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

[professor-lyman.livejournal.com]

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."