Remembering Columbus

By the mid nineteenth century, the city of Columbus was a vibrant cultural center of the North. From its birth to the present, Columbus has consistently built and reshaped its appearance, ideals, and industry. Through changing fortunes, the city has continued to grow and prosper by overcoming adversity and maintaining the strong, independent culture of its citizens. With a selection of fine historic images from his bestselling book Historic Photos of Columbus, Nick Taggart provides a valuable and revealing historical retrospective on the growth and development of Columbus. Remembering Columbus captures this journey through still photography selected from the finest archives. From early days to the recent past, Remembering Columbus follows life, government, education, and events throughout the city's history. This volume captures unique and rare scenes through the lens of more than a hundred historic photographs. Published in vivid black-and-white, these images communicate historic events and everyday life of two centuries of people building a unique and prosperous city.

This book uses political process theory to examine three cultural movements around Christopher Columbus. The author examines the religious, ethnic and anti-colonial movements most successful at rewriting national origin myth, demonstrating the political process model while telling the story of how a powerless public mobilized to rewrite its past.

Walk the brick-paved streets of German Village, one of the capital city's most vital and historically prominent neighborhoods. Beginning as a haven for German settlers in the mid-1800s, the neighborhood, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is renowned for its preserved architecture and its hearty citizenry, such as Max Visocnik, who gave us Max & Erma's in 1958, and the Schmidt family, proprietors of the famed Schmidt's Restaurant and Sausage Haus--a German Village institution for more than one hundred years. Join the German Village Society's Jody Graichen as she recounts the struggles of the German immigrants, the rise of the neighborhood and the efforts to preserve a Columbus jewel in this collection of columns previously published in ThisWeek Community Newspapers, with a foreword by Dr. Wayne P. Lawson, The Ohio State University professor and director emeritus of the Ohio Arts Council.

The bestselling author of Blue Latitudes takes us on a thrilling and eye-opening voyage to pre-Mayflower America On a chance visit to Plymouth Rock, Tony Horwitz realizes he's mislaid more than a century of American history, from Columbus's sail in 1492 to Jamestown's founding in 16-oh-something. Did nothing happen in between? Determined to find out, he embarks on a journey of rediscovery, following in the footsteps of the many Europeans who preceded the Pilgrims to America. An irresistible blend of history, myth, and misadventure, A Voyage Long and Strange captures the wonder and drama of first contact. Vikings, conquistadors, French voyageurs—these and many others roamed an unknown continent in quest of grapes, gold, converts, even a cure for syphilis. Though most failed, their remarkable exploits left an enduring mark on the land and people encountered by late-arriving English settlers. Tracing this legacy with his own epic trek—from Florida's Fountain of Youth to Plymouth's sacred Rock, from desert pueblos to subarctic sweat lodges—Tony Horwitz explores the revealing gap between what we enshrine and what we forget. Displaying his trademark talent for humor, narrative, and historical insight, A Voyage Long and Strange allows us to rediscover the New World for ourselves.

A comprehensive portrait of how human agency and social forces come together over time to make history.

FIVE HUNDRED YEARS AFTER HE SET SAIL, the dominant understanding of Christopher Columbus holds him responsible for almost everything that went wrong in the New World. Here, finally, is a book that will radically change our interpretation of the man and his mission. Scholar Carol Delaney claims that the true motivation for Columbus’s voyages is very different from what is commonly accepted. She argues that he was inspired to find a western route to the Orient not only to obtain vast sums of gold for the Spanish Crown but primarily to help fund a new crusade to take Jerusalem from the Muslims—a goal that sustained him until the day he died. Rather than an avaricious glory hunter, Delaney reveals Columbus as a man of deep passion, patience, and religious conviction. Delaney sets the stage by describing the tumultuous events that had beset Europe in the years leading up to Columbus’s birth—the failure of multiple crusades to keep Jerusalem in Christian hands; the devastation of the Black Plague; and the schisms in the Church. Then, just two years after his birth, the sacking of Constantinople by the Ottomans barred Christians from the trade route to the East and the pilgrimage route to Jerusalem. Columbus’s belief that he was destined to play a decisive role in the retaking of Jerusalem was the force that drove him to petition the Spanish monarchy to fund his journey, even in the face of ridicule about his idea of sailing west to reach the East. Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem is based on extensive archival research, trips to Spain and Italy to visit important sites in Columbus’s life story, and a close reading of writings from his day. It recounts the drama of the four voyages, bringing the trials of ocean navigation vividly to life and showing Columbus for the master navigator that he was. Delaney offers not an apologist’s take, but a clear-eyed, thought-provoking, and timely reappraisal of the man and his legacy. She depicts him as a thoughtful interpreter of the native cultures that he and his men encountered, and unfolds the tragic story of how his initial attempts to establish good relations with the natives turned badly sour, culminating in his being brought back to Spain as a prisoner in chains. Putting Columbus back into the context of his times, rather than viewing him through the prism of present-day perspectives on colonial conquests, Delaney shows him to have been neither a greedy imperialist nor a quixotic adventurer, as he has lately been depicted, but a man driven by an abiding religious passion.

Reflecting on the relationship between memory, power, and national identity, this book examines the complex reactions of the people of the Caribbean to the 500th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of the New World. Viala analyzes the ways in which Columbus became a reservoir of metaphors to confront anxieties of the present with myths of the past.