how can the history books give credit to Christopher Columbus for discovering America?

Question

when in fact the first person to discover america was the indians that was here first.i mean wouldnt it be someone from the native american people that should be given credit for discoering america and not columbus or any other person?

how is it pointless.the american indians where and still some of the most intelligent and peacful people until we came along and took everything from them.in the begining we europeans gave them virus's that made them sick that wasnt here before.then when they helped us by showing us how to farm the land so we didnt starve to death or freeze as well.then what did we do in return.we slaughtered most of there people.then we took there land and put them on terrible places to live.

Answer 1

GREAT QUESTION!

The answer is that ethnocentric people write history books and get paid big bucks to do it. That's how it can be in history books. It's a LIE, but that's HOW it gets in there. Those people were taught lies by others who were taught lies and it just keeps getting repeated.

Bark, yes, many history books still report that Columbus "discovered" America.

Mahatma, it is NOT a bad question. Ethnocentrism NEEDS to be challenged! Racism NEEDS to be challenged! To let someone lie and say that Columbus "discovered" America is to say the people here didn't matter and weren't more than animals. It's wrong!

Xero, they don't all say he was the first Euro here. Many still say he "discovered" America. AND he wasn't even the first Euro here!

Doctory, that's just ridiculous. It has to be communicated to someone else???? The Lakota told the Ojibwe who told the Apache, who told the Haudenosaunee who told the Comanche that they were here first LOL! If an Ojibwe rode a canoe to England and "discovered" the royal palace does that mean it now belongs to that Ojibwe? The Lakota didn't know about it.... It wasn't told to the Apache.... Well, you get my point. YOU CAN'T "discover" PEOPLE!!!!

Pauls, the Bering Straight Theory has been proven wrong many times. Repeating that old trash.... Just look at Native history. Native people originate in the Americas.

Philip, the Native people here were NOT slaughtering each other any more than Europeans were! People were being burned in Europe for being witches at that time for crying out loud!!!! As for your racist comment about intelligence, Euro's had leeches sucking the "bad blood" out of people....

mrdange, Columbus did NOT even make it to the America's! He only made it to some islands and could not even find the main land let alone make it here! He was lost! He was a criminal! He was sent to jail in his time! He was the first trans-Atlantic slave trader! He was a murderer! He and his men were rapists! They killed babies! Your defending him is sick!

The racism and ethnocentrism displayed in many of these answers is a perfect example of why the history books need to be corrected! One guy insinuated that Native people did nothing important here before Columbus. I think the development of Corn, potatoes and tomatoes is one of the many pretty important things Native people accomplished before the arrival of Columbus. We aren't taught those things in the Eurocentric history books!

Check these out:
http://www.transformcolumbusday.org/
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/Taino/docs/columbus.html

Answer 2

The good history books do mention the Vikings settlement, but still give credit to Columbus, because his "discovery" was more permanent. The Vikings in America died out, so, even though they were the first Europeans in the new world, they had no influence on how civilization developed on the continent.

Answer 3

To "discover" something is to imply that one finds or locates something that no one knew existed before. Properly speaking, Columbus didn't "discover" America. There were millions of people - Native Americans - who knew that the Americas existed, so his was not a discovery in this sense.

Columbus wasn't even the first European to set foot in the Americas. Solid archaeological evidence indicates that Vikings around AD 1000 settled in Newfoundland, Canada. Some scientists have suggested that travlers from modern-days France made their way to the Americas thousands of years ago.

Columbus's achievement, in fact, was accidental. Columbus was seeking a western passage to Asia. Europeans found overland travel to highly desirable Asian trading centers hard and dangerous, and wanted to find a water route that didn't require a ship to travel all the way around the African continent. So Columbus pitched his idea of a western route, received royal backing, and headed off into the sunset - only to find an entire continent blocking his path to his true destination. Columbus, in fact, died still convinced that he had landed in Asia, not America.

Even though he wasn't the first - even though other Europeans had done it before him - even though he stumbled upon it by accident - Columbus's voyage of exploration was nevertheless monumental. Columbus's landing in America, and the events that followed, is analogous to a Native American tribe setting sail across the Atlantic and landing somewhere in Portugal or France, subduing the population of Europe and forcing Native American culture upon them, and spreading their language and customs and religion upon the entire continent. Imagine what a world-changing chain of events that would have been! It is undeniable that Columbus's voyage was among the most important events of the past milennium because that voyage set in motion a series of events that would change the fate of three continents forever.

Answer 4

Actually, for a long time--at least in the English colonies--Columbus didn't get much credit; up until the 18th century, the residents of Jamestown were better known in the U.S. than was Columbus. A couple of things changed this, and made Columbus a figure worthy of celebration in American history books. First, he wasn't English, and in the late 1700s and early 1800s, the relationship between the U.S. and England was a really awkward one. Second, especially by the 20th century, Italian Americans started to hold Columbus up as their great hero. The legend was solidified by 1892, a year the U.S. treated as a huge national event. (There's a book--I'm not sure it's in print any more--titled "How America Discovered Columbus" that provides a lot of details on this. I think it's by Claudia Bushman.)

As far as the question of why Columbus gets celebrated as a discoverer (or, to avoid the debate over the meaning of the term "discovery," as a major historic figure), it's because he initiated the colonial era, by laying the groundwork for first Spain and then other European countries to colonize in the new world. That doesn't mean he should be celebrated--in fact, for most of American history, he wasn't, as suggested above; and for many years, Columbus was characterized as a mass murderer in English histories of the colonial era (on this characterization of Columbus, and all Spanish colonization, you might check out the really amazing first few chapters of American Slavery, American Freedom, by Edmund Morgan)--but certainly it means that no discussion of American history would be acceptable without including him.

Answer 5

Because Columbus discovery of Americas was the single most important event in the past 515 years . For the native peoples who may or may not discovered it - actually tripped over it -was a non event. Absolutley nothing happened as a result of their discovery so it had no value. The history of the world is full of long forgotten people who made some discovery ,didn't have a clue about it's future value and carried on with their lives as always.
Blaming Columbus for all that followed is cowardly . You want to blame somebody blame Christianity, blame the culture of the times but don't place the burden on one man.
Columbus was simply an incredibly great sailor trying to make a decent living, who behaved in a way that was normal for the times that he lived in.

Answer 6

From the minimal knowledge I have, all human life began in Africa. Then the so called Native Americans travelled here over a land bridge in the north thousands upon thousands of years go. Then several hundred years prior to Columbus it is believed that Vikings had made several trips to what is now Nova Scotia and possibly areas along the east coast of the United States. So I actually don't believe they are giving credit to Columbus. I think Columbus gets credit for the surge of people that would follow close after he had made made his discovery.

Answer 7

It could be argued that it is not enough to FIND something, but to be credited as a discoverer you must communicate that find to someone else. So all the natives that were already in America weren't exactly spreading the word around, nor did the Vikings who may have landed there as well.

It's worth noting that one of the biggest opponents of the idea of America's discovery was Columbus himself. Right up until the time he died, he insisted that he had found a way to India... he even had pear-shaped globes made to demonstrate how all the vast things that were there could still somehow be where he thought they should be.

So it goes.

Answer 8

the indians didn't "discover" America. They migrated there. They did not send word back to their people about it. So, only they knew about it.

Same problem with the Vikings that settled in North America, they didn't pass that knowledge on to the rest of the world and it was forgotten.

Columbus went out and found a whole new continent that nobody else knew existed. Not counting it's residents of course, who didn't know about the rest of the world either. And, more importantly, he went back and told people about it, and they sent more people and it became known to the whole world. That is discovery.

Answer 9

They probably all now say he was the first "European" to discover America. White writers of textbooks used to be very egocentric and believed everything revolved around the "civilized" European cultures. However, it is also debatable that he was even the first European. Lief Ericcson (sp?) from Norway supposedly found Canada almost 500 years earlier.

Answer 10

peaceful? They were salughtering each other long before Columbus arrived. Intelligent? They thought if you danced it would rain.