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US History (Monday, January 16, 7th period)

Josh put down his copy of the Missoulian with a sigh of relief when his history class began arriving.

He pointed to his inbox. "Please drop your incredibly insightful and correctly spelled essays about the Native American tribe of your choice off on my desk now." He waited until the class had done so, then turned to the board.

"As Principal Smith mentioned in his announcement, in the United States, we are celebrating a national holiday to honor the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr. We'll be getting to him in something like ten weeks and about four hundred years of history. But to give you an idea of why he's being honored, we're going to watch his 'I Have a Dream' Speech. Doesn't matter where, or when, you're from. Some things just resonate."

Josh hit play on the video of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s speech and turned the lights out.

After it was over, he flipped the lights back on. "Okay. Back to North and South America just after the arrival of Columbus the Navigational Moron."

He reached for his notes. "Okay. Columbus sailed back for Europe with his gold and his slaves and his insane thoughts that he had found India, leaving behind some of his sailors on Hispanola as the first Spanish settlement in the New World. The settlers soon began fighting over gold and Indian women, and started killing each other. The Indians, who were probably good and tired of being pushed around, killed the rest of them." He looked up. "Not the greatest beginning, huh?"

"Columbus came back with his second expedition totally convinced that this time they'd find the Great Khan, and giant heaps of gold, silk and spices. And while the New World would eventually make people rich, it wasn't going to be with that. To keep the men happy, Columbus gave them land on the islands they were discovering. The men started capturing Indians to work as slaves because the Spaniards were more interested in finding gold then learning to farm. The Indians ran away or died--sometimes a fun combination of both--so a slave trade with Africa was established. The first Africans arrived in the New World in 1503--a little more than a decade after the new continents were discovered. By 1574 there were 12,000 Africans on Hispanola alone." Josh looked disgusted. "And that was the beginning of black slavery in the Americas--a mistake that would hang around our necks for centuries."

He walked to the front of the classroom and pulled a map down. "Of course, the rest of the world--and by world, I mean Europe in this particular instance--wasn't going to let Spain get all the glory--and by glory, I mean gold. " He smiled. "This began an Age of Exploration the likes of which wasn't really topped until the Space Race five hundred years later." He looked around the classroom. "The names of the explorers have always bored me. So I'm not going to relearn them. But you have to. Because I'm evil, etc."

"Your homework, due next Monday, is to tell me about one of the explorers of North or South America ~~from the almighty Wikipedia~~ in a way that doesn't bore me to tears."

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Cally signs in.

Lana signs in.

Shep signs in.

Piper signs in.

Jake signed in.

Veronica signs in

Chloe signs in.

Chiana signs in.

Quinn signs in.

Blair signs in.

Lilly signs in.

Lily signs in.

Discuss the "I Have A Dream" speech or the various ways in which Columbus was a moron.

Lana sat down next to Shep, taking advantage of the opportunity to give his hand a quick squeeze while no one was looking. "I find it amazing to look at both how far we've come since Martin Luther King Jr's speech and how far we still have to go. And yes, Columbus was a bonehead."

Piper nodded at Lana. "It's a shame we still have so far to go. And yeah. Columbus? Complete idiot."

"I have to admit that I totally don't get the whole concept of, 'oh look, here is a land with all of these indigenous people, let's enslave them!' Just boggles the mind."

"Yeah, that's a concept I can't wrap my brain around either." Piper shakes her head. "It's so wrong that there's a holiday to celebrate Columbus."

"Yeah, that I've never understood. I mean once you get past the whole fairy tale story they tell kids around Columbus Day, what are you left with? It's not even as if he discovered the area that became the early United States, even!"

"It really makes no sense," Piper sighed.

"It's like driving in the car with my dad on long trips," Quinn says. "He'll start driving somewhere and he doesn't know the right way, and three hours later we're somewhere in Ohio and that vein on his forehead is starting to stand out but will he pull over and ask for directions? Of course not. So Mom's getting upset, Daria's either reading some stupid book or doing that 'i'm not touching you thing' until I start telling Mom to make her stop and Dad starts threatening to turn the car around which was what we wanted him to do in the first place. So yeah, Columbus was an idiot."

"Sir, I'm all for supporting those who've been wronged and stuff but haven't we started to close our minds the other way and completely ignore anything that Columbus or the explorers did that was good?" Blair bounced nervously.

"I'm not saying we should rename the country after him or anything, but aren't we doing history a disservice by dissing him and the settlers?"

Josh smiled. "That's a very good point, Blair." He spread his hands. "And I'm certainly not saying that what these men did wasn't an amazingly brave thing. I'm just saying to it wasn't exactly puppies and chocolates for everyone involved." He shrugged. "We have a lot of exploration ahead of us in class--and there's a lot we get right. And when we get it right, I'll be obnoxious about crowing about it."

Blair grinned and bounced. "Good to know, man. And I agree, not puppies and chocolate for everyone. It rarely is."

"I'm still kind of boggling over Columbus thinking he'd reached India. It wasn't like people had never been there before. They knew what Indians - real Indians - looked like and sounded like, and that they were fairly civilized and had all these really cool spices and things to export. And then Columbus gets there and...I mean, deep down, he had to know he was in the wrong place. The people were wrong and the climate was wrong and clearly, he was the epitome of the idiot male who refuses to ask for directions, and then refuses to admit that he's gotten himself completely lost." Chloe blushes a little at the end of her rant. "Sorry, that wasn't all supposed to come out in one breath."

Cally's somewhat amazed by the speech, and decides to talk about it.

"Did you folks really have issues with skin color? Like really big, major issues? I mean, I guess we had the issues between the different colonies, which is kinda similar, but nothing that seems so bizzarely arbitrary like that."

"I totally agree," Lilly says, looking equally perplexed. "I mean, I understand on Earth there are huge issues, but I think we should look at it from Cally's point of view. Because judging someone by the skin color is just moronic."

Something about an explorer that won't bore me. Go.

Lana turns in an interesting piece on John Cabot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cabot), formerly Giovanni Caboto, complete with photos of his statues and the towers named after him and a facsimile of the 1947 stamp in his honor.

“As it’s been said… ‘Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper. (http://strangeplaces.net/weirdthings/students.html)’ But that’s because some kids are dumb.

In 1577, Drake was commissioned by Queen Elizabeth to undertake an expedition against the Spanish along the Pacific coast of the Americas. He set sail from Plymouth, England, in December aboard the Pelican (which is not a stork, so he was not delivering babies), with four other ships and over 150 men. After crossing the Atlantic, two of the ships had to be abandoned on the east coast of South America. Drake crossed from the Atlantic to the Pacific through the Magellan Strait, after which a storm blew his ship so far south, he realized that Tierra del Fuego (which means Land of Fire... that must have been historical irony given how close it is to Antarctica and I know from personal experience you can freeze your ~~ass~~ behind off in Antarctica 365 days a year), the island seen to the south of the Magellan Strait, was not part of a southern continent (as was believed at that time).

The three remaining ships departed for the Strait of Magellan at the southern tip of the continent. This course established "Drake's Passage" (the female ducks had to take a different route), but the route south of Tierra del Fuego around the bottom of South America, where the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans meet at Cape Horn, was not discovered until 1616.

A few weeks later, Drake made it to the Pacific, however, violent storms destroyed one of the ships, and caused another to return to England. Drake pushed onward in his lone flagship, now renamed the Golden (be)Hind in honour of Sir Christopher Hatton (after his coat of arms) (Because ski vests wouldn't become fashionable until the 1970's).

João Rodrigues Cabrilho was a Portuguese explorer noted for his exploration of the west coast of North America while sailing for Spain. Cabrillo was the first European explorer to navigate the coast of present day California in the United States. He also helped found the city of Oaxaca, Oaxaca, in Mexico.

Little is known about Cabrillo’s early years. Even his nationality is uncertain; most biographies describe him as Portuguese, but in his exhaustive 1986 biography Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, historian Harry Kelsey writes that Cabrillo appears to have been born in Spain, "probably in Seville, but perhaps in Cuellar." His date of birth and parentage are also unknown, but events in Cabrillo’s life lead Kelsey to believe he was born of poor parents "around 1498 or 1500," and then worked for his keep in the home of a prominent Seville merchant.

Juan Ponce de León was born in Santervás de Campos (Valladolid). As a young man he joined the war to conquer Granada, the last Moorish state on the Iberian peninsula. Ponce de León accompanied Christopher Columbus on his second voyage to the New World. He became the first Governor of Puerto Rico by appointment of the Spanish Crown. He is regarded as the first European known to have visited what is now the United States when he set foot in Florida in 1513.

The popular story that Ponce de León was searching for the Fountain of Youth when he discovered Florida is misconceived. He was seeking a spiritual rebirth with new glory, honor, and personal enrichment, not a physical rebirth through the waters of the Fountain of Youth. The Tainos had told the Spanish of a large, rich island to the north named Bimini, and Ponce de Leon was searching for gold, slaves and lands to claim and govern for Spain, all of which he hoped to find at Bimini and other islands. The story of Ponce de León searching for the Fountain of Youth seems to have surfaced in the 1560s in the Memoir of Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda, and was later included in the Historia general de los hechos de los Castellanos of Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas.

Quinn has a short handwritten piece on the guy who discovered Canada, just because he has a cool name and sounds like he would have an accent.

Cally turns in the following:

So, this Meriwether Lewis guy, who helped explore some stuff with a guy named Clark, he died of a gunshot wound at a tavern called Grinder's Inn; his wrists had been cut, and he had been shot in the head and chest. It's unsure whether it was murder or suicide, but it was reported that he was extremely depressed and had attempted to jump into the Mississippi River and drown shortly before his death.

James Cook (October 27, 1728 (O.S.) – February 14, 1779) was a British explorer, navigator, and map maker. He made three voyages to the Pacific Ocean, during which large areas were accurately charted, and several islands and coastlines recorded for the first time on European maps. His most notable accomplishments were the British discovery and claiming of the east coast of Australia, the European discovery of the Hawaiian Islands, and the first circumnavigation and mapping of Newfoundland and New Zealand.

James Cook's 11 years sailing around the Pacific Ocean contributed much to European knowledge of the area. Several islands such as Easter Island and the Sandwich Islands were encountered for the first time by Europeans, and his more accurate navigational charting of large areas of the Pacific was a major achievement.

Non-Boring Explorer Poem
Vasco de Gama
Was not full of drama
Suceeded where Columbus failed
From Europe to India sailed

oops, that's not North or South America

Take #2
Being the discoverer of Brazil
Pedro Cabal's destiny to fufill
He named the Island of Vera Cruz
Christianity he did transfuse
Which on every voyage was seeded
Allowing montheistic religions to go unheeded
(and totally wipe out the rich history and worship pratices of the indigenous peoples, making it hard for them to pass on their rituals and making it difficult for us to find out about their ancient gods or tribal warriors with enhanced senses.)

Professor, sorry that the last part didn't rhyme...got a little carried away. ~Blair

Leif Ericson (Old Norse: Leifr Eiríksson; modern Icelandic: Leifur Eiríksson; modern Norwegian: Leiv Eiriksson) (c. 980 – c. 1020) was a Norse explorer and the first European to discover North America—more specifically, the region that would become Newfoundland and, by later extension, Canada.

The Saga of the Greenlanders tells that Leif set out about 1000 to follow Bjarni's route in the opposite direction.[1] The first land he met was covered with flat rock slabs (Old Norse: hellur). He therefore called it Helluland ("Land of the Flat Stones"), which is probably the present day Baffin Island. Next he came to a land that was flat and wooded, with white sandy beaches, which he called Markland ("Wood-land"), which is assumed to have been Labrador.

When Leif and his men found land again after leaving Markland, they landed and built some houses. They found the land pleasant: there were plenty of salmon in the river and the climate was mild, with little frost in the winter and green grass year-round. They remained at the place over the winter. The sagas mention that one of Leif's men, Tyrkir, arguably a German warrior, found grapes, and Leif named the country Vínland after it.

Henry Hudson was an English sea explorer and navigator in the early seventeenth century. His place and date of birth are unknown, but September 12, 1570 in England seems likely, and he is presumed to have died in 1611 somewhere in Hudson Bay, Canada.

In 1607, Hudson set sail on the Hopewell to find a northwest passage to Asia through the Arctic Ocean via the North Pole. The voyage was paid for by the Muscovy Company, one of a small number of corporations given Royal Charters. In June he reached the eastern shore of Greenland and started northward, mapping as he went. On the 20th his expedition started out for Svalbard, eventually reaching an island on the northern end of the group on the 17th of July. At this point the ship was only 577 nautical miles from the pole, but it was clear there was no way to go further due to the ice and he decided to return to England on the 31st. On the return voyage Hudson discovered what is now known as Jan Mayen Island before reaching home in September.

Lily turns in her essay on Portugese explorer Vasco da Gama (http://www.cdli.ca/CITE/exgama.htm).

...

Liz may not need these classes, but I do! *g*

And my tribe of choice would have been the Pequot (http://www.pequotmuseum.org/), who were my saviors in my end of year archaeology/anthropology exams. Don't have an example? Let's use the Pequots *bg*

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US History (Monday, January 16, 7th period)

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