By Stephen Smoot
Last week the Italian community nationwide, as Harrison County did both weeks ago and now, celebrated the history and heritage of one of the nation’s greatest heroes, Christopher Columbus.
Columbus, as most over a certain age learned in history, undertook one of the most daunting and daring expeditions in human history. Given crews of convicts and other miscreants, Columbus sailed on the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria to prove a point. He believed that a continent lay approximately 3,000 miles from Spain and aimed to both prove it and capture the new land for the royal family ruling and governing the recently assembled Kingdom of Spain.
History records the story of how a captain accustomed to the relatively tame Mediterranean had to contend with the much more dangerous Atlantic. Like any good European sea captain, he knew how to avoid North African pirates who captured cargoes and enslaved Christians to labor in their desert homelands, but was not always prepared to meet the challenges in this new mission.
At a certain point, halfway through their supplies, Columbus had to sell these men on the risks of continuing, as opposed to the more sure and safe choice to turn around and sail home.
Once in the New World, Columbus lost his authority. His men, most of whom were criminals and some violent at that, rebelled against Columbus’ relatively peaceful vision. They set to impose on the peoples of the West Indies the same type of bondage imposed on European sailors by the Muslim Barbary Pirates.
The culture of Spain, unlike that of Italy, frowned upon men undertaking agriculture, working in commerce, or developing peaceful and beneficial administration. Centuries of occupation by Muslim Arabs pushed Christian resistance to the mountains, where men respected “action,” as opposed to the more peaceful pursuits of peoples who had lived with the luxury of civilization.
Spain’s excesses in both the behavior of people unsuited for first contact with other civilizations or in its own bloody Inquisition are historic facts.
Just as factual is the centuries of brutal and bloody history that served as the midwife of this culture.
The problem with the 21st century portrayal of Christopher Columbus comes from the slipping of even the study and teaching of academic history into the muddier waters of heritage.
History relies on two pillars. The first are the objective facts of the existence of people, places, events, ideas, and other “nouns.” Second, history also expects that its practitioners both professional and amateur create interpretations based on evidence derived from these objective facts. History only very rarely and selectively identifies villains, either in individuals or collective organized efforts, because the debate on “good guys” and “bad guys” has much less relevance than what happened, why it happened, and the impacts of it.
One of the beautiful aspects of the discipline is that completely opposing interpretations can have validity in the discipline of history, so long as they rely strongly on the evidence. John Lewis Gaddis and William Appleton Williams, both American historians, both educated in elite institutions, both looking at the same evidence, came up with interpretations of American Cold War history that remain at odds today, but also compel study because each was crafted from evidence based on facts.
Heritage reflects something different. It originates in how culture and memory remember history and comes from not objective facts and analysis but emotions. Heritage, when directed at uplifting a people and promoting pride in the past to a reasonable extent, has a positive place in society.
When weaponized, however, and used to promote an agenda or force others to feel shame in their history and heritage, it becomes ugly, divisive, and a negative that keeps people apart.
Even worse, when heritage invades the space of history, seizes a position, occupies it, and imposes its own guidelines, actual knowledge of history suffers. Efforts from the Left in the past two generations to turn the teaching of history into a heritage-based condemnation of Western colonialism, for example, fail to also discuss the brutality in the culture of the Barbary Pirates, the Five Nations of the Iroquois League, the Aztec Empire, and so on.
All of these peoples have their own sins absolved in the secular baptism of “Western Imperialism,” their own pasts ignored.
Real history ignores the temptation to condemn and understands its mission to explain thoughtfully.
Christopher Columbus, thus in the eyes of history, becomes a flawed leader of limited capacity, put in a nearly impossible position by his “benefactors,” who nonetheless risked it all to lead one of the bravest expeditions of the modern age and produced tremendous historical impact.
Italian heritage identifies Columbus as a hero and, to the Italian people and others, heritage makes a strong case. History, however, demands that those who look at it do so without passion for anything except a truth with context.