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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...
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…
Bibliography
Divine, Robert, et. al. The American Story (Second Edition). New York: Penguin, 2002.
Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me. New York: Touchstone Books, 1995.
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