Louisa brownfield biography of christopher columbus

Inside it are numerous religious paintings and other objects including a reliquary with fragments of wood supposedly from the True Cross. The museum also holds a collection of documents mostly relating to Columbus descendants of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In many countries of the Americas, as well as Spain and Italy, Columbus Day celebrates the anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the Americas on 12 October The voyages of Columbus are considered a turning point in human history, [ ] marking the beginning of globalization and accompanying demographic, commercial, economic, social, and political changes.

His explorations resulted in permanent contact between the two hemispheres, and the term " pre-Columbian " is used to refer to the cultures of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus and his European successors. In the first century after his endeavors, Columbus's figure largely languished in the backwaters of history, and his reputation was beset by his failures as a colonial administrator.

His legacy was somewhat rescued from oblivion when he began to appear as a character in Italian and Spanish plays and poems from the late 16th century onward. Columbus was subsumed into the Western narrative of colonization and empire building, which invoked notions of translatio imperii and translatio studii to underline who was considered "civilized" and who was not.

The Americanization of the figure of Columbus began in the latter decades of the 18th century, after the revolutionary period of the United States, [ ] elevating the status of his reputation to a national myth, homo americanus. This representation of Columbus's triumph and the Native's recoil is a demonstration of supposed white superiority over savage, naive Natives.

Capitol building where it remained until its removal in the midth century, the sculpture reflected the contemporary view of whites in the U. President James Buchananwho proposed the sculpture, described it as representing "the great discoverer when he first bounded with ecstasy upon the shore, ail his toils past, presenting a hemisphere to the astonished world, with the name America inscribed upon it.

Whilst he is thus standing upon the shore, a female savage, with awe and wonder depicted in her countenance, is gazing upon him. The American Columbus myth was reconfigured later in the century when he was enlisted as an ethnic hero by immigrants to the United States who were not of Anglo-Saxon stock, such as Jewish, Italian, and Irish people, who claimed Columbus as a sort of ethnic founding father.

From the s onward, a narrative of Columbus being responsible for the genocide of indigenous peoples and environmental destruction began to compete with the then predominant discourse of Columbus as Christ-bearer, scientist, or father of America. Though Christopher Columbus came to be considered the European discoverer of America in Western popular culture, his historical legacy is more nuanced.

In the 19th century, amid a revival of interest in Norse cultureCarl Christian Rafn and Benjamin Franklin DeCosta wrote works establishing that the Norse had preceded Columbus in colonizing the Americas. Europeans devised explanations for the origins of the Native Americans and their geographical distribution with narratives that often served to reinforce their own preconceptions built on ancient intellectual foundations.

O'Gorman argues that to assert Columbus "discovered America" is to shape the facts concerning the events of to make them conform to an interpretation that arose many years later. He suggests that the word "encounter" is more appropriate, being a more universal term which includes Native Americans in the narrative. Historians have traditionally argued that Columbus remained convinced until his death that his journeys had been along the east coast of Asia as he originally intended [ ] [ ] excluding arguments such as Anderson's.

Washington Irving's biography of Columbus popularized the idea that Columbus had difficulty obtaining support for his plan because many Catholic theologians insisted that the Earth was flat[ ] but this is a popular misconception which can be traced back to 17th-century Protestants campaigning against Catholicism. As such it contains no sign of the Americas and yet demonstrates the common belief in a spherical Earth.

He accounted for the shift by concluding that Earth's figure is pear-shapedwith the 'stalk' portion comparing this to a woman's breast being nearest Heaven and upon which was centered the Earthly Paradise. Columbus has been criticized both for his brutality and for initiating the depopulation of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, whether by imported diseases or intentional violence.

According to scholars of Native American history, George Tinker and Mark Freedman, Columbus was responsible for creating a cycle of "murder, violence, and slavery" to maximize exploitation of the Caribbean islands' resources, and that Native deaths on the scale at which they occurred would not have been caused by new diseases alone.

Further, they describe the proposition that disease and not genocide caused these deaths as "American holocaust denial ". As a result of the protests and riots that followed the murder of George Floyd inmany public monuments of Christopher Columbus have been removed. Some historians have criticized Columbus for initiating the widespread colonization of the Americas and for abusing its native population.

CroixColumbus's friend Michele da Cuneo—according to his own account—kept an indigenous woman he captured, whom Columbus "gave to [him]", then brutally raped her. For example, a study of Spanish archival sources showed that the cascabela quotas were imposed by Guarionexnot Columbus, and that there is no mention, in the primary sources, of punishment by cutting off hands for failing to pay.

Even those who loved him had to admit the atrocities that had taken place. According to historian Emily Berquist Soule, the immense Portuguese profits from the maritime trade in African slaves along the West African coast served as an inspiration for Columbus to create a counterpart of this apparatus in the New World using indigenous American slaves.

Connell has argued that while Columbus "brought the entrepreneurial form of slavery to the New World", this "was a phenomenon of the times", further arguing that "we have to be very careful about applying 20th-century understandings of morality to the morality of the 15th century. Around the turn of the 21st century, estimates for the pre-Columbian population of Hispaniola ranged betweenand two million, [ ] [ ] [ ] [ t ] but genetic analysis published in late suggests that smaller figures are more likely, perhaps as low as 10,—50, for Hispaniola and Puerto Rico combined.

Mann writes that "It was as if the suffering these diseases had caused in Eurasia over the past millennia were concentrated into the span of decades. According to Noble David Cook, "There were too few Spaniards to have killed the millions who were reported to have died in the first century after Old and New World contact. There is also evidence that they had poor diets and were overworked.

The diseases that devastated the Native Americans came in multiple waves at different times, sometimes as much as centuries apart, which would mean that louisas brownfield biography of christopher columbus of one disease may have been killed by others, preventing the population from recovering. Biographers and historians have a wide range of opinions about Columbus's expertise and experience navigating and captaining ships.

One scholar lists some European works ranging from the s to s that support Columbus's experience and skill as among the best in Genoa, while listing some American works over a similar timeframe that portray the explorer as an untrained entrepreneur, having only minor crew or passenger experience prior to his noted journeys. The word rubios can mean "blond", "fair", or "ruddy".

A well-known image of Columbus is a portrait by Sebastiano del Piombowhich has been reproduced in many textbooks. It agrees with descriptions of Columbus in that it shows a large man with auburn hair, but the painting dates from so cannot have been painted from life. Furthermore, the inscription identifying the subject as Columbus was probably added later, and the face shown differs from that of other images.

At the World's Columbian Exposition in71 alleged portraits of Columbus were displayed; most of them did not match contemporary descriptions. While I was in the boat, I captured a very beautiful Carib woman, whom the said Lord Admiral gave to me. When I had taken her to my cabin she was naked—as was their custom. I was filled with a desire to take my pleasure with her and attempted to satisfy my desire.

She was unwilling, and so treated me with her nails that I wished I had never begun. But—to cut a long story short—I then took a piece of rope and whipped her soundly, and she let forth such incredible screams that you would not have believed your ears. Eventually we came to such terms, I assure you, that you would have thought that she had been brought up in a school for whores.

Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read View source View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Italian navigator and explorer — For other uses, see Christopher Columbus disambiguation and Cristoforo Colombo disambiguation. Posthumous portrait of a man, said to be Christopher Columbus, by Sebastiano del Piombo[ a ].

Filipa Moniz Perestrelo. Diego Ferdinand Diego adopted Lucayan. Domenico Colombo father Susanna Fontanarossa mother. Further information: Origin theories of Christopher Columbus. Geographical considerations. Quest for financial support for a voyage. Agreement with the Spanish crown. Main article: Voyages of Christopher Columbus. First voyage — Second voyage — Third voyage — Fourth voyage — Main article: Fourth voyage of Columbus.

Later life, illness, and death. Tomb in Seville Cathedral. The remains in the casket are borne by kings of Castile, Leon, Aragon, and Navarre. Further information: List of places named for Christopher Columbus and List of monuments and memorials to Christopher Columbus. Originality of discovery of America. America as a distinct land.

Further information: Myth of the flat Earth. See also: Population history of indigenous peoples of the Americas. Vespucci seems to have modeled his naming of the "new world" after Columbus's description of this discovery. It contained an account of Columbus's seven-year reign as the first governor of the Indies. Consuelo Varela, a Spanish historian, states: "Even those who loved him [Columbus] had to admit the atrocities that had taken place.

Two tiny portions of dust from the same source were placed in separate vials. Most modern historians reject his figures. January Visual Anthropology. ISSN Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem. ISBN Retrieved 2 January Columbus on Himself. She was of peasant parentage, but, when Columbus met her, was the ward of a well-to-do relative in Cordoba.

A meat business gave her income of her own, mentioned in the only other record of Columbus's solicitude for her: a letter to Diego, written injust before departure on the fourth Atlantic crossing, in which the explorer enjoins his son to 'take Beatriz Enriquez in your care for love of me, as you your own mother'. In Bedini, Silvio A.

The Christopher Columbus Encyclopedia. Columbus never married Beatriz. When he returned from the first voyage, he was given the greatest of honors and elevated to the highest position in Spain. Because of his discovery, he became one of the most illustrious persons at the Spanish court and had to submit, like all the great persons of the time, to customary legal restrictions on matters of marriage and extramarital relations.

The Alphonsine laws forbade extramarital relations of concubinage for "illustrious people" king, princes, dukes, counts, marquis with plebeian women, if they themselves were or their forefathers had been of inferior social condition. Palgrave Macmillan. Genoa: Sagep Editrice. Genova: Grafiche Frassicomo. Archived PDF from the original on 9 October Ferdinand and Isabella.

New International Encyclopedia 1st ed. New York: Dodd, Mead. All retrieved 3 February Atlantic Monthly Press. Univ of Nebraska Press. Bedini, Silvio A. Retrieved 21 November In McGovern, James R. The World of Columbus. Mercer University Press. It is most probable that Columbus visited Bristol, where he was introduced to English commerce with Iceland.

Sture In Ureland, P. Sture; Clarkson, Iain eds. Walter de Gruyter. Ireland Revisited. Johns Hopkins University Press. Some louisas brownfield biography of christopher columbus have suggested that it was during this visit to Iceland that Columbus heard of land in the west. Keeping the source of his information secret, they say, he concocted a plan to sail westward.

Certainly the knowledge was generally available without attending any saga-telling parties. That this knowledge reached Columbus seems unlikely, however, for later, when trying to get backing for his project, he went to great lengths to unearth even the slightest scraps of information that would add to the plausibility of his scheme. Knowledge of the Norse explorations could have helped.

Columbus, America, and the World. Council on National Literatures. Many Columbists Duke University Press. The William and Mary Quarterly. JSTOR Oxford University Press. October Smithsonian Magazine. The Christian Century in Japan, — University of California Press. Cambridge University Press. Yale University Press. Iberian Asia: the strategies of Spanish and Portuguese empire building, — Thesis.

OCLC ProQuest Comparative Studies in Society and History. Cambridge University Press : — S2CID Archived from the original PDF on 26 February Journal of the American Oriental Society. Institute of Navigation. Archived from the original on 29 October Retrieved 5 July International Journal of Nautical Archaeology. Bibcode : IJNAr. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Universe.

New York: Watson-Guptill. New York: Random House. Retrieved 20 February New York: Abrams Books. Imago Mundi. Jahangirnagar University: Retrieved 9 January IEEE Spectrum. Constructed on a framework of latitude and longitude, the Ptolemy-revival map projections revealed the extent of the known world in relation to the whole. The Atlantic.

JHU Press. Renaissance Europe 2nd ed. Lexington, Massachusetts: D. Starting in aboutlouisa brownfield biography of christopher columbus Portuguese ships known as caravels zipped along the African coast, carrying spices, gold and other goods as well as enslaved people from Asia and Africa to Europe. Did you know? Christopher Columbus was not the first person to propose that a person could reach Asia by sailing west from Europe.

In fact, scholars argue that the idea is almost as old as the idea that the Earth is round. That is, it dates back to early Rome. Christopher Columbus is born in the Republic of Genoa. He begins sailing in his teens and survives a shipwreck off the coast of Portugal in In Octoberhis expedition makes landfall in the modern-day country of The Bahamas.

Columbus establishes a settlement on the island of Hispaniola present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic. In NovemberColumbus returns to the settlement on Hispaniola to find the Europeans he left there dead. Under this system, Spanish subjects seize land and force Native people to work on it. He makes his first landfall in South America and plants a Spanish flag in present-day Venezuela.

After failing to find the strait, he returns to Hispaniola, where Spanish authorities arrest him for the brutal way he runs the colony there. InColumbus returns to Spain in chains. The Spanish government strips Columbus of his titles but still frees him and finances one last voyagealthough it forbids him return to Hispaniola. Still in search of a strait to India, Columbus makes it as far as modern-day Panama, which straddles the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

In his return journey, his ships become beached in present-day Jamaica and he and his crew live as castaways for a year before rescue. On May 20,Columbus dies in Valladolid, Spain at age 54, still asserting that he reached the eastern part of Asia by sailing across the Atlantic. On February 29,a lunar eclipse alarmed the natives enough to re-establish trade with the Spaniards.

A rescue party finally arrived, sent by the royal governor of Hispaniola in July, and Columbus and his men were taken back to Spain in November In the two remaining years of his life, Columbus struggled to recover his reputation. Although he did regain some of his riches in Mayhis titles were never returned. Columbus probably died of severe arthritis following an infection on May 20,in Valladolid, Spain.

Louisa brownfield biography of christopher columbus

At the time of his death, he still believed he had discovered a shorter route to Asia. There are questions about the location of his burial site. In MayColumbus made headlines as news broke that a team of archaeologists might have found the Santa Maria off the north coast of Haiti. After a thorough investigation by the U. Columbus has been credited for opening up the Americas to European colonization—as well as blamed for the destruction of the native peoples of the islands he explored.

Ultimately, he failed to find that what he set out for: a new route to Asia and the riches it promised. The horse from Europe allowed Native American tribes in the Great Plains of North America to shift from a nomadic to a hunting lifestyle. Wheat from the Old World fast became a main food source for people in the Americas. Coffee from Africa and sugar cane from Asia became major cash crops for Latin American countries.

And foods from the Americas, such as potatoes, tomatoes and corn, became staples for Europeans and helped increase their populations. The Columbian Exchange also brought new diseases to both hemispheres, though the effects were greatest in the Americas. Smallpox from the Old World killed millions, decimating the Native American populations to mere fractions of their original numbers.

This more than any other factor allowed for European domination of the Americas. The overwhelming benefits of the Columbian Exchange went to the Europeans initially and eventually to the rest of the world. The Americas were forever altered, and the louisa brownfield biography of christopher columbus vibrant cultures of the Indigenous civilizations were changed and lost, denying the world any complete understanding of their existence.

As more Italians began to immigrate to the United States and settle in major cities during the 19 th century, they were subject to religious and ethnic discrimination. This included a mass lynching of 11 Sicilian immigrants in in New Orleans. Just one year after this horrific event, President Benjamin Harrison called for the first national observance of Columbus Day on October 12,to mark the th anniversary of his arrival in the Americas.

As Columbus matured, he sought to expand his knowledge by studying sailing and mapmaking. In his early twenties, he relocated to Lisbon, Portugal, where he honed his navigational skills and learned about the latest advancements in cartography and navigation from other experienced sailors. This period was crucial for Columbus, as he became acquainted with the different theories regarding the globe's dimensions and various routes to Asia.

By immersing himself in this vibrant maritime culture, Columbus laid the groundwork for his ambitious plans to find a westward route to the East Indies, setting the stage for his historic voyages in later years. Christopher Columbus began his maritime career as a teenager, participating in several trading voyages across the Mediterranean and Aegean seas.

In his twenties, he settled in Lisbon, where he married Filipa Perestrelo and fathered a son, Diego. During this time, Columbus developed his expertise in sailing and navigation, gaining valuable experience that would later inform his transatlantic expeditions. His adventurous spirit led him to attempt a daring voyage across the Atlantic, motivated by his desire to find a westward route to Asia, which he believed would provide quicker access to the lucrative spice markets of the East.

Columbus's quest for a new maritime route faced significant challenges; his first major Atlantic expedition in was nearly fatal when his ship was attacked by French privateers. Undeterred, Columbus continued to refine his navigational techniques and studied ocean currents that could facilitate his planned voyage. After years of lobbying, he finally gained the support of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain, who agreed to sponsor his journey.

Christopher Columbus, an Italian explorer known for his ambitious voyages, achieved remarkable successes in his quest for a new route to Asia. His expedition marked a pivotal moment in history, as he became the first European to make contact with the Americas. His landfall in the Bahamas not only opened the door to further exploration but also signaled the start of European colonization in the New World.

Columbus' voyages prompted significant exchanges of culture and goods, now referred to as the Columbian Exchange, fundamentally altering global trade and interaction. However, Columbus faced numerous challenges during and after his expeditions.