So, today is Columbus Day in America, because apparently, on October 12, fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue and made landfall in the Bahamas, therefore discovering America. There are two main problems with this - firstly, that he believed that he had in fact discovered South Asia (I should like to make a joke here, but I couldn't follow a map of my own house, so this would be somewhat hypocritical) and secondly, of course, that there were already people living there - all over North and South America, actually - who didn't really think the country needed to be discovered.
(As an interesting aside, it is pretty much accepted now by most historians that the Vikings found their way over to the Americas sometime during the Dark Ages, though they possibly didn't leave Canada, or the very far north states - possibly because of their generally cooler climates, mimicking the geography of the areas they had come from.)
Columbus Day was first celebrated in 1792, in New York and is now a national holiday in the United States. It is also, according to wikipedia, related to Canadian Thanksgiving, which makes slightly more sense in a way than the reasons behind American Thanksgiving. I always wondered about how exactly they celebrated Thanksgiving during the mid-nineteenth century in America. From then, until the start of the twentieth century, the idea of Manifest Destiny (that it was God's wish for the white settlers to go out and take over the whole continent) really took hold, and the pioneers went out across the country. They didn't really like the Native Americans being "in their way" though, and generally treated them pretty badly. How on earth did they seriously manage to give thanks to the first American people for showing their ancestors how to survive in the first harsh winter, at the same time as 'clearing' the Indians' ancestors off what was rightfully their land? It makes no sense.
You can understand the pioneers' longing to just go out and conquer the unconquerable new territory though. Reading old accounts of the Oregon trails, I sometimes want to pack up all my worldly goods into a wagon and trail across the continent to the west coast, with its sunshine and greenery and succulence. Except also not really, because there was no internet or hand sanitizer and an awful lot of dysentery, which frankly I don't think is much of a substitute. And I could've ended up in a situation like the Donner Party did in 1846/7 who ended up having to eat each other to avoid starving to death and that would've probably put quite a downer on things.
I could have been a Forty Niner instead and gone out to strike it rich in the American Gold Rush in California. Or I could have lived in a log cabin on the prairies like the Ingalls-Wilders, or in a clapboard house with a porch like the Marches in Massachusetts, with a beautiful boy as a next-door neighbour. Maybe I'd have been a servant in New York at the turn of the century, come over to escape the unrest in Europe. I could've landed at Ellis Island, after seeing the statue of liberty as I arrived, and walked out of the immigration centre into the city, walking a few blocks until I found a newspaper vendor, where I might have scoured the adverts for a family of upper class socialists who needed a lady's maid to dress them up before a big night out at the Metropolitan Opera.
I could have been a fifties teenager, driving around a small town in my boyfriend's car as we listened to the new-fangled rock'n'roll music on the radio. Or a girl growing up in the pre-Civil War South, where the men are all gentlemen who'd call you a peach and walk by the roadside with you so your skirt didn't get splashed by the passing carriages, never dreaming that sweet little you were a member of the Underground Railroad, helping escaped slaves.
I'm probably almost definitely romanticizing all of this, which I will fully admit to. I do have a slight inexplicable obsession with History and America though, so when the two combine, it's always something can get super excited about. Keep your fingers crossed that I get onto the American History course I've applied for at uni, yeah? :)
No comments:
Post a Comment