Never, ever, ever judge the past and the people who lived in the past with the eyes of today. That's by far the most important history lesson you can ever learn. ...that he supports a peaceful protest, but that wasn't it. And last Saturday... Oh, they're crazy....they're crazy....they're probably mad.
Buongiorno a tutti ragazzi. Luca here, professor of history and enthusiast of Italian culture. And today, from the building that celebrates Italian sailors and explorers, we talk about one of the most controversial topics in American public debate. October 12, the Columbus Day. How was the Columbus Day born?
Has it always been like that? Why is it so important in countries in the American hemisphere, such as the United States, where it is still a national holiday? To answer all these questions, I did some research and I was helped by a very, very good student of mine in my classes of early modern history in the University of Rome Tor Vergata, Lisa Passeri, whom I thank. So let's dive in.
And the answer is no, Christopher Columbus was absolutely not a popular character in North America, at least until the 19th century. And this was for... two major reasons. First being very practical. Columbus never had anything to do with North American history.
He never set a foot in the territory later to become the United States. He worked for the Spanish, he colonized the Caribbean region. He never had anything to do with the history of the United States. The second one, as the brilliant historian William J. Connell said in a beautiful article that I'll link in the description down below, Columbus was an Italian Catholic who worked for the Spanish.
There was nothing worse in the eyes of the American ruling classes. Deeply Protestant, very close to the British, Northern European culture. So it was absolutely impossible for them to appreciate an Italian Catholic who worked for the Spanish.
It was a terrible combination. Long before Italians began to arrive in the United States in large numbers, Italians were already imagined here as a people who represented values opposite to those the American Republic claimed to stand for. Perhaps if it is more generally recognized that throughout so much of America's intellectual and cultural history, Italians were imagined as moral foes to virtuous Americans, we will be better able to move beyond the stereotypes concerning Italian Americans that abound in our popular culture. And the popularity of Christopher Columbus started to rise only by the beginning of the 19th century and a huge role in this rise to success was played by the important American writer Washington Irving who dedicated let's say a biography to the Italian sailor depicting him as basically as an American national hero who built America by discovering it and start the journey of the American people in the continent.
He was a man of great and inventive genius. His ambition was lofty and noble. He was full of high thoughts and ardent enthusiasm and of an undaunted spirit. He had an elevation of soul, a dignity of sentiment, a vastness of conception that led him to aim at things that seemed impossible.
By the end of the 19th century, Columbus was elevated as a symbol of this alien American community. A way to defend themselves, to give them legitimacy during their troubled integration in the first part of their immigration in the US. And this is such an important part of today's story. As Italian historian of Massachusetts University Matteo Casini pointed out, Columbus was a shield that Italian-Americans used to protect themselves from the huge discriminations that they underwent during their...
process of integration and assimilation in the American culture, it was a way to put them on the map. of legitimacy in the American society. Following this tendency, in 1934, the Italian-American businessman Generoso Pope convinced the President of the United States, Franklin Ronald Roosevelt, to recognize the Columbus Day as a national holiday to be held. held on October 12th and since then many monuments and streets and squares and also prestigious universities such as the Columbia were dedicated to him and also the area around Washington, the federal capital, is called District of Columbia and bears his name. But in recent years many things have changed.
A new image of Columbus began to spread, seen no longer as the hero who discovered the Americas but as the initiator of the terrible genocide of the native populations. the deconstruction of the myth of Columbus was in fact fueled a lot by Native American associations and following them many cities abolished the Columbus Day and replaced it with, for example, the Native American day but things then escalated much further people started vandalizing statues of Columbus and in very recent years they actually destroyed many statues of the Italian explorer And this is because these statues of Columbus, like for example the ones of the Confederate generals during the Civil War, are increasingly seen as a testimony of a terrible past that people just want to forget. Not forget, want to erase. They just want to pretend that nothing has ever happened. It's called cancelled culture.
And the answer is nothing, absolutely nothing. Italians do not think anything about Columbus. October 12th in Italy is a perfectly normal day. No one cares. When I go to school or to university and I make students notice that it's October 12th, the Columbus Day, they're like, what's the Columbus Day?
Why is it saying that? They look at me like I'm an idiot. And this is the way we are. We absolutely don't care about our history. We have very few knowledge and even less interest and with new generations it's even worse.
So at the end of the day, the Columbus Day is way more felt and important in the American hemisphere than in Italy, despite Columbus being Italian. What do I make of that? What's my idea about this?
But stop! Before deciding whether Columbus was the greatest sailor of all time or just a terrible murderer, I want to share with you a thought that I think is absolutely crucial in order to understand this topic. Every time I enter a classroom for the first time, it can be high school, it can be university, it doesn't matter. First lesson, number one, the first thing I say is never, ever, ever judge the past and the people who lived in the past. with the eyes of today.
That's by far the most important history lesson you can ever learn because it helps you connecting history with 2024. Not judging is what you need. But actually I have to say that even in academia this lesson has not been learned according to what I hear and read, especially in the American public debate. The idea of attributing to a man who was born mundane 500 years ago the values of 2024 and based on that establishing whether the statues dedicated to him should stand or not is just sick is pure madness you have to understand that if we start going down that path so attributing to people who were born in a completely different time our values then for example also Leonardo da Vinci one of the greatest Italians of all time and probably the greatest genius of all time with our categories we should burn the Mona Lisa Because he was a pedophile, right? Come on guys, please, come on. Christopher Columbus was an important historical character, but remember, lesson number two.
Individuals never make history. Peoples make history. Columbus was just a very good navigator, sailor, man of his time... values of his time and in those times values of these people were just to seek out new worlds, civilizations and when they met these new civilizations if they could they trade with them. If they couldn't, they tried to forcibly Christianize them and if this didn't work, they killed them all.
That's it. We cannot erase what happened. But when it comes to specifically the history of the United States, I'm sorry but Columbus doesn't have anything to do with that. He never set a foot in the United States.
And one of the greatest genocides in human history, which is the genocides of the North American Native Americans, was made by the Anglo- American than American colonies who completely wiped out, leveled down an entire civilization in order to build what today is one of the greatest empires of all time, the American Empire. That's it. If you take out this part of history from United States history, there's nothing left. You can't.
United States was based on wiping out the out Native Americans, taking all their lands and establishing an immensely powerful empire from the Atlantic to the Pacific. You cannot cancel this part of American history, otherwise there's nothing left. So please leave those statues there, because they have nothing to do with what happened. Come on guys.
This is it for today guys. Thank you so much for watching. Let me know in the comments if you like this kind of topics. if you want to see more stuff related to this genre. And please subscribe to the channel because most of the people who watch my videos are not subscribers and I really, really need to grow in order to provide you more quality content.
Ciao, ciao ragazzi!