Columbus Author's Representation the Book the American

Columbus Author's Representation The book the American Story attempts to dispel common notions of the conquest of the New World. According to the author, "The story recounted first in Europe and then in the United States depicted heroic adventurers, missionaries and soldiers sharing Western civilization with the peoples of the New World and opening a vast virgin land to economic development.

The familiar tale celebrated material progress, the inevitable spread of European values and the taming of frontiers." (Divine, 2) Divine believes this is a grossly distorted version of the truth for many reasons explained below. First, North America was already a land of great cultural and technological achievement before the Europeans arrived. There are many examples provided, but the one that stands out the most is Chaco Canyon on the San Juan River in present-day New Mexico (Divine, 4).

With as many as fifteen thousand people, Chaco Canyon had both a technologically sophisticated network of irrigation canals and roads that connected more than seventy outlying villages. While Native Americans developed different cultural and social practices, they did not live in isolated communities (Divine, 5). Commerce was nothing new for Native Americans, but they wanted peaceful trade (Divine, 9). Over time, cooperative commerce between the Native Americans and Europeans diminished as the Europeans destroyed their natural resources necessary for subsistence and drew them into debt (Divine, 10).

Further, the Native Americans were ravaged by new diseases that the Europeans exposed them to. (Divine, 10). Ultimately, the Indians rejected European values, wishing instead to keep their own manners and customs just as the Europeans desired to maintain their own identities (Divine, 9). Christianity made little sense to the Native Americans, finding it irrelevant to their needs especially when constant warfare killed large numbers of young Indian males, thereby disrupting village systems for food distribution (Divine, 10).

Further, conquest of the New World according to Divine was sparked by a strong competition between Catholic and Protestant faiths combined with a heavy dose of greed rather than a desire to spread morality throughout the world. Part of the result of "the Age of Religious Wars" was fierce competition between Spain and England to dominate not only each other, but also the New World (Divine, 25-26).

Increasingly, England began to view American colonies as essential to its own prosperity and independence, hiding the sufferings of Native Americans and presenting the New World as a paradise to promote colonization (Divine, 28). II. Theme Portrayal The European colonization of the New World forever changed the lives and cultures of the Native Americans. Their populations were ravaged by displacement, disease warfare, and enslavement.

Yet, the traditional, conservative views surrounding Thanksgiving and American history seems to be ingrained in Americans even though virtually none of it contains much in the way of authenticity, historical accuracy or cross-cultural perception (Loewen, 75). Perhaps this distortion of history more than any other factor motivated Divine to set the record straight on the conquest of the New World. While Divine is certainly to the left of mainstream historical accounts, there's far more radical interpretations to be found.

The following quote from Loewen's book Lies My Teacher Told Me illustrates the far left extremist view: 'The Europeans were able to conquer America not because of their military genius, or their religious motivation, or their ambition, or their greed. They conquered it by waging unpremeditated biological warfare" (Loewen, 76) Divine's interpretation that Europeans exposed the Indians to disease against which they had no natural immunity (Divine, 10) seems more reasonable than to believe that there was biological warfare hundreds of years ago.

Further, Divine's discussion of European motivations is just as relevant as outcomes. Divine acknowledges disease as destroying the cultural identity of North American tribes and disrupting trade (Divine, 10), but doesn't give enough data to fully understand the severity of the problem. Divine's mention of disease hardly approaches the more detailed and devastating accounts by Loewen. For example, Loewen tells how Pilgrim William Bradford described the results of Dutch rivals of Plymouth visiting an Indian village in Connecticut to trade.

"But their enterprise failed, for it pleased God to afflict these Indians with such a deadly sickness, that out of 1,000, over 950 of them died, and many of them lay rotting above ground for want of burial. ." (Loewen, 84) On the opposite coast things were just as bad for Native Americans. There, the Native American population of California declined from 300,000 in 1769 (by which time it had already been cut in half by various Spanish-borne diseases) to 30,000 a hundred years later, owing mainly to disease, starvation, homicide, and a declining birthrate (Loewen, 84).

Because of the different ways Divine and Loewen have dealt with the issue of disease, one has to wonder if either.