5/17/2023 0 Comments Christopher columbus dayFor Italians, a group facing discrimination, promoting Columbus’ Italian origins was a way to “assimilate better,” as Dunbar-Ortiz puts it to TIME. They saw that linking Irish Catholics and Italian Catholics to a national hero like Christopher Columbus was one way to do so. House Committee on Immigration about whether they could be considered “full-blooded Caucasians.”īut the Irish Catholic fraternal organization the Knights of Columbus, formed in 1882, embraced the Italian immigrants, seeing them as part of a larger mission to make Catholicism more popular in an anti-Catholic country. As Dunbar-Ortiz points out in her book, there was a debate in the U.S. “There already was a kind of cult around Columbus,” says Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of Not “A Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion.Īt the same time, more than four million Italians immigrated to the United States between 18, where they encountered discrimination especially in employment, as many businesses did not consider them white enough. “Most fitting it is, therefore, that the people of the greatest nation on the continent discovered by Christopher Columbus, should lead in the celebration of the Four Hundredth Anniversary of that event,” declaimed a guide to the fair. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletterīy the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s acclaimed voyage, momentum was even greater because it coincided with the 1893 World’s Fair Columbian Exhibition. “Celebrating the Columbian tercentenary less than a decade after the end of the war contributed to the creation of a deep national past by codifying an origins story for the new American republic.” Hattem in Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution. “Columbus’s lack of connections to England made him a much more useful discoverer of America for those trying to express historical independence from Britain, even though he never actually set foot on the North American continent,” wrote Michael D. Noah Webster wrote an entry called “The Story of Columbus” in the 1791 The Little Reader’s Assistant that stated, “Let every child in America learn to speak the praises of the great Columbus.” In 1792, festivities around the 300th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage took place all along the Eastern seaboard, from Boston to South Carolina, in the form of poetry, monuments and newspaper coverage. Though Columbus did not immigrate to America, celebrations of his explorations are almost as old as the United States. 11 as Indigenous Peoples’ Day, so the agency changed the day so it was listed as both Italian American Heritage Day and Indigenous Peoples’ Day. In May of this year, for example, Italian-American elected officials objected to a New York City Department of Education calendar that listed Oct. The debate has at times set advocates of a more critical examination of the history against Italian-American community groups who see it as a day of celebration. The 77th annual Columbus Day Parade, expected to take place on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue on Monday, is billed as “the largest celebration of Italian American heritage and culture in the United States.”īut, in the nearly 30 years since Berkeley, Calif., launched Indigenous Peoples’ Day as a form of counter-programming for Columbus Day, to recognize the Native Americans whose lives in North America were disrupted by European exploration, that embrace of Columbus has increasingly been questioned. 11 this year-is a source of pride for many in the Italian-American community, marking the anniversary of the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus reaching the Caribbean. federal holiday of Columbus Day-which falls on Oct.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |