native American groups and progressive activists applauding the changes.

Renee Roma Nose, of the Tulalip Tribe, told

, “We are asking for mutual respect and understanding. We hope that this holiday brings that.” Likewise in Minneapolis, Native leaders sought to separate Columbus the man from the myth. “He actually led a lot of devastating movements against indigenous people,” Native American Community Development Institute President Jay Bad Heart Bull stressed to MPR News.

But these name-changing efforts are not without their opponents. Italian-American civic and business leaders in Seattle strongly resisted any attempt to downplay Columbus Day. And in a show of diplomatic support the Italian ambassador to the United States sent a letter of criticism to Seattle’s mayor.

The picture grows even more complicated when you factor in teachers and schools, which often rely on textbooks, materials, and lesson plans inundated with Anglo-American, mono-cultural viewpoints. In

James W. Loewen, a history professor, reviews the common misstatements and misrepresentations in the retelling of American history—from the first Thanksgiving and reconstruction to the mythology surrounding Columbus. The result is “a whitewashed version of history,” Shannon Speed, Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote in a

op-ed last year. “Omission of the truth is, in fact, a form of lying. I would offer that the purpose of teaching history in schools is to create critical thinkers capable of meaningful participation in a democratic society.”

In San Francisco, Robert Sautter, a kindergarten teacher, agrees. Sautter, a recent recipient of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance award for culturally responsive teaching, is committed to telling his students “the truth about everything” including the Columbus legacy —in ways appropriate to their age and life experiences as 5-year-olds. A self-described anti-racist, self-reflective, white educator, Sautter strives to help youngsters learn “injustices happen, and have happened and will continue to happen, but those who experience injustice aren’t powerless.”

The standard conception of the disorder is based on studies of "hyperactive young white boys." For females, it comes on later, and has different symptoms.

When you live in total squalor—cookies in your pants drawer, pants in your cookies drawer, and nickels, dresses, old

, and apple seeds in your bed—it’s hard to know where to look when you lose your keys. The other day, after two weeks of fruitless searching, I found my keys in the refrigerator on top of the roasted garlic hummus. I can’t say I was surprised. I

surprised when my psychiatrist diagnosed me with ADHD two years ago, when I was a junior at Yale.

In editorials and in waiting rooms, concerns of too-liberal diagnoses and over-medication dominate our discussions of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD.

recently reported, with great alarm, the findings of a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study: 11 percent of school-age children have received an ADHD diagnosis, a 16 percent increase since 2007. And rising diagnoses mean rising treatments—drugs like Adderall and Ritalin are more accessible than ever, whether prescribed by a physician or purchased in a library. The consequences of misuse and abuse of these drugs are dangerous, sometimes fatal.

, the president defended his Middle East policy after Russian involvement in Syria.

Anyone who got beat up as a kid knows there’s no one weaker than a bully. International politics is slightly more complicated than that, of course, but not by much.

During a lengthy interview with Steve Kroft on

that aired Sunday night, President Obama tried to explain how Russian President Vladimir Putin’s shows of strength in Syria and Ukraine actually reflected weakness. In doing so, Obama also warned against the United States making the same mistake.

Kroft opened by noting how much the world had changed since their last interview, and what that meant for America’s influence overseas.

A year ago when we did this interview, there was some saber-rattling between the United States and Russia on the Ukrainian border. Now it’s also going on in Syria. You said a year ago that the United States—America leads. We’re the indispensible nation. Mr. Putin seems to be challenging that leadership.

A Wisconsin mother, imprisoned to protect her fetus, fought back in federal court—and won the first round.

Women’s rights advocates haven’t had many victories in the past couple of years, but now they are celebrating two—one in  Arkansas, and the other in the Midwest. Last month, the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin made an announcement in the case of Tammy Loertscher, who had been jailed for 18 days after admitting to having used drugs early in her pregnancy. The district court denied the state’s motion to have the suit thrown out, so the case is now heading to trial.

Loertscher has received national attention as one of very few to pushback successfully against a slew of punitive laws, many enacted in the past several years, that have targeted pregnant women. She never guessed she’d become a symbol of resistance. Growing up in a small, working-class industrial town in northern Wisconsin, Loertscher dreamed of being an astronaut. But until recently, she’d barely even made it out of the state, where she found work in the healthcare system. In Wisconsin, she fell in love with a local boy, Dondi Ellner, who had been around the world as a musician—and even knew how to cook. They moved in together and shared his niece’s house. Things were good for a while, and then not so much.

Why ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ Sound So Similar in So Many Languages

Is there anything inherently “doggy” about the word “dog”? Obviously not—to the French, a dog is a

chien, to Russians a sobaka, to Mandarin Chinese-speakers a gǒu. These words have nothing in common, and none seem any more connected to the canine essence than any other. One runs up against that wall with pretty much any word.

Except some. The word for “mother” seems often either to be mama or have a nasal sound similar to m, like nana. The word for “father” seems often either to be papa or have a sound similar to p, like b, in it—such that you get something like baba. The word for “dad” may also have either d or t, which is a variation on saying d, just as p is on b. People say mama or nana, and then papa, baba, dada, or tata, worldwide.

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