Hear Me Out: Columbus Day Is Worth Celebrating

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4 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 10 October 2023

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On today’s episode of Hear Me Out… sailing the ocean blue. Most of us just had Monday off for the holiday formerly known as Columbus Day — and technically, still known as Columbus Day, on the federal level. Indigenous People’s Day, or Native Americans’ Day, was christened as a rebuttal to what Columbus actually meant for many: colonialism, violence, death, and destruction. But there are those who believe that Columbus, the man, is a different beast than Columbus, the event. Spanish ships landing in the Caribbean was a monumental moment in global history… so could that still be worth commemorating, even in a world that’s no longer kind to Columbus? Prof. William Connell, chair of Italian Studies at Seton Hall University and organizer/co-editor of the definitive Routledge History of Italian-Americans, joins us. If you have thoughts you want to share, or an idea for a topic we should tackle, you can email the show: [email protected] Podcast production by Maura Currie You can skip all the ads in Hear Me Out by joining Slate Plus. Sign up now at slate.com/hearmeoutplus for just $15 a month for your first three months. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Hear Me Out, I'm Celeste Headley.
0:04.9	We just commemorated the federal holiday known officially as Columbus Day, but it's rare
0:10.8	these days that you'll hear it called that.
0:13.7	Indigenous People's Day has pretty much replaced celebrations of Christopher Columbus
0:18.2	for most of us, and most of us think that's good.
0:23.2	Not only did Columbus not really discover America as in the current site of the United States,
0:29.4	he also left a lot of death and anguish in his wake.
0:33.8	That's the story of colonialism, really.
0:36.6	But our question today isn't whether Columbus was a saint, but whether in spite of the gift
0:41.5	of hindsight, we should celebrate his accomplishments at all.
0:45.8	It doesn't bother me that there's a Columbus Day holiday.
0:49.3	It doesn't bother me that it's also called Indigenous People's Day.
0:53.5	They're both talking about the same thing, which is the unification of the world.
0:59.4	Professor William Connell of Seton Hall University joins us in just a moment.
1:03.2	Stay with us.
1:06.9	Welcome back to Hear Me Out, I'm Celeste Headley.
1:10.4	So most of us were taught as children that Christopher Columbus was a hero that he discovered
1:15.7	America, even though of course there had been people here for many thousands of years
1:19.7	before his arrival in 1492, and he never actually set foot on what we know of as the United
1:25.0	States of America.
1:26.4	The notion that Columbus was actually not a hero, and in fact was more a villain, is relatively
1:33.6	new for most people.
	...

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