m1 critical thinking activity discovering the new world

Truth Matters
Feb 8, 2022

Did Columbus Discover The New World?

Updated: Feb 21, 2022

GOAL: Revisionists love to play word games and disingenuously change the definition of words to push their historical propaganda. In Columbus' case they love to say, you can't discover land if someone's already living there. This lesson will help students understand why someone CAN honestly say Columbus discovered the New World.

LESSON PLAN:

This part can be given as a homework assignment before the actual lesson is taught:

On a piece of paper have the students write out the definition of the word "Discover". This is from the American Heritage Dictionary:

To notice or learn, especially by making an effort.

To be the first, or the first of one's group or kind, to find, learn of, or observe.

To learn about for the first time in one's experience.

ASK: "On the sheet of paper write a story of something you discovered. It can be a park, a playground, a new way to get somewhere. Who did you tell? Did it improve your life? Did it make anything better?"

Pick on one or more students and ask them to read their story aloud in class.

After each story is read, ask the class, "Let's apply this to the definition.":

"Did [ex. Emily] notice or learn something new?

"Do you think she was the first person to ever learn this?"

A: Probably not; depends.

"Do you think she was the first person in her [family or group of friends; depending on the story] to learn this?"

A: Yes/No/Maybe

"Did she learn about it for the first time in her experience?"

Now show the class the following maps:

m1 critical thinking activity discovering the new world

5. This is the world as it was known during Columbus' time. As you can see, no civilization from Portugal to Japan had the Caribean Islands, North, Central, or South America on their maps. When Columbus sailed West he landed on islands that had never been mapped. These lands were inhabited by natives who he believed to be Indians. In his 4 voyages he also landed in Central America and explored the Northern part of South America."

6. So even though there were natives already living in the "New World", did Columbus make a discovery?

"Did Columbus make an effort and notice or learn something new?

"Do you think Columbus was the FIRST person to learn of these islands and main lands?"

A: In a Global sense: no, because natives were here and they obviously knew of their lands.

"Do you think Columbus was the first person in his group or kind [of the Old World; Europe-Asia] to learn this?"

"Did Columbus learn about it for the first time in his experience?"

7. So one can easily see that Columbus DID discover the New World. It was his discovery that opened the way for other explorers like Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot), Amerigo Vespucci, Ferdinand Magellan, and many others to come and make discoveries of their own and map out the New World.

EXTRA ACTIVITY: GRADES (1-2): Have the students color in the ship and draw in the box what they think Columbus discovered in the new world

CRITICAL THINKING (Grades 6+): Revisionist's improperly use the word "discover" and try to mock Columbus and diminish his accomplishments by saying, "You can't discover something that's already there." So according to their faulty logic should we make fun of astronomers every time they discover a new planet, galaxy, or star system? They didn't discover anything, those celestial bodies have been there for millenia.

Or how about this, they love to ridicule Columbus and say he was lost at sea. But Columbus knew what direction he was traveling in and he knew what to look for. As an explorer, you set out into the unknown to discover and make known new lands, species, bodies of water, etc... By their inadequate logic we should ridicule every explorer in history because they were all lost as well. Should we make fun of the following people and not celebrate them for their intrepidness and bravery?

Lesson Plans

AP U.S. History Notes

Chapter Outlines
Practice Tests
Topic Outlines
Court Cases
Sample Essays
Discovery and Settlement of the New World

Pre-Columbian Era

The first Americans came from Asia, beginning as early as thirty thousand years ago, over a land bridge that formed at the Bering Strait during the Ice Age. The new immigrants were hunters and gatherers, and over a period of fifteen thousand years various groups spread over the American continents. By the time of the European “discovery” of the New World, there were perhaps as many as 100 million native Americans, the vast majority living in Central and South America.

The development of agriculture by Native Americans more than five thousand years ago sparked new cultures and innovations. Hunters who previously roamed the land like nomads established permanent villages. Corn, sun, and water became focal points for many societies and played strong roles in religious ceremonies. In some cultures, control of the corn surplus was directly linked to power and authority.

Some of the first sedentary societies of North America were created by groups known as the Mound Builders, believed to be the ancestors of the Creeks, Choctaws, and Natchez. The mound building societies formed enormous earthworks into various shapes and sizes. Some mounds featured multiple terrace levels on which hundreds of houses were built. The largest known mound had a base that covered nearly fifteen acres and rose to a height of one hundred feet. While circles, squares, and octagons were the most common mound shapes, some patterns resembled creatures such as hawks, panthers, or snakes. Many believe that the different shapes were religious signs or territorial markers for different tribes.

The Mississippian culture flourished after the Mound Builders and expanded their settlements and trading network. They also built massive mounds that served as burial and ceremonial sites. As these peoples became more proficient at farming and fishing, they remained longer in one location and developed substantial dwellings. Clusters of mound builders settled in the Ohio Valley, along the Mississippi River, and as far west as present-day Oklahoma.

In the Rio Grande valley, the Pueblo people created complex irrigation systems to water their cornfields. The Anasazi, or “Ancient Ones” in the Navajo language, carved into the sandstone cliffs complete cities with baked mud structures that towered four or five stories high. They developed row upon row of terraced gardens that they used for planting crops.

In what is now the northeastern United States, the Iroquois Confederacy—comprised of five Indian nations, the Seneca, the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Cayuga, and the Mohawk—also relied on agriculture to multiply and prosper. Farming allowed the people to accumulate large quantities of food that could be stored for long periods. This helped to decrease the threat of starvation, especially during the winter, and ultimately led to population growth since more food was available and more hands were needed to cultivate and harvest the crops.

Many Native American groups developed sophisticated planting techniques that allowed them to take full advantage of the land and make the most out of the time and effort they put into their agricultural work. One of the more unique procedures, called “three-sister” farming, involved a high-yielding strain of bean that grew on the corn stalks while squash grew at the base of the plant to help retain moisture in the soil. This procedure allowed farmers, who were usually the females of the tribe, to harvest three different crops from the same field. These crops became an important commodity as farmers traded portions of their harvest to hunters for animal furs, bones, and meat.

The Iroquois League of Five Nations was the largest political and military organization east of the Mississippi River. However, even as North American civilizations grew in population, sophistication, and power, they did not compare to the complex societies of the Aztecs and Incas in Central and South America. These vast empires included paved roadways and canals that linked smaller cities, aqueducts that carried fresh water to urban pools and fountains, and giant pyramids that rivaled in grandeur those found in Egypt.

The Aztecs settled on the site of present-day Mexico City in the early 14th century. Although they might be considered latecomers to the area, their political skills and military strength enabled them to expand beyond their capital city of Tenochtitlan very quickly. While they used their military might to conquer several regions, Aztec leaders also formed alliances with many groups already established in the area. They convinced them to serve the empire rather than risk bloodshed and war. Food, baskets, household goods, precious metals, and even prisoners for human sacrifices were given to the rulers in Tenochtitlan. The empire grew rapidly as more and more subjects paid tribute to the Aztecs.

In South America, where the climate varies from cold mountain peaks to steamy rain forests, the Incas ruled much of the western coast. Perhaps more than 12 million people contributed to the creation of sprawling cities, terraced farmlands, extended roadways, and golden palaces. The Inca empire covered nearly 2,500 miles and included regions of present-day Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, and Argentina. Although, like other native peoples throughout the Americas, they did not have their own written language or the use of the wheel, the Incas were extremely intelligent engineers. They built huge stone structures without mortar and designed suspension bridges that crossed deep mountain valleys.

Their well organized political structure and close-knit hierarchical society enabled the Incas to become the largest civilization in South America by 1500. Like that of the Aztec empire, the Inca empire was essentially a coalition of tribes. However, unlike the strong-handed rule of the Central American culture, the Incas allowed local groups to govern regions independently. Each tribe gave its allegiance to the ruler, the Sapa Inca, whom they believed was the descendent of the sun-god. In return for their cooperation, the people were treated well and accepted into the paternalistic Incan society.

The majority of the Native Americans that inhabited South and North America respected their land and often paid tribute to gods to bring them bountiful harvests and protection. However, little did they know that their way of life would change drastically once European explorers set foot on the American continents.

Christopher Columbus

During the Middle Ages, Europeans knew little, if anything, about the existence of the Americas. Scandinavian voyagers explored present-day Newfoundland around 1000 A.D., and made several attempts at colonization. Without dependable backing from strong nation-states, and in the face of a determined and violent opposition from native inhabitants, however, their fragile villages were ultimately abandoned and forgotten.

In Europe, territorial battles between Christians and Muslims dominated much of the period between the 11th and 14th centuries. By the middle of the 15th century, Europeans had grown accustomed to a variety of exotic Asian goods including silk, drugs, perfume, and spices. However, Muslim forces controlled key passageways to the east and forced European tradesmen to pay huge sums for their ways. European consumers tired of the increasing prices and demanded faster, less expensive routes to Asia. During this era, as city-states and emerging nations fostered a new-found enthusiasm for expansion and exploration, Christopher Columbus was born in the Italian port of Genoa. The son of a wool-comber, Columbus spent his youth learning his father’s trade. By his teenage years, he became a seaman and took part in voyages to England and Ireland with Portuguese mariners.

The invention of the printing press around this time made information sharing much easier. Journals described the experiences of many explorers, including the travels of Marco Polo to Asia almost three hundred years earlier. Europeans were captivated by his descriptions of incredible wealth and golden pagodas.

Columbus, too, became caught up in the excitement and read many books on navigation and geography. He eventually devised a plan to find a westward route to Asia. In 1484, he presented his plan to King John II of Portugal but was denied financial support. He spent years asking the rulers of various countries, including France and England, for assistance before Spain’s Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand finally agreed to help. The monarchs wanted desperately to spread Christianity throughout the world and increase the Spanish presence over that of Portugal. Of course, the opportunity to acquire gold and riches greatly influenced their decision as well.

Once Columbus received the support he had been seeking so long, he surprised many by making a series of demands. Should he succeed on his voyage, he wanted to be knighted, appointed Admiral of the Ocean Sea and viceroy (governor) of any new lands he discovered, and awarded ten percent of any profits generated by his expedition. The Spanish monarchs reluctantly agreed to his stipulations and provided Columbus with three small ships and a crew of about ninety sailors.

On August 3, 1492, the Niña , the Pinta , and the Santa Maria set sail from Palos in southern Spain. The fleet spent almost a month in the Canary Islands to make repairs and gather supplies. With the maintenance chores complete, Columbus continued his voyage west. Much like many sailors of the 15th century, Columbus’s men were superstitious and wary of venturing too far from land. The weather remained fair for most of the journey but crew members often pleaded with their leader to turn around and return home. Columbus refused. Then, on October 12, 1492, as the exhausted sailors grew closer to mutiny, lookout Roderigo de Triana spied land from his perch atop the mast of the Pinta. His cries of “Tierra! Tierra!” echoed across the water to the crews on the other ships.

Columbus led a party ashore, drove a flag into the ground, and called the new land San Salvador (Holy Savior). Although he was standing on an island in the Bahamas, Columbus was so positive that he had found the East Indies that he named the natives “Indians.” He then ventured on to Cuba, which he thought was China, and mistook Haiti (Hispaniola) for Japan. Thinking that he had retraced Marco Polo’s footsteps, Columbus took what gold and natural resources he could carry aboard his ships back to Spain. The king and queen were impressed with his findings and agreed to fund more excursions to the New World. Although Columbus repeated his journey three more times, he refused to accept the evidence that the people, animals, and plants of the New World were nothing like those found in Europe or Asia. He remained convinced that he had discovered a new westward route to the Indies.

Cortés Defeats the Aztecs

Christopher Columbus’s initial voyage to America whetted the appetites of many European countries. Power-hungry leaders sponsored many expeditions to the New World in the hopes that they would get a share of the riches. As travel between Europe and America became more frequent, small settlements and trading posts were established along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, including present-day Florida through Central America. Explorers discovered great amounts of precious metals and natural resources, but it was not enough the quench their growing thirst for more wealth.

In 1519, Hernan Cortés was commissioned by the governor of Cuba to expand the Spanish empire into Mexico. Cortés, an aspiring conquistador (conqueror), gathered an army of about six hundred soldiers who shared his dreams of military glory and riches.

During his journey to Mexico, Cortés encountered an Indian slave named Malinche. She was fluent in several languages, including Nahuatl, the language spoken by the Aztecs. Through Malinche’s conversations with many people ruled by the Aztecs, Cortés learned that the capital, Tenochtitlan, was overflowing with gold and silver and other riches. He also discovered that the empire was riddled with conflict and turmoil, and he formed military alliances with local people who resented the Aztecs for their human sacrifices and forced tribute.

As Cortés approached Tenochtitlan, emperor Montezuma II sent diplomats to meet the Spaniards with gifts. Cortés accepted the small tokens but boldly told the Aztec ruler that he and his men had a disease of the heart that only gold could cure. Though apprehensive, Montezuma welcomed Cortés into the capital because he believed that he was the legendary god Quetzalcoatl, whose return was predicted to signal final days of Tenochtitlan. Cortés and his men held Montezuma as a virtual prisoner, and plundered the vast wealth of the region. Cortés, for example, forced Montezuma to provide Indian laborers to mine more gold. Although Cortés and his small army were greatly outnumbered, they could do most anything they desired because they ruled the empire through Montezuma. They also continued to enjoy the allegiance of non-Aztecs and controlled the more powerful military weapons. Guns, swords, knives, and even horses amazed and frightened the Aztecs.

In 1520, the Aztec people, weary of their servile status and angry at Montezuma for his failure to protect them, attacked the Spaniards and drove them out of the city. Montezuma was killed, probably by his own people, during this uprising. Cortés, however, eventually regrouped and staged a bloody assault on the capital that lasted through much of 1521. The violent battles, combined with a smallpox epidemic that same year, killed many Aztec warriors and caused the once powerful Aztec empire to crumble. The great temples in Tenochtitlan were destroyed and Christian churches were constructed in their places.

The Spanish empire grew rapidly after the fall of the Aztecs. Between 1522 and 1528, Spanish forces overpowered groups in Yucatan and Guatemala. In the 1530s, Francisco Pizarro led a group of Spanish soldiers through Panama and into Peru where they battled the Incas. The conquistador decimated the Incan Empire quickly and with relatively little effort because he and his warriors focused their fighting on the heart of the empire, the ruling family. Once the people realized that the Inca, to whom they pledged their allegiance, was no longer in control, they retreated and the empire collapsed. The Spaniards successfully carried out their plan to rule much of the New World. However, their greed and shortsightedness regarding the future of the Americas eventually took its toll.

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How to cite this note (MLA)

What Was Columbus Thinking?

1519 portrait by Sebastiano del Piombo of a man said to be Christopher Columbus (born about 1446, died 1506).

Wikimedia Commons

"...one of the greatest mariners in history, a visionary genius, a mystic, a national hero, a failed administrator, a naive entrepreneur, and a ruthless and greedy imperialist. —The Library of Congress's 1492: An Ongoing Voyage exhibition

Most students recognize the name Christopher Columbus. They may be aware that his voyages ushered in the first period of sustained contact between Europeans and the Americas and its people. They may not know, however, why Columbus traveled to the New World or what happened to the native people he encountered.

In this lesson, students read excerpts from Columbus's letters and journals, as well as recent considerations of his achievements. Students reflect on the motivations behind Columbus's explorations, his reactions to what he found and the consequences, intended and unintended, of his endeavor.

Guiding Questions

What were the intentions behind Columbus's voyages of exploration?

What were the consequences in the lives of Native Americans and Europeans?

What should Christopher Columbus's legacy be?

Learning Objectives

Identify the stated aims of Columbus's voyages.

Characterize changes in Columbus's purposes in writing the documents studied.

Describe the indigenous people Europeans encountered and the results of their contact.

Compare the goals of early European exploration with the results.

Evaluate the impact of Columbus on the indigenous people of the Americas and his legacy.

Lesson Plan Details

NCSS.D2.His.1.3-5. Create and use a chronological sequence of related events to compare developments that happened at the same time.

NCSS.D2.His.2.3-5. Compare life in specific historical time periods to life today.

NCSS.D2.His.3.3-5. Generate questions about individuals and groups who have shaped significant historical changes and continuities.

NCSS.D2.His.4.3-5. Explain why individuals and groups during the same historical period differed in their perspectives.

NCSS.D2.His.10.3-5. Compare information provided by different historical sources about the past.

NCSS.D2.His.12.3-5. Generate questions about multiple historical sources and their relationships to particular historical events and developments.

NCSS.D2.His.14.3-5. Explain probable causes and effects of events and developments.

NCSS. D2.His.16.3-5. Use evidence to develop a claim about the past.

Before you begin to teach this unit, review the suggested lesson plans. Download and duplicate as necessary the Columbus documents and any articles you will use. If desired, mark the pertinent excerpts, or bookmark pages online that students will use. (See Selected EDSITEment Websites links for a complete listing of documents.)

A tutorial with extensive information for contextualizing Columbus's voyage in terms of the larger world of the Renaissance is available through EDSITEment at The End of Europe's Middle Ages .

Notes to the Teacher

This teaching unit includes several suggested activities that can be used individually as lesson plans or presented in sequence as a complete unit that will help students fully grasp the impact of Columbus's voyage to the New World. Each suggested activity will take approximately one to two class periods to present, or more time if explored in greater detail.
In this unit, students will work with primary source documents written by Christopher Columbus around the time of his voyage to the New World and with secondary source documents written at a later date. They also have a chance to write their own secondary source material in this unit. Using both primary and secondary source documents within a single unit gives students an opportunity to see the difference between these two types of documents. You may wish to have students work alone or in small groups to read and interpret these documents. Groups could be based on areas of interest (especially for analyzing the scholarly documents), or could allow students with stronger reading skills to help others work through the source documents.
If time or other constraints do not permit you to teach the entire unit, simply reviewing the primary source documents written by Columbus (lessons 1 through 4) can provide an interesting look at the historical context surrounding Columbus's voyage through his own perspective.
Each document in this unit can be read by the whole class or by a small group, which would report back its findings. When reading primary sources, keep in mind issues of point of view. Help students understand that documents written by Columbus could slant interpretation in a particular direction. The same is true of documents about native peoples of America, since these were written by Europeans.
The desire to bring Christianity to native peoples was essential to European exploration. It is a topic that cannot be ignored in discussions of Columbus; however, the issues raised need sensitive handling.

Activity 1. Dear Diary

Students will read from Columbus's journal of his voyage of 1492, available through EDSITEment from the Internet Medieval Sourcebook. Of special interest are the following:

The introduction—a restatement of the purpose of the voyage as explained to the King and Queen of Spain—primarily the sentence beginning, "Your Highnesses, as Catholic Christians, and princes who love and promote the holy Christian faith ...";
The entry for October 11, the day of the discovery;
Excerpts from the entries for October 13, 16 and 21 for descriptions of the Native Americans Columbus encountered.

What seemed of particular interest to Columbus on his voyage? What were his impressions of the places he visited? What ideas did he have about what might happen next?

Activity 2. Dear Europe

Students will read a letter written by Columbus in May 1493 , available from the Osher Map Library of the University of Southern Maine. Columbus used this letter to publicize his successful voyage; it became a sort of best-seller throughout Europe. It contains descriptions of the peoples he encountered. Of special interest are the five paragraphs beginning with, "There are besides in the said island Juana ..." as well as the last two paragraphs. What did Columbus emphasize in publicizing his journey?

Activity 3. Dear Ferdinand and Isabella

In this Letter to the King and Queen of Spain , circa 1494, Columbus lists his recommendations about how Spain should proceed, including his suggestion that the area he encountered be systematically colonized. The letter is fairly brief; especially pertinent are points 1, 4, 5 and 9. What does Columbus emphasize about what he saw and what should happen next?

Activity 4. What was Columbus thinking?

After students have read each document, discuss the following:

Who was the intended audience for this document?
When was the document written?
Does Columbus seem to have a goal in mind in creating this document? Is it intended to persuade the reader, emphasize a point, share information or some other purpose?
What details are described in this document?
Can students identify a primary message in this document?

Working in small groups or individually, students should write their answers to these questions for use in comparing the documents with each other. Now, in a group or as a class, have students compare the three documents. Ask students to compare their analyses of the individual documents. How do they differ? Are there any similarities? Ask students to reconsider the following:

What does Columbus emphasize in his journal as the purpose of his journey? Does this purpose seem to change in the later documents?
What details seem to interest Columbus as he describes the first days of discovery? Does his interest change as his journey progresses?
What other changes can students identify between the documents? Can students propose a hypothesis that would explain these changes?

Students should make and post statements summarizing what Columbus found (for example, natives with a simple technology) and a list of outcomes Columbus believed would come as a result of his journey (for example, he stated that the natives he met would make good servants).

Activity 5. Looking Back at Columbus

Now the students will find out the effects of Columbus's voyages according to scholars by reading brief excerpts from specially chosen articles. Divide the class into groups to be assigned any or all of the following areas of research (topics can be duplicated among groups if desired). Each group should have at least one strong reader. Students can use information from the following sources, as well as texts and online sources of their own choosing.

In reviewing an article, students need only read those sections containing the specific information they are researching. A brief guide has been provided for each article.

Foods and Plants —A variety of new foods and plants were introduced from Europe to the Americas and from the Americas to Europe. Students should concentrate on naming such plants and flowers.

SOURCE: " The Gardeners of Eden: a bouquet of exotic flowers was one trophy of European expansion " by Samuel M. Wilson.
GUIDE TO THE ARTICLE: Read the passage from "Many of the New World's most spectacular contributions ..." to "Europeans' gardens began to fill with the exotic flowers of Africa, Asia, and, eventually, the Americas." Find the names of fruits, grains, vegetables and other plants that were common during this time period. Which started in the New World? Which started in the Old? What, if any, changes in where plants grew occurred after Columbus voyages?
For information about the gardens the Aztecs had when the Europeans arrived, read from "The sixteenth-century chronicler Fernando de Alva Ixtilochitl ..." to "So no bird, fish or animal of the whole country was wanting here they were either alive of figured in gold and gems."

Disease —Diseases introduced by the Europeans ravaged native populations. Only one disease migrated from the New World to the Old.

SOURCE: "The Great Disease Migration" by Geoffrey Cowley from Newsweek (Special Issue, Fall/Winter 1991, pp. 54–56)
GUIDE TO THE ARTICLE: Read the section beginning "Many experts now believe that the New World was home to 40 million to 50 million people before Columbus arrived," to "by germs." Then read from "By the time Columbus arrived, groups like the Aztecs and Maya" to "any Indian who received news of the Spaniards could also have easily received the infection." Find out what diseases were particularly damaging to the people of the New World.

Native Americans Encountered by Columbus —Columbus only met peoples with very simple technologies. However, America was home to a number of complex cultures that would have their own encounters with Europeans. What cultures and technologies did Columbus himself encounter in the New World? How were these cultures changed?

SOURCE: "The Lost Worlds of Ancient America" by Melinda Beck, from Newsweek (Special Issue, Fall/Winter 1991, pp. 24–26)
GUIDE TO THE ARTICLE: Read the introduction and the section "Mesoamerica" to create a list of the accomplishments of these "lost worlds." Look especially for mentions of buildings, inventions and scientific achievements. Why do you think the author calls them "lost worlds"?
SOURCE: "Rumors of Cannibals" by Dave D. Davis in Archaeology (January/February 1992, p. 49)
GUIDE TO THE ARTICLE: Read the first three paragraphs. Were the Carib people (also known as Caribe and Canima) cannibals? What happened because the Spanish thought they were cannibals?
SOURCE: "Columbus, My Enemy" (A Caribbean chief resists the first Spanish invaders) by Samuel M. Wilson in Natural History (December 1990, pp. 44–49)
GUIDE TO THE ARTICLE: Read from "Two years earlier" to "By 1497, after two years of epidemics and famine following the arrival of the Spaniards, the other chiefs were pushing Guarionex to put up some resistance."
Did the Taino have reasons to be afraid of the Spanish? What did the they agree to do for the Spanish to keep the peace? Why were the other chiefs pushing Guarionex to fight the Spanish? How successful was Guarionex?
Now read from "Bartolome staged a midnight raid on the surrounding villages" to "gave them their king and other leaders."
Lastly, read the paragraph beginning "The impact of the Europeans' arrival was felt differently on other islands of the Caribbean," for a summary of what happened to various native peoples.
SOURCE: Excerpt from "What Columbus Discovered" by Kirkpatrick Sale in The Nation (October 22, 1990, pp. 444–446)
GUIDE TO THE ARTICLE: Read from "Take, for example, the Taino" up to "are gentle and are always laughing." Then read the paragraph beginning, "Do not ask, by the way, what happened to those gentle Taino. ..."
What were the Taino people like before the Europeans arrived? Learn about their houses, transportation, crops and way of life. What happened to them? Why does the author say, "Do not ask ... what happened to those gentle Taino?"

Christianity —Columbus declared he was sailing west "to see the said princes, people, and territories, and to learn their disposition and the proper method of converting them to our holy faith." How successful were the Spanish in converting the native peoples?

SOURCE: "How Did Native Americans Respond to Christianity?" by Thomas S. Giles in Christian History Issue 35 (Vol. XI, No. 3)
GUIDE TO THE ARTICLE: Read the introduction and the first paragraph of the section "Holding to the ancient faith." What were some ways the Europeans tried to convert the native peoples? What are some ways the native peoples responded?
Read from "In a letter in 1601, Brother Juan de Escalona laments" to "The true God, the true Dios, came, but this was the origin too of affliction for us." What do students think was the main reason the Europeans had trouble converting native peoples?
Now read from "What about those Indians who responded positively to the Christian faith?" to "Because these go about poorly dressed and barefoot just like us; they eat what we eat; they settle among us. ..." What made some missionaries successful
Additional information on a number of these topics can be found at 1492: An Ongoing Voyage . Europe Claims America: The Atlantic Joined provides a brief summary of the effects of the arrival of the Europeans.

Activity 6. Organizing facts and findings

After completing their research, each group should prepare items for posting on a large graphic organizer designed to display the facts students learned. The class could decide, on the basis of the information at hand, exactly how to design the organizer. For example, the migration of food and plants or of diseases could be represented through text and/or pictures organized in the form of a chart with four columns: Before Columbus (In Europe), Before Columbus (In America), After Columbus (In Europe), After Columbus (In America). When this project is completed, each group can present its findings to the rest of the class, using the graphic organizer to illustrate what they learned.

Activity 7. List appropriate statements about expectations and outcomes

Events don't always turn out the way one expects. As a culminating activity, have the class brainstorm and list many appropriate statements about expectations and outcomes in the following form: Columbus (or "Europeans" or "Native Americans") _________________________________________________, but ______________________________________. For example, students might say:

"Columbus thought he had discovered a new route to the Indies, but he had really traveled to what we now call the Americas."
"Columbus thought the natives 'would be good servants,' but trying to make slaves out of them was so unsuccessful that eventually Spain imported slaves from Africa."
"Columbus encountered natives living with a simple technology, but civilizations with advanced technologies also lived in the Americas."

Post the statements. As the students continue to study other events in history, especially meetings of disparate cultures, such as the colonial settlers and the Native Americans, they should note the effects of these encounters, both intended and unintended.

Activity 8. Learning about Columbus

At the beginning of this lesson, students listed some of the ways the world changed after Columbus's voyage to the New World. Review this list with students. How would their list be different now if asked the same question? What should be added? Removed?

Students had learned some things about Columbus before this lesson. Based on what they have learned during this lesson, do students recommend any changes in the information young people are taught about Columbus? Changes in our celebration of Columbus Day?

If students found their list of changes significantly different at the end of the lesson, some might be interested in writing a set of guidelines for teaching about Columbus and/or for observing Columbus Day. Share the guidelines with the appropriate teachers.

Legislation: California SB-1490 Holidays: Columbus Day: Indigenous Peoples’ Day (2018).

Time Magazine: " Everything You Need to Know About Indigenous Peoples Day " (2017)

Christ or Christian (NOTE: "Christopher" will also emerge when searching for "Christ" or "Christian" unless otherwise specified. Count the instances of "Christ" and "Christian" only.)

Copy and paste each document to its own word processing file. Use the word count tool to count the number of words in each document; then use the "search" tool to find and count the number of references to the words listed above. (Students may also search for key words of their own choosing, based on their studies of Columbus's writings.)

Determine the percentage of times any particular word occurs by dividing the number of occurrences by the total number of words in a document and multiplying by 100.

What can be concluded from the differences in percentages? Why would Columbus's emphasis have changed? Consider the audience as well as the purpose of the document. Have students consider the following questions based on their search results:

Gold: Is there a change in how often gold is mentioned? Was there a change in the quest for gold?
Spices: One goal of finding another route to India was to make the trade in spices easier. How prominent was that goal in Columbus's writing?
1492: An Ongoing Voyage , an Exhibit of the Library of Congress
Columbus and the Age of Discovery , an impressive source of primary and secondary documents relating to voyages of discovery and exploration.

Selected EDSITEment Websites

Document Analysis Worksheets
The End of Europe's Middle Ages
Christopher Columbus: Extracts from Journal
1492: An Ongoing Voyage (available through the EDSITEment resource American Memory ) This exhibit of the Library of Congress has especially pertinent information in the following sections:
What Came To Be Called "America"
Europe Claims America
What So Proudly We Hail Columbus Day feature

Related on EDSITEment

Other worlds: the voyage of columbus, mapping the past, mapping our worlds.

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This Day In History : October 12

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Columbus reaches the “New World”

After sailing across the Atlantic Ocean, Italian explorer Christopher Columbus sights a Bahamian island on October 12, 1492, believing he has reached East Asia. His expedition went ashore the same day and claimed the land for Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain , who sponsored his attempt to find a western ocean route to China, India, and the fabled gold and spice islands of Asia.

Columbus was born in Genoa, Italy, in 1451. Little is known of his early life, but he worked as a seaman and then a maritime entrepreneur. He became obsessed with the possibility of pioneering a western sea route to Cathay (China), India, and the gold and spice islands of Asia. At the time, Europeans knew no direct sea route to southern Asia, and the route via Egypt and the Red Sea was closed to Europeans by the Ottoman Empire , as were many land routes.

Contrary to popular legend, educated Europeans of Columbus’ day did believe that the world was round, as argued by St. Isidore in the seventh century. However, Columbus, and most others, underestimated the world’s size, calculating that East Asia must lie approximately where North America sits on the globe (they did not yet know that the Pacific Ocean existed).

With only the Atlantic Ocean, he thought, lying between Europe and the riches of the East Indies, Columbus met with King John II of Portugal and tried to persuade him to back his “Enterprise of the Indies,” as he called his plan. He was rebuffed and went to Spain, where he was also rejected at least twice by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. However, after the Spanish conquest of the Moorish kingdom of Granada in January 1492, the Spanish monarchs, flush with victory, agreed to support his voyage.

On August 3, 1492, Columbus set sail from Palos, Spain, with three small ships, the Santa Maria, the Pinta and the Nina . On October 12, the expedition reached land, probably Watling Island in the Bahamas. Later that month, Columbus sighted Cuba, which he thought was mainland China, and in December the expedition landed on Hispaniola, which Columbus thought might be Japan. He established a small colony there with 39 of his men. The explorer returned to Spain with gold, spices, and “Indian” captives in March 1493 and was received with the highest honors by the Spanish court. He was the first European to explore the Americas since the Vikings set up colonies in Greenland and Newfoundland in the 10th century.

During his lifetime, Columbus led a total of four expeditions to the "New World," exploring various Caribbean islands, the Gulf of Mexico, and the South and Central American mainlands, but he never accomplished his original goal—a western ocean route to the great cities of Asia. Columbus died in Spain in 1506 without realizing the scope of what he did achieve: He had discovered for Europe the New World, whose riches over the next century would help make Spain the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. He also unleashed centuries of brutal colonization, the transatlantic slave trade and the deaths of millions of Native Americans from murder and disease.

Columbus was honored with a U.S. federal holiday in 1937. Since 1991, many cities, universities and a growing number of states have adopted Indigenous Peoples’ Day , a holiday that celebrates the history and contributions of Native Americans. Not by coincidence, the occasion usually falls on Columbus Day , the second Monday in October, or replaces the holiday entirely. Why replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day? Some argue that the holiday overlooks Columbus' enslavement of Native Americans—while giving him credit for “discovering” a place where people already lived.

Christopher Columbus: How The Explorer’s Legend Grew—and Then Drew Fire

Columbus's famed voyage to the New World was celebrated by Italian‑Americans, in particular, as a pathway to their own acceptance in America.

Did Polynesian Voyagers Reach the Americas Before Columbus?

The Polynesians were expert sailors—and research suggests they landed in the Americas centuries before Columbus.

What Is Indigenous Peoples’ Day?

Indigenous Peoples’ Day celebrates the history and contributions of Native Americans and, while not yet a federal holiday, it has been federally recognized since 2021.

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Columbus’ Confusion About the New World

The European discovery of America opened possibilities for those with eyes to see. But Columbus was not one of them

Edmund S. Morgan

In the year 1513, a group of men led by Vasco Núñez de Balboa marched across the Isthmus of Panama and discovered the Pacific Ocean. They had been looking for it—they knew it existed—and, familiar as they were with oceans, they had no difficulty in recognizing it when they saw it. On their way, however, they saw a good many things they had not been looking for and were not familiar with. When they returned to Spain to tell what they had seen, it was not a simple matter to find words for everything.

For example, they had killed a large and ferocious wild animal. They called it a tiger, although there were no tigers in Spain and none of the men had ever seen one before. Listening to their story was Peter Martyr, member of the King's Council of the Indies and possessor of an insatiable curiosity about the new land that Spain was uncovering in the west. How, the learned man asked them, did they know that the ferocious animal was a tiger? They answered "that they knewe it by the spottes, fiercenesse, agilitie, and such other markes and tokens whereby auncient writers have described the Tyger." It was a good answer. Men, confronted with things they do not recognize, turn to the writings of those who have had a wider experience. And in 1513 it was still assumed that the ancient writers had had a wider experience than those who came after them.

Columbus himself had made that assumption. His discoveries posed for him, as for others, a problem of identification. It seemed to be a question not so much of giving names to new lands as of finding the proper old names, and the same was true of the things that the new lands contained. Cruising through the Caribbean, enchanted by the beauty and variety of what he saw, Columbus assumed that the strange plants and trees were strange only because he was insufficiently versed in the writings of men who did know them. "I am the saddest man in the world," he wrote, "because I do not recognize them."

We need not deride Columbus' reluctance to give up the world that he knew from books. Only idiots escape entirely from the world that the past bequeaths. The discovery of America opened a new world, full of new things and new possibilities for those with eyes to see them. But the New World did not erase the Old. Rather, the Old World determined what men saw in the New and what they did with it. What America became after 1492 depended both on what men found there and on what they expected to find, both on what America actually was and on what old writers and old experience led men to think it was, or ought to be or could be made to be.

During the decade before 1492, as Columbus nursed a growing urge to sail west to the Indies—as the lands of China, Japan and India were then known in Europe—he was studying the old writers to find out what the world and its people were like. He read the Ymago Mundi of Pierre d'Ailly, a French cardinal who wrote in the early 15th century, the travels of Marco Polo and of Sir John Mandeville, Pliny's Natural History and the Historia Rerum Ubique Gestarum of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II). Columbus was not a scholarly man. Yet he studied these books, made hundreds of marginal notations in them and came out with ideas about the world that were characteristically simple and strong and sometimes wrong, the kind of ideas that the self-educated person gains from independent reading and clings to in defiance of what anyone else tries to tell him.

The strongest one was a wrong one—namely, that the distance between Europe and the eastern shore of Asia was short, indeed, that Spain was closer to China westward than eastward. Columbus never abandoned this conviction. And before he set out to prove it by sailing west from Spain, he studied his books to find out all he could about the lands that he would be visiting. From Marco Polo he learned that the Indies were rich in gold, silver, pearls, jewels and spices. The Great Khan, whose empire stretched from the Arctic to the Indian Ocean, had displayed to Polo a wealth and majesty that dwarfed the splendors of the courts of Europe.

Polo also had things to say about the ordinary people of the Far East. Those in the province of Mangi, where they grew ginger, were averse to war and so had fallen an easy prey to the khan. On Nangama, an island off the coast, described as having "great plentie of spices," the people were far from averse to war: they were anthropophagi—man-eaters—who devoured their captives. There were, in fact, man-eating people in several of the offshore islands, and in many islands both men and women dressed themselves with only a small scrap of cloth over their genitals. On the island of Discorsia, in spite of the fact that they made fine cotton cloth, the people went entirely naked. In one place there were two islands where men and women were segregated, the women on one island, the men on the other.

Marco Polo occasionally slipped into fables like this last one, but most of what he had to say about the Indies was the result of actual observation. Sir John Mandeville's travels, on the other hand, were a hoax—there was no such man—and the places he claimed to have visited in the 1300s were fantastically filled with one-eyed men and one-footed men, dog-faced men and men with two faces or no faces. But the author of the hoax did draw on the reports of enough genuine travelers to make some of his stories plausible, and he also drew on a legend as old as human dreams, the legend of a golden age when men were good. He told of an island where the people lived without malice or guile, without covetousness or lechery or gluttony, wishing for none of the riches of this world. They were not Christians, but they lived by the golden rule. A man who planned to see the Indies for himself could hardly fail to be stirred by the thought of finding such a people.

Columbus surely expected to bring back some of the gold that was supposed to be so plentiful. The spice trade was one of the most lucrative in Europe, and he expected to bring back spices. But what did he propose to do about the people in possession of these treasures?

When he set out, he carried with him a commission from the king and queen of Spain, empowering him "to discover and acquire certain islands and mainland in the ocean sea" and to be "Admiral and Viceroy and Governor therein." If the king and Columbus expected to assume dominion over any of the Indies or other lands en route, they must have had some ideas, not only about the Indies but also about themselves, to warrant the expectation. What had they to offer that would make their dominion welcome? Or if they proposed to impose their rule by force, how could they justify such a step, let alone carry it out? The answer is that they had two things: they had Christianity and they had civilization.

Christianity has meant many things to many men, and its role in the European conquest and occupation of America was varied. But in 1492 to Columbus there was probably nothing very complicated about it. He would have reduced it to a matter of corrupt human beings, destined for eternal damnation, redeemed by a merciful savior. Christ saved those who believed in him, and it was the duty of Christians to spread his gospel and thus rescue the heathens from the fate that would otherwise await them.

Although Christianity was in itself a sufficient justification for dominion, Columbus would also carry civilization to the Indies; and this, too, was a gift that he and his contemporaries considered adequate recompense for anything they might take. When people talked about civilization—or civility, as they usually called it—they seldom specified precisely what they meant. Civility was closely associated with Christianity, but the two were not identical. Whereas Christianity was always accompanied by civility, the Greeks and Romans had had civility without Christianity. One way to define civility was by its opposite, barbarism. Originally the word "barbarian" had simply meant "foreigner"—to a Greek someone who was not Greek, to a Roman someone who was not Roman. By the 15th or 16th century, it meant someone not only foreign but with manners and customs of which civil persons disapproved. North Africa became known as Barbary, a 16th-century geographer explained, "because the people be barbarous, not onely in language, but in manners and customs." Parts of the Indies, from Marco Polo's description, had to be civil, but other parts were obviously barbarous: for example, the lands where people went naked. Whatever civility meant, it meant clothes.

But there was a little more to it than that, and there still is. Civil people distinguished themselves by the pains they took to order their lives. They organized their society to produce the elaborate food, clothing, buildings and other equipment characteristic of their manner of living. They had strong governments to protect property, to protect good persons from evil ones, to protect the manners and customs that differentiated civil people from barbarians. The superior clothing, housing, food and protection that attached to civilization made it seem to the European a gift worth giving to the ill-clothed, ill-housed and ungoverned barbarians of the world.

Slavery was an ancient instrument of civilization, and in the 15th century it had been revived as a way to deal with barbarians who refused to accept Christianity and the rule of civilized government. Through slavery they could be made to abandon their bad habits, put on clothes and reward their instructors with a lifetime of work. Throughout the 15th century, as the Portuguese explored the coast of Africa, large numbers of well-clothed sea captains brought civilization to naked savages by carrying them off to the slave markets of Seville and Lisbon.

Since Columbus had lived in Lisbon and sailed in Portuguese vessels to the Gold Coast of Africa, he was not unfamiliar with barbarians. He had seen for himself that the Torrid Zone could support human life, and he had observed how pleased barbarians were with trinkets on which civilized Europeans set small value, such as the little bells that falconers placed on hawks. Before setting off on his voyage, he laid in a store of hawk's bells. If the barbarous people he expected to find in the Indies should think civilization and Christianity an insufficient reward for submission to Spain, perhaps hawk's bells would help.

Columbus sailed from Palos de la Frontera on Friday, August 3, 1492, reached the Canary Islands six days later and stayed there for a month to finish outfitting his ships. He left on September 6, and five weeks later, in about the place he expected, he found the Indies. What else could it be but the Indies? There on the shore were the naked people. With hawk's bells and beads he made their acquaintance and found some of them wearing gold nose plugs. It all added up. He had found the Indies. And not only that. He had found a land over which he would have no difficulty in establishing Spanish dominion, for the people showed him an immediate veneration. He had been there only two days, coasting along the shores of the islands, when he was able to hear the natives crying in loud voices, "Come and see the men who have come from heaven; bring them food and drink." If Columbus thought he was able to translate the language in two days' time, it is not surprising that what he heard in it was what he wanted to hear or that what he saw was what he wanted to see—namely, the Indies, filled with people eager to submit to their new admiral and viceroy.

Columbus made four voyages to America, during which he explored an astonishingly large area of the Caribbean and a part of the northern coast of South America. At every island the first thing he inquired about was gold, taking heart from every trace of it he found. And at Haiti he found enough to convince him that this was Ophir, the country to which Solomon and Jehosophat had sent for gold and silver. Since its lush vegetation reminded him of Castile, he renamed it Española, the Spanish island, which was later Latinized as Hispaniola.

Española appealed to Columbus from his first glimpse of it. From aboard ship it was possible to make out rich fields waving with grass. There were good harbors, lovely sand beaches and fruit-laden trees. The people were shy and fled whenever the caravels approached the shore, but Columbus gave orders "that they should take some, treat them well and make them lose their fear, that some gain might be made, since, considering the beauty of the land, it could not be but that there was gain to be got." And indeed there was. Although the amount of gold worn by the natives was even less than the amount of clothing, it gradually became apparent that there was gold to be had. One man possessed some that had been pounded into gold leaf. Another appeared with a gold belt. Some produced nuggets for the admiral. Española accordingly became the first European colony in America. Although Columbus had formally taken possession of every island he found, the act was mere ritual until he reached Española. Here he began the European occupation of the New World, and here his European ideas and attitudes began their transformation of land and people.

The Arawak Indians of Española were the handsomest people that Columbus had encountered in the New World and so attractive in character that he found it hard to praise them enough. "They are the best people in the world," he said, "and beyond all the mildest." They cultivated a bit of cassava for bread and made a bit of cottonlike cloth from the fibers of the gossampine tree. But they spent most of the day like children idling away their time from morning to night, seemingly without a care in the world. Once they saw that Columbus meant them no harm, they outdid one another in bringing him anything he wanted. It was impossible to believe, he reported, "that anyone has seen a people with such kind hearts and so ready to give the Christians all that they possess, and when the Christians arrive, they run at once to bring them everything."

To Columbus the Arawaks seemed like relics of the golden age. On the basis of what he told Peter Martyr, who recorded his voyages, Martyr wrote, "they seeme to live in that golden worlde of the which olde writers speake so much, wherein menne lived simply and innocently without enforcement of lawes, without quarreling, judges and libelles, content onely to satisfie nature, without further vexation for knowledge of things to come."

As the idyllic Arawaks conformed to one ancient picture, their enemies the Caribs conformed to another that Columbus had read of, the anthropophagi. According to the Arawaks, the Caribs, or Cannibals, were man-eaters, and as such their name eventually entered the English language. (This was at best a misrepresentation, which Columbus would soon exploit.) The Caribs lived on islands of their own and met every European approach with poisoned arrows, which men and women together fired in showers. They were not only fierce but, by comparison with the Arawaks, also seemed more energetic, more industrious and, it might even be said, sadly enough, more civil. After Columbus succeeded in entering one of their settlements on his second voyage, a member of the expedition reported, "This people seemed to us to be more civil than those who were in the other islands we have visited, although they all have dwellings of straw, but these have them better made and better provided with supplies, and in them were more signs of industry."

Columbus had no doubts about how to proceed, either with the lovable but lazy Arawaks or with the hateful but industrious Caribs. He had come to take possession and to establish dominion. In almost the same breath, he described the Arawaks' gentleness and innocence and then went on to assure the king and queen of Spain, "They have no arms and are all naked and without any knowledge of war, and very cowardly, so that a thousand of them would not face three. And they are also fitted to be ruled and to be set to work, to cultivate the land and to do all else that may be necessary, and you may build towns and teach them to go clothed and adopt our customs."

So much for the golden age. Columbus had not yet prescribed the method by which the Arawaks would be set to work, but he had a pretty clear idea of how to handle the Caribs. On his second voyage, after capturing a few of them, he sent them in slavery to Spain, as samples of what he hoped would be a regular trade. They were obviously intelligent, and in Spain they might "be led to abandon that inhuman custom which they have of eating men, and there in Castile, learning the language, they will much more readily receive baptism and secure the welfare of their souls." The way to handle the slave trade, Columbus suggested, was to send ships from Spain loaded with cattle (there were no native domestic animals on Española), and he would return the ships loaded with supposed Cannibals. This plan was never put into operation, partly because the Spanish sovereigns did not approve it and partly because the Cannibals did not approve it. They defended themselves so well with their poisoned arrows that the Spaniards decided to withhold the blessings of civilization from them and to concentrate their efforts on the seemingly more amenable Arawaks.

The process of civilizing the Arawaks got underway in earnest after the Santa Maria ran aground on Christmas Day, 1492, off Caracol Bay. The local leader in that part of Española, Guacanagari, rushed to the scene and with his people helped the Spaniards to salvage everything aboard. Once again Columbus was overjoyed with the remarkable natives. They are, he wrote, "so full of love and without greed, and suitable for every purpose, that I assure your Highnesses that I believe there is no better land in the world, and they are always smiling." While the salvage operations were going on, canoes full of Arawaks from other parts of the island came in bearing gold. Guacanagari "was greatly delighted to see the admiral joyful and understood that he desired much gold." Thereafter it arrived in amounts calculated to console the admiral for the loss of the Santa Maria , which had to be scuttled. He decided to make his permanent headquarters on the spot and accordingly ordered a fortress to be built, with a tower and a large moat.

What followed is a long, complicated and unpleasant story. Columbus returned to Spain to bring the news of his discoveries. The Spanish monarchs were less impressed than he with what he had found, but he was able to round up a large expedition of Spanish colonists to return with him and help exploit the riches of the Indies. At Española the new settlers built forts and towns and began helping themselves to all the gold they could find among the natives. These creatures of the golden age remained generous. But precisely because they did not value possessions, they had little to turn over. When gold was not forthcoming, the Europeans began killing. Some of the natives struck back and hid out in the hills. But in 1495 a punitive expedition rounded up 1,500 of them, and 500 were shipped off to the slave markets of Seville.

The natives, seeing what was in store for them, dug up their own crops of cassava and destroyed their supplies in hopes that the resulting famine would drive the Spaniards out. But it did not work. The Spaniards were sure there was more gold in the island than the natives had yet found, and were determined to make them dig it out. Columbus built more forts throughout the island and decreed that every Arawak of 14 years or over was to furnish a hawk's bell full of gold dust every three months. The various local leaders were made responsible for seeing that the tribute was paid. In regions where gold was not to be had, 25 pounds of woven or spun cotton could be substituted for the hawk's bell of gold dust.

Unfortunately Española was not Ophir, and it did not have anything like the amount of gold that Columbus thought it did. The pieces that the natives had at first presented him were the accumulation of many years. To fill their quotas by washing in the riverbeds was all but impossible, even with continual daily labor. But the demand was unrelenting, and those who sought to escape it by fleeing to the mountains were hunted down with dogs taught to kill. A few years later Peter Martyr was able to report that the natives "beare this yoke of servitude with an evill will, but yet they beare it."

The tribute system, for all its injustice and cruelty, preserved something of the Arawaks' old social arrangements: they retained their old leaders under control of the king's viceroy, and royal directions to the viceroy might ultimately have worked some mitigation of their hardships. But the Spanish settlers of Española did not care for this centralized method of exploitation. They wanted a share of the land and its people, and when their demands were not met they revolted against the government of Columbus. In 1499 they forced him to abandon the system of obtaining tribute through the Arawak chieftains for a new one in which both land and people were turned over to individual Spaniards for exploitation as they saw fit. This was the beginning of the system of repartimientos or encomiendas later extended to other areas of Spanish occupation. With its inauguration, Columbus' economic control of Española effectively ceased, and even his political authority was revoked later in the same year when the king appointed a new governor.

For the Arawaks the new system of forced labor meant that they did more work, wore more clothes and said more prayers. Peter Martyr could rejoice that "so many thousands of men are received to bee the sheepe of Christes flocke." But these were sheep prepared for slaughter. If we may believe Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Dominican priest who spent many years among them, they were tortured, burned and fed to the dogs by their masters. They died from overwork and from new European diseases. They killed themselves. And they took pains to avoid having children. Life was not fit to live, and they stopped living. From a population of 100,000 at the lowest estimate in 1492, there remained in 1514 about 32,000 Arawaks in Española. By 1542, according to Las Casas, only 200 were left. In their place had appeared slaves imported from Africa. The people of the golden age had been virtually exterminated.

Why? What is the meaning of this tale of horror? Why is the first chapter of American history an atrocity story? Bartolomé de Las Casas had a simple answer, greed: "The cause why the Spanishe have destroyed such an infinitie of soules, hath been onely, that they have helde it for their last scope and marke to gette golde." The answer is true enough. But we shall have to go further than Spanish greed to understand why American history began this way. The Spanish had no monopoly on greed.

The Indians' austere way of life could not fail to win the admiration of the invaders, for self-denial was an ancient virtue in Western culture. The Greeks and Romans had constructed philosophies and the Christians a religion around it. The Indians, and especially the Arawaks, gave no sign of thinking much about God, but otherwise they seemed to have attained the monastic virtues. Plato had emphasized again and again that freedom was to be reached by restraining one's needs, and the Arawaks had attained impressive freedom.

But even as the Europeans admired the Indians' simplicity, they were troubled by it, troubled and offended. Innocence never fails to offend, never fails to invite attack, and the Indians seemed the most innocent people anyone had ever seen. Without the help of Christianity or of civilization, they had attained virtues that Europeans liked to think of as the proper outcome of Christianity and civilization. The fury with which the Spaniards assaulted the Arawaks even after they had enslaved them must surely have been in part a blind impulse to crush an innocence that seemed to deny the Europeans' cherished assumption of their own civilized, Christian superiority over naked, heathen barbarians.

That the Indians were destroyed by Spanish greed is true. But greed is simply one of the uglier names we give to the driving force of modern civilization. We usually prefer less pejorative names for it. Call it the profit motive, or free enterprise, or the work ethic, or the American way, or, as the Spanish did, civility. Before we become too outraged at the behavior of Columbus and his followers, before we identify ourselves too easily with the lovable Arawaks, we have to ask whether we could really get along without greed and everything that goes with it. Yes, a few of us, a few eccentrics, might manage to live for a time like the Arawaks. But the modern world could not have put up with the Arawaks any more than the Spanish could. The story moves us, offends us, but perhaps the more so because we have to recognize ourselves not in the Arawaks but in Columbus and his followers.

The Spanish reaction to the Arawaks was Western civilization's reaction to the barbarian: the Arawaks answered the Europeans' description of men, just as Balboa's tiger answered the description of a tiger, and being men they had to be made to live as men were supposed to live. But the Arawaks' view of man was something different. They died not merely from cruelty, torture, murder and disease, but also, in the last analysis, because they could not be persuaded to fit the European conception of what they ought to be.

Edmund S. Morgan is a Sterling Professor emeritus at Yale University.

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Christopher Columbus and the Discovery of the New World

In the annals of history, few names resonate as profoundly as Christopher Columbus’s. To many, he is a visionary navigator, a daring explorer who courageously ventured into the uncharted waters of the Atlantic, driven by an insatiable curiosity and a fierce determination. To others, he symbolizes European imperialism, whose voyages led to the colonization and subjugation of indigenous populations. This dichotomy presents a tantalizing enigma: Who was Christopher Columbus truly? Beyond the folklore and mythology, who was the man who set foot on the shores of the New World in 1492? This essay will traverse the seas of time, dispelling myths and unearthing facts as we journey alongside Columbus on his epoch-making voyage to the Americas. Through a lens of historical scrutiny, we will attempt to understand this seminal figure’s motivations, challenges, and legacies, setting the stage for a deep exploration into the repercussions of his discoveries.

Table of content

The landscape of the late 15th century was a tapestry of burgeoning empires vying for dominion and wealth. Europe, especially, was in the throes of a profound transformation. Renaissance ideals were fanning the flames of knowledge, art, and human potential. Cities like Florence and Venice were not just magnificent hubs of culture; they were cauldrons of ambition, with tales of Marco Polo’s adventures to the East echoing in their streets.

Against this backdrop, nations like Spain and Portugal were engaged in an intense rivalry, seeking the elusive and profitable passage to the East. The overland Silk Road, though historically significant, had its limitations and dangers. Moreover, the Ottomans’ control over Constantinople in 1453 challenged Europe’s access to the Asian trade markets. Maritime supremacy became the watchword of the day.

Enter Christopher Columbus – a Genoese sailor with a grand vision. Armed with a blend of experience and audacity, Columbus believed the key to these Eastern riches was not by navigating around Africa, as the Portuguese were attempting, but by sailing westward. Though met with skepticism from various quarters, this idea found a sympathetic ear in the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella. Columbus’s ambitious dream was poised to become a reality with their patronage.

However, more than the promise of trade fueled this venture. There was an undercurrent of religious zeal, as Christendom hoped to find a route to spread Christianity to the East. Columbus himself harbored such hopes, as evident in his writings.

This chapter sets the stage for Columbus’s monumental voyage, exploring the confluence of economic aspirations, geopolitical rivalries, and personal ambitions that propelled him into the vastness of the Atlantic.

The Journey

In the late summer of 1492, the harbors of Palos, Spain, were abuzz with frenetic activity. Three ships – the Niña, the Pinta, and the stately Santa Maria – anchored side by side were being outfitted for an expedition into the unknown. Sailors exchanged whispers of both anticipation and trepidation. Many were venturing out of the confines of the known world, fueled by a cocktail of hope, fear, and curiosity.

Under Columbus’s leadership, the flotilla embarked on this daring voyage, charting waters that, according to some naysayers of the time, hid leviathans and where the horizon might drop into oblivion. The ocean’s vastness proved to be both a challenge and a marvel. Stars that once felt familiar to these seasoned sailors took on new patterns, and the compass, their trusted ally, began behaving unpredictably as they ventured farther from home.

Days turned into weeks. The monotony of the open sea, with its endless blue horizons, tested the crew’s mettle. Whispers of mutiny began to circulate as land remained elusive. However, with a blend of stern leadership and guile, Columbus managed to quell the rising discontent, promising his crew that they were on the cusp of discovery.

Then, in the pre-dawn hours of October 12th, a cry echoed from the Pinta’s lookout: “Tierra! Tierra!” (Land! Land!). The relentless expanse of the Atlantic had finally yielded its secret. As dawn broke, an island, lush and teeming with life, unfurled on the horizon – presenting a world untouched by European footsteps. Unaware that they had stumbled upon a new continent altogether, Columbus and his crew believed they had reached the outskirts of Asia.

The challenges and tribulations of this voyage were not merely physical but psychological. Columbus’s journey was a testament to human endurance and navigation skills and the indomitable spirit of exploration and discovery. This chapter seeks to recreate the highs and lows, the anxieties and elations, of this historic passage across the Atlantic.

Encounter with the Natives

As Columbus and his men disembarked, they found themselves amidst a world startlingly distinct from their European milieu. This land was painted with the vivid hues of tropical flora and filled with the harmonious notes of unfamiliar fauna. Nevertheless, most arresting were the inhabitants of this newfound land, the native peoples, who looked on with curiosity and caution.

The indigenous tribes, diverse in their cultures and languages, had lived in harmony with their surroundings for millennia. Their societies were intricate tapestries of tradition, spirituality, and communal kinship. From the intricate patterns they weaved in their baskets to the tales they spun around evening fires, these tribes possessed a vibrant heritage.

Initial encounters were marked by a sense of wonderment on both sides. The natives, skin bronzed by the sun and adorned with feathers and beads, approached the Europeans, fascinated by their pale complexions, shining armor, and large vessels. In his journals, Columbus often vacillated between admiration for their gentle nature and a patronizing tone, noting their “naivety” as an opportunity for both conversion to Christianity and subjugation.

However, as days turned into months, the veneer of mutual fascination began to crack. The Europeans’ insatiable hunger for gold and other treasures put them at odds with the indigenous populations. Barter turned to coercion, and coercion soon gave way to violence. Many natives were forced into servitude, their freedoms curtailed, and their cultures derided. The dichotomy of the Europeans’ approach – marveling at the ‘New World’ while attempting to mold it in their image – set the stage for centuries of colonial conflict and cultural erosion.

The Impact of the Discovery

The wake of Columbus’s voyages sent ripples across the Atlantic and worldwide, ushering in an era of transformation on an unprecedented scale. This newly discovered realm, abundant in resources and potential, became the cynosure of European ambitions, altering geopolitics, economies, and societies in ways previously unimagined.

Economically, the ‘New World’ opened up a treasure trove for Europe. Precious metals, particularly gold and silver from the mines of South America, began flooding European coffers. This influx of wealth, while bolstering the fortunes of monarchies like Spain, also wreaked havoc on European economies by leading to inflation and economic disparities.

Nevertheless, it was not just mineral wealth that reshaped the global landscape. The Columbian Exchange, as historians call it, was a vast bi-directional transfer of plants, animals, technologies, and even diseases. Tomatoes, potatoes, and maize, staple diets of many countries today, were introduced to Europe, while horses, cattle, and wheat made their way to the Americas. The cultural and culinary landscapes of entire continents were rewritten, creating a rich tapestry of global interconnectedness.

However, this exchange came with its shadowy underbelly. Diseases from Europe, such as smallpox, for which the indigenous populations had no immunity, decimated tribes, wiping out vast swathes of native inhabitants. It is a somber testament to the unintended consequences of exploration.

On the sociopolitical front, the discovery heralded the rise of European colonial empires. Territories were claimed, borders were drawn, and indigenous populations were often subjugated and marginalized in their ancestral lands. The seeds of modern nation-states in the Americas were sown, often drenched in the blood of colonial conflict and native resistance.

As waves of European settlers arrived, they also brought their beliefs, religions, and ways of governance, forever altering the societal mosaic of the New World. The spread of Christianity, in particular, became a cornerstone of colonial policy, leading to the establishment of missions and the often forceful conversion of indigenous populations.

Modern Perspectives

As the mists of time roll forward, the figure of Christopher Columbus, once celebrated with near-mythic reverence, now stands at the intersection of evolving historical narratives and present-day discourses. Today, as we stand on the precipice of a globalized, interconnected world, the legacy of Columbus is reevaluated through lenses tinted with nuances and introspection.

The earlier portrayals of Columbus, especially in Western education, painted him as an intrepid explorer, a symbol of human tenacity and the quest for knowledge. Parades, statues, and even a national holiday in the United States were instituted in his honor, commemorating the ‘discovery’ of a new land. To many, Columbus became emblematic of the spirit of exploration and the breaking of frontiers.

However, a paradigm shift began to unfold in the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st. Historians, anthropologists, and indigenous activists began to spotlight the darker facets of the Columbian encounter. The tales of exploitation, enslavement, and ecological upheaval started to challenge the monolithic narrative of Columbus as a hero. In modern classrooms and public discourses, the emphasis shifted to understanding the profound human and environmental costs that accompanied the European incursion into the Americas.

Furthermore, indigenous voices, long marginalized in retelling their own history, began to resurface with vigor. Their oral histories, traditions, and perspectives provided a counter-narrative, re-centering the story from one of ‘discovery’ to one of ‘invasion’ or ‘encounter.’ The implications of this linguistic shift are profound, reframing the entire narrative to be more inclusive and representative.

Today, statues of Columbus, once erected with pride, have become flashpoints of contention in some regions, with debates raging over their removal or preservation. These debates are emblematic of a broader societal reckoning with colonial legacies and the quest for historical truth.

Columbus’s discovery of the New World changed the course of history. While his achievements in navigation and exploration cannot be denied, it is essential to approach his legacy with a nuanced understanding. The history is enlightening and cautionary, reminding us that every action has repercussions.

By focusing on the various facets of Columbus’s journey and the subsequent consequences, this essay sample offers a comprehensive overview of a turning point in global history. The aim is to foster a balanced perspective, highlighting both the achievements and the dark sides of the era of exploration.

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Discovery and Settlement of the New World Columbus, Cortez, Pizarro, Magellan

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Age range: 7 - 14

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The 'New World'

❖ His 'discovery ' led to many other explorers from Spain, and later on Portugal, to make the journey and grab land for their monarchs.
❖ The New World was rich in resources - gold and silver, but also timber and furs - which were taken by the European colonists , developing trade and wealth for the European powers.
❖ Over time, other European countries began to colonise the New World - especially England, France and the Netherlands. This led to European domination of the Americas.

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Explore the New World and America's exploration with Columbus

Video title: exploring a new world.

Watch this Elementary American History video entitled Exploring a New World to study a new world with Christopher Columbus, and witness America's exploration, colonization, and development through the pre-Revolutionary period.

Learn about the unwitting discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus, and hardships undergone by the sailors. Discover how the early European explorers laid claim to different parts of North America in their efforts to find a sea route to Asia.

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Explore the New World and America's exploration with Columbus. Learning Objectives for this video:

History of the New World. Learn about Exploring a New World. Discover a new world with Columbus, and witness America's exploration, colonization, and development through the pre-Revolutionary period.
Learn the reasons for European expansion and identify important explorers and their accomplishments.
Trace the explorations of the Spanish and French and distinguish the differences in their treatment of Native Americans.
Follow the establishment of the thirteen original colonies and see what life was like in the early English settlements.
Learn the probable origins of the Native Americans and describe their relationships with the early settlers and the U. S. government.
Discover the many benefits of using online video for visual learning. Educational video for teaching the K-12 curriculum provides online learning for children and students of all ages and abilities. Using subtitled video - or video with closed captions - enables children to choose between watching, listening to, or reading each presentation whichever best suites their individual learning style. A wonderful option particularly for dyslexia and special needs education.
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Exploration of the New World

Wandering, Foraging, and Farming

Contact and Conflict

16,000 bce to 1622 ce.

Initially, European nations were searching for a water route to the Far East. Many factors encouraged European exploration. Portugal, Spain, France, and England were newly emerged as nation-states with the means to finance long overseas voyages now possible by innovations in navigation. They searched for a water route to the East because war with the Ottoman Empire interrupted the profitable overland trade routes with the Orient. Support for exploration also came from the Catholic Church, which looked to convert pagans.

International Interest in the "New World"

Portugal led the European nations into exploration by sailing southward along the African coast, seeking a route to the East. Spain’s ambitions were launched by Christopher Columbus, who landed on inhabited islands in the Caribbean Sea unknown to Europeans. As Spain expanded its American empire through the enslavement and near extermination of the region’s Indigenous population, France and the Netherlands were also exploring.

Christopher Columbus’s voyages launched a wave of Spanish followers. Ponce de Leon explored Florida. Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama. Magellan sailed around the world. Coronado discovered the Grand Canyon. De Soto explored Florida to the Mississippi. When Cortez and Pizarro stole the riches of the Aztecs of Mexico and the Incas of Peru, Spain became the wealthiest and most powerful nation.

Why Did the English Come?

The English did not come to Virginia for political or religious freedom. They wanted an empire in America, where Spain already was deriving great wealth. They sought gold and gems, a passage to the riches of China and the Indies, and to prey on treasure-filled Spanish galleons. They hoped to convert the native peoples to Protestantism and challenge the ambitions of Catholic Spain and France.

Europeans hoped that the Western Hemisphere would prove a new Eden of peace and plenty. Jamestown was established by the Virginia Company of London, a stock company established in 1606 by a royal charter issued by James I. The king made promises in that charter that Virginians would remember in 1775: all in Virginia “and every of their children shall have and enjoy all Liberties, Franchises, and Immunities as if they had been abiding and born within this our Realm of England.”

How Virginia Got Its Name

Elizabeth I (1533–1603), queen of England, never married. Englishmen named their dream of an empire in the New World after her, their virgin queen. Elizabeth’s elder sister, Mary I, had lost England’s last possession on the continent, Calais, in France. During Elizabeth’s reign Englishmen turned their eyes to the "New World." The first English attempts to colonize North America were made under her patronage.

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Captain re-creates Henry Hudson's exploration of the river that now bears his name.

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On September 3, 1609, English explorer Henry Hudson and his crew of Dutch and British sailors turned their 85-foot sailboat , the Half Moon , up a great waterway . They thought it might be a new route to the Far East . The Half Moon had been searching for that route , the Northwest Passage , from Scandinavia to present-day Maine and South Carolina. They never located a passage slicing across the North American continent to the Pacific Ocean. The expedition did discover a river, rippling with fish, that cut through a wooded land bursting with natural resources . The river would later be named the Hudson River in the explorer’s honor. William T. “Chip” Reynolds is director of the New Netherland Museum and captain of a replica of the Half Moon . This replica has recreated Hudson’s voyage up the river to Albany, N.Y., every year since 1999. Reynolds says that Hudson must have immediately known the importance of his discovery. “Here Hudson comes over, and seeing this North America continent through the eyes of a European has to be stunning,” Reynolds says. “You have these expansive natural harbors . You have these shipbuilding timbers that are available right at the river’s edge. You have plentiful fish. You have fur-bearing mammals . This is a veritable Garden of Eden to them.” Every fall, Reynolds sets sail up the Hudson River with a crew of a dozen 12-year-old students in a replica of the Half Moon and traces Hudson’s journey up the waterway. Though the Half Moon replica is outfitted with modern technology , including a global positioning system (GPS) , Reynolds says the students handle the sails like Hudson’s crew and employ the same navigation tools, including a compass to find their way upriver . In 2009, New York celebrated the 400th anniversary of Hudson’s discovery, which showered more attention on Reynolds and the Half Moon ’s annual voyage upriver . The sailboat was accompanied by a handful of Dutch frigates and NATO naval vessels as it left New York Harbor on its way up the Hudson.

Changes to the Waterway

Having followed Hudson’s route up the river every fall for the last decade, Reynolds is able to easily reel off a handful of ways the waterway has changed, and stayed the same, since the explorer’s initial explorations of the region . Reynolds says that even within sight of New York City’s skyline , where skyscrapers rise like jagged crystals , one can take in the magnificent natural scenery that the explorer encountered . “In virtually an entire section of the Hudson River, we are able to sail and see exactly the same circumstances that Hudson saw, even when we are right in the vicinity of New York City,” he says. “As you are sailing along the Palisades (cliffs along the lower river in New York and New Jersey), you can look to one side and see one of the densest urban areas in the world and look in the other direction and you’ll see a view that is exactly the view that Henry Hudson saw 400 years ago.” Reynolds also notes that the river is essentially unchanged in the Hudson Highlands, a mountainous region between Newburgh Bay and Haverstraw Bay. Only a few buildings and the Bear Mountain Bridge, which spans the Hudson near Peekskill, N.Y., dot the shore. “We have charts from the 1630s that provide depths and sailing directions that we can follow to this day,” Reynolds says. “We can take the soundings and the reaches that are described in the log from 1609, as reported and recorded by Robert Juet (one of Hudson’s officers), and sail exactly as he described and precede from Upper Haverstraw Bay right through the Highlands and up into Newburgh Bay with no change.”

Of course, there’s a large section of the Lower Hudson River Valley that has been significantly altered due to its proximity to New York City, the most densely populated city in the United States. Reynolds admits that the Upper Hudson River Valley, a portion of the waterway north of the town of Catskill, N.Y., is also not the same as Hudson initially saw it.

“From the late 19th century to now, that run of shoreline has been heavily stabilized with the dredging of a navigational channel , with stabilization of the shoreline , with the damming of the Upper Hudson River that controls seasonal flooding to reduce it,” he says.

One dramatic alteration of the Hudson River has been caused by the dumping of pollutants in the water since the arrival of the Europeans in the area. The polluting of the Hudson River has contributed to the declining fish population there. From reading Juet’s log from Hudson’s journey, one can observe changes in the local fish and animal populations since the river was first explored. There are many entries that describe the river’s vast reserves of fish and oysters , which have diminished since the area was settled by Europeans and eventually became a part of the United States. As the Half Moon inched into the mouth of the river 400 years ago, Juet remarked of seeing many salmon , mullets and rays . The next day, Juet wrote: “our boat went on land with our net to fish, and caught 10 great mullets , of a foot and a half long a piece and a ray as great as four men could haul into the ship.” Recovering Environment

Unfortunately, on his annual trips up the Hudson River, Reynolds has been unable to encounter the natural bounty that Hudson witnessed , even though he says the river has been rebounding since the passage of 1972’s Clean Water Act , which sought to reduce the direct discharge of pollutants into the nation’s waterways . “Fish populations have dramatically declined from Hudson’s time, but they are resurging,” Reynolds says. “We’ve lost several species that have been really hard hit: sturgeon , shad , stripers , herring.” Meanwhile, another entry in Juet’s journal describes Hudson’s crew trading beads, knives and hatchets for the native inhabitants’ supplies of beaver and otter skins. Though one species is not as prevalent in the Hudson River Valley as it was in Hudson’s day, Reynolds notes that certain animals have returned to the area in impressive numbers over the last decade and a half. “We have not observed any otter in the navigable portion of the Hudson River, but we’ve observed beaver ,” he says. “We’ve observed muskrat . We’ve seen deer . We’ve seen fox . We’ve seen eagles . We’ve seen ospreys . Fifteen years ago, it was quite a special thing to see an eagle in the Hudson River Valley. Now, it’s unusual if we don’t see an eagle when we are traveling anywhere in the Hudson Valley even for a day.”

Hudson Bay Henry Hudson continued to explore waterways in the New World after exploring the river that bears his name. The largest bay in the world, Hudson Bay, is named for him. It is also where he died. In 1611, after a brutal winter in the ice of the bay, Hudson's crew, including Robert Juet, set him adrift in a small boat with his teenage son and eight other men, most of whom were sick. He was never heard from again.

Juet's Journey on the Half Moon Follow the voyages of the Half Moon replica and read Robert Juet's journal in its entirety .

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In the Iberian Peninsula the impetus of the counteroffensive against the Moors carried the Portuguese to probe the West African coastline and the Spanish to attempt the expulsion of Islam from the western Mediterranean. In the last years of the 15th century, Portuguese navigators established the sea route to India and within a decade had secured control of the trade routes in the Indian Ocean and its approaches. Mercantile interests, crusading and missionary zeal, and scientific curiosity were intermingled as the motives for this epic achievement. Similar hopes inspired Spanish exploitation of the discovery by Christopher Columbus of the Caribbean outposts of the American continent in 1492. The Treaties of Tordesillas and Saragossa in 1494 and 1529 defined the limits of westward Spanish exploration and the eastern ventures of Portugal. The two states acting as the vanguard of the expansion of Europe had thus divided the newly discovered sea lanes of the world between them.

By the time of the Treaty of Saragossa, when Portugal secured the exclusion of Spain from the East Indies , Spain had begun the conquest of Central and South America . In 1519, the year in which Ferdinand Magellan embarked on the westward circumnavigation of the globe, Hernán Cortés launched his expedition against Mexico. The seizure of Peru by Francisco Pizarro and the enforcement of Portuguese claims to Brazil completed the major steps in the Iberian occupation of the continent. By the middle of the century, the age of the conquistadores was replaced by an era of colonization, based both on the procurement of precious metal by Indian labour and on pastoral and plantation economies using imported African slaves. The influx of bullion into Europe became significant in the late 1520s, and from about 1550 it began to produce a profound effect upon the economy of the Old World.

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Supplement to Critical Thinking

This supplement elaborates on the history of the articulation, promotion and adoption of critical thinking as an educational goal.

John Dewey (1910: 74, 82) introduced the term ‘critical thinking’ as the name of an educational goal, which he identified with a scientific attitude of mind. More commonly, he called the goal ‘reflective thought’, ‘reflective thinking’, ‘reflection’, or just ‘thought’ or ‘thinking’. He describes his book as written for two purposes. The first was to help people to appreciate the kinship of children’s native curiosity, fertile imagination and love of experimental inquiry to the scientific attitude. The second was to help people to consider how recognizing this kinship in educational practice “would make for individual happiness and the reduction of social waste” (iii). He notes that the ideas in the book obtained concreteness in the Laboratory School in Chicago.

Dewey’s ideas were put into practice by some of the schools that participated in the Eight-Year Study in the 1930s sponsored by the Progressive Education Association in the United States. For this study, 300 colleges agreed to consider for admission graduates of 30 selected secondary schools or school systems from around the country who experimented with the content and methods of teaching, even if the graduates had not completed the then-prescribed secondary school curriculum. One purpose of the study was to discover through exploration and experimentation how secondary schools in the United States could serve youth more effectively (Aikin 1942). Each experimental school was free to change the curriculum as it saw fit, but the schools agreed that teaching methods and the life of the school should conform to the idea (previously advocated by Dewey) that people develop through doing things that are meaningful to them, and that the main purpose of the secondary school was to lead young people to understand, appreciate and live the democratic way of life characteristic of the United States (Aikin 1942: 17–18). In particular, school officials believed that young people in a democracy should develop the habit of reflective thinking and skill in solving problems (Aikin 1942: 81). Students’ work in the classroom thus consisted more often of a problem to be solved than a lesson to be learned. Especially in mathematics and science, the schools made a point of giving students experience in clear, logical thinking as they solved problems. The report of one experimental school, the University School of Ohio State University, articulated this goal of improving students’ thinking:

Critical or reflective thinking originates with the sensing of a problem. It is a quality of thought operating in an effort to solve the problem and to reach a tentative conclusion which is supported by all available data. It is really a process of problem solving requiring the use of creative insight, intellectual honesty, and sound judgment. It is the basis of the method of scientific inquiry. The success of democracy depends to a large extent on the disposition and ability of citizens to think critically and reflectively about the problems which must of necessity confront them, and to improve the quality of their thinking is one of the major goals of education. (Commission on the Relation of School and College of the Progressive Education Association 1943: 745–746)

The Eight-Year Study had an evaluation staff, which developed, in consultation with the schools, tests to measure aspects of student progress that fell outside the focus of the traditional curriculum. The evaluation staff classified many of the schools’ stated objectives under the generic heading “clear thinking” or “critical thinking” (Smith, Tyler, & Evaluation Staff 1942: 35–36). To develop tests of achievement of this broad goal, they distinguished five overlapping aspects of it: ability to interpret data, abilities associated with an understanding of the nature of proof, and the abilities to apply principles of science, of social studies and of logical reasoning. The Eight-Year Study also had a college staff, directed by a committee of college administrators, whose task was to determine how well the experimental schools had prepared their graduates for college. The college staff compared the performance of 1,475 college students from the experimental schools with an equal number of graduates from conventional schools, matched in pairs by sex, age, race, scholastic aptitude scores, home and community background, interests, and probable future. They concluded that, on 18 measures of student success, the graduates of the experimental schools did a somewhat better job than the comparison group. The graduates from the six most traditional of the experimental schools showed no large or consistent differences. The graduates from the six most experimental schools, on the other hand, had much greater differences in their favour. The graduates of the two most experimental schools, the college staff reported:

… surpassed their comparison groups by wide margins in academic achievement, intellectual curiosity, scientific approach to problems, and interest in contemporary affairs. The differences in their favor were even greater in general resourcefulness, in enjoyment of reading, [in] participation in the arts, in winning non-academic honors, and in all aspects of college life except possibly participation in sports and social activities. (Aikin 1942: 114)

One of these schools was a private school with students from privileged families and the other the experimental section of a public school with students from non-privileged families. The college staff reported that the graduates of the two schools were indistinguishable from each other in terms of college success.

In 1933 Dewey issued an extensively rewritten edition of his How We Think (Dewey 1910), with the sub-title “A restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process”. Although the restatement retains the basic structure and content of the original book, Dewey made a number of changes. He rewrote and simplified his logical analysis of the process of reflection, made his ideas clearer and more definite, replaced the terms ‘induction’ and ‘deduction’ by the phrases ‘control of data and evidence’ and ‘control of reasoning and concepts’, added more illustrations, rearranged chapters, and revised the parts on teaching to reflect changes in schools since 1910. In particular, he objected to one-sided practices of some “experimental” and “progressive” schools that allowed children freedom but gave them no guidance, citing as objectionable practices novelty and variety for their own sake, experiences and activities with real materials but of no educational significance, treating random and disconnected activity as if it were an experiment, failure to summarize net accomplishment at the end of an inquiry, non-educative projects, and treatment of the teacher as a negligible factor rather than as “the intellectual leader of a social group” (Dewey 1933: 273). Without explaining his reasons, Dewey eliminated the previous edition’s uses of the words ‘critical’ and ‘uncritical’, thus settling firmly on ‘reflection’ or ‘reflective thinking’ as the preferred term for his subject-matter. In the revised edition, the word ‘critical’ occurs only once, where Dewey writes that “a person may not be sufficiently critical about the ideas that occur to him” (1933: 16, italics in original); being critical is thus a component of reflection, not the whole of it. In contrast, the Eight-Year Study by the Progressive Education Association treated ‘critical thinking’ and ‘reflective thinking’ as synonyms.

In the same period, Dewey collaborated on a history of the Laboratory School in Chicago with two former teachers from the school (Mayhew & Edwards 1936). The history describes the school’s curriculum and organization, activities aimed at developing skills, parents’ involvement, and the habits of mind that the children acquired. A concluding chapter evaluates the school’s achievements, counting as a success its staging of the curriculum to correspond to the natural development of the growing child. In two appendices, the authors describe the evolution of Dewey’s principles of education and Dewey himself describes the theory of the Chicago experiment (Dewey 1936).

Glaser (1941) reports in his doctoral dissertation the method and results of an experiment in the development of critical thinking conducted in the fall of 1938. He defines critical thinking as Dewey defined reflective thinking:

Critical thinking calls for a persistent effort to examine any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the evidence that supports it and the further conclusions to which it tends. (Glaser 1941: 6; cf. Dewey 1910: 6; Dewey 1933: 9)

In the experiment, eight lesson units directed at improving critical thinking abilities were taught to four grade 12 high school classes, with pre-test and post-test of the students using the Otis Quick-Scoring Mental Ability Test and the Watson-Glaser Tests of Critical Thinking (developed in collaboration with Glaser’s dissertation sponsor, Goodwin Watson). The average gain in scores on these tests was greater to a statistically significant degree among the students who received the lessons in critical thinking than among the students in a control group of four grade 12 high school classes taking the usual curriculum in English. Glaser concludes:

The aspect of critical thinking which appears most susceptible to general improvement is the attitude of being disposed to consider in a thoughtful way the problems and subjects that come within the range of one’s experience. An attitude of wanting evidence for beliefs is more subject to general transfer. Development of skill in applying the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning, however, appears to be specifically related to, and in fact limited by, the acquisition of pertinent knowledge and facts concerning the problem or subject matter toward which the thinking is to be directed. (Glaser 1941: 175)

Retest scores and observable behaviour indicated that students in the intervention group retained their growth in ability to think critically for at least six months after the special instruction.

In 1948 a group of U.S. college examiners decided to develop taxonomies of educational objectives with a common vocabulary that they could use for communicating with each other about test items. The first of these taxonomies, for the cognitive domain, appeared in 1956 (Bloom et al. 1956), and included critical thinking objectives. It has become known as Bloom’s taxonomy. A second taxonomy, for the affective domain (Krathwohl, Bloom, & Masia 1964), and a third taxonomy, for the psychomotor domain (Simpson 1966–67), appeared later. Each of the taxonomies is hierarchical, with achievement of a higher educational objective alleged to require achievement of corresponding lower educational objectives.

Bloom’s taxonomy has six major categories. From lowest to highest, they are knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Within each category, there are sub-categories, also arranged hierarchically from the educationally prior to the educationally posterior. The lowest category, though called ‘knowledge’, is confined to objectives of remembering information and being able to recall or recognize it, without much transformation beyond organizing it (Bloom et al. 1956: 28–29). The five higher categories are collectively termed “intellectual abilities and skills” (Bloom et al. 1956: 204). The term is simply another name for critical thinking abilities and skills:

Although information or knowledge is recognized as an important outcome of education, very few teachers would be satisfied to regard this as the primary or the sole outcome of instruction. What is needed is some evidence that the students can do something with their knowledge, that is, that they can apply the information to new situations and problems. It is also expected that students will acquire generalized techniques for dealing with new problems and new materials. Thus, it is expected that when the student encounters a new problem or situation, he will select an appropriate technique for attacking it and will bring to bear the necessary information, both facts and principles. This has been labeled “critical thinking” by some, “reflective thinking” by Dewey and others, and “problem solving” by still others. In the taxonomy, we have used the term “intellectual abilities and skills”. (Bloom et al. 1956: 38)

Comprehension and application objectives, as their names imply, involve understanding and applying information. Critical thinking abilities and skills show up in the three highest categories of analysis, synthesis and evaluation. The condensed version of Bloom’s taxonomy (Bloom et al. 1956: 201–207) gives the following examples of objectives at these levels:

analysis objectives : ability to recognize unstated assumptions, ability to check the consistency of hypotheses with given information and assumptions, ability to recognize the general techniques used in advertising, propaganda and other persuasive materials
synthesis objectives : organizing ideas and statements in writing, ability to propose ways of testing a hypothesis, ability to formulate and modify hypotheses
evaluation objectives : ability to indicate logical fallacies, comparison of major theories about particular cultures

The analysis, synthesis and evaluation objectives in Bloom’s taxonomy collectively came to be called the “higher-order thinking skills” (Tankersley 2005: chap. 5). Although the analysis-synthesis-evaluation sequence mimics phases in Dewey’s (1933) logical analysis of the reflective thinking process, it has not generally been adopted as a model of a critical thinking process. While commending the inspirational value of its ratio of five categories of thinking objectives to one category of recall objectives, Ennis (1981b) points out that the categories lack criteria applicable across topics and domains. For example, analysis in chemistry is so different from analysis in literature that there is not much point in teaching analysis as a general type of thinking. Further, the postulated hierarchy seems questionable at the higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. For example, ability to indicate logical fallacies hardly seems more complex than the ability to organize statements and ideas in writing.

A revised version of Bloom’s taxonomy (Anderson et al. 2001) distinguishes the intended cognitive process in an educational objective (such as being able to recall, to compare or to check) from the objective’s informational content (“knowledge”), which may be factual, conceptual, procedural, or metacognitive. The result is a so-called “Taxonomy Table” with four rows for the kinds of informational content and six columns for the six main types of cognitive process. The authors name the types of cognitive process by verbs, to indicate their status as mental activities. They change the name of the ‘comprehension’ category to ‘understand’ and of the ‘synthesis’ category to ’create’, and switch the order of synthesis and evaluation. The result is a list of six main types of cognitive process aimed at by teachers: remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create. The authors retain the idea of a hierarchy of increasing complexity, but acknowledge some overlap, for example between understanding and applying. And they retain the idea that critical thinking and problem solving cut across the more complex cognitive processes. The terms ‘critical thinking’ and ‘problem solving’, they write:

are widely used and tend to become touchstones of curriculum emphasis. Both generally include a variety of activities that might be classified in disparate cells of the Taxonomy Table. That is, in any given instance, objectives that involve problem solving and critical thinking most likely call for cognitive processes in several categories on the process dimension. For example, to think critically about an issue probably involves some Conceptual knowledge to Analyze the issue. Then, one can Evaluate different perspectives in terms of the criteria and, perhaps, Create a novel, yet defensible perspective on this issue. (Anderson et al. 2001: 269–270; italics in original)

In the revised taxonomy, only a few sub-categories, such as inferring, have enough commonality to be treated as a distinct critical thinking ability that could be taught and assessed as a general ability.

A landmark contribution to philosophical scholarship on the concept of critical thinking was a 1962 article in the Harvard Educational Review by Robert H. Ennis, with the title “A concept of critical thinking: A proposed basis for research in the teaching and evaluation of critical thinking ability” (Ennis 1962). Ennis took as his starting-point a conception of critical thinking put forward by B. Othanel Smith:

We shall consider thinking in terms of the operations involved in the examination of statements which we, or others, may believe. A speaker declares, for example, that “Freedom means that the decisions in America’s productive effort are made not in the minds of a bureaucracy but in the free market”. Now if we set about to find out what this statement means and to determine whether to accept or reject it, we would be engaged in thinking which, for lack of a better term, we shall call critical thinking. If one wishes to say that this is only a form of problem-solving in which the purpose is to decide whether or not what is said is dependable, we shall not object. But for our purposes we choose to call it critical thinking. (Smith 1953: 130)

Adding a normative component to this conception, Ennis defined critical thinking as “the correct assessing of statements” (Ennis 1962: 83). On the basis of this definition, he distinguished 12 “aspects” of critical thinking corresponding to types or aspects of statements, such as judging whether an observation statement is reliable and grasping the meaning of a statement. He noted that he did not include judging value statements. Cutting across the 12 aspects, he distinguished three dimensions of critical thinking: logical (judging relationships between meanings of words and statements), criterial (knowledge of the criteria for judging statements), and pragmatic (the impression of the background purpose). For each aspect, Ennis described the applicable dimensions, including criteria. He proposed the resulting construct as a basis for developing specifications for critical thinking tests and for research on instructional methods and levels.

In the 1970s and 1980s there was an upsurge of attention to the development of thinking skills. The annual International Conference on Critical Thinking and Educational Reform has attracted since its start in 1980 tens of thousands of educators from all levels. In 1983 the College Entrance Examination Board proclaimed reasoning as one of six basic academic competencies needed by college students (College Board 1983). Departments of education in the United States and around the world began to include thinking objectives in their curriculum guidelines for school subjects. For example, Ontario’s social sciences and humanities curriculum guideline for secondary schools requires “the use of critical and creative thinking skills and/or processes” as a goal of instruction and assessment in each subject and course (Ontario Ministry of Education 2013: 30). The document describes critical thinking as follows:

Critical thinking is the process of thinking about ideas or situations in order to understand them fully, identify their implications, make a judgement, and/or guide decision making. Critical thinking includes skills such as questioning, predicting, analysing, synthesizing, examining opinions, identifying values and issues, detecting bias, and distinguishing between alternatives. Students who are taught these skills become critical thinkers who can move beyond superficial conclusions to a deeper understanding of the issues they are examining. They are able to engage in an inquiry process in which they explore complex and multifaceted issues, and questions for which there may be no clear-cut answers (Ontario Ministry of Education 2013: 46).

Sweden makes schools responsible for ensuring that each pupil who completes compulsory school “can make use of critical thinking and independently formulate standpoints based on knowledge and ethical considerations” (Skolverket 2018: 12). Subject syllabi incorporate this requirement, and items testing critical thinking skills appear on national tests that are a required step toward university admission. For example, the core content of biology, physics and chemistry in years 7-9 includes critical examination of sources of information and arguments encountered by pupils in different sources and social discussions related to these sciences, in both digital and other media. (Skolverket 2018: 170, 181, 192). Correspondingly, in year 9 the national tests require using knowledge of biology, physics or chemistry “to investigate information, communicate and come to a decision on issues concerning health, energy, technology, the environment, use of natural resources and ecological sustainability” (see the message from the School Board ). Other jurisdictions similarly embed critical thinking objectives in curriculum guidelines.

At the college level, a new wave of introductory logic textbooks, pioneered by Kahane (1971), applied the tools of logic to contemporary social and political issues. Popular contemporary textbooks of this sort include those by Bailin and Battersby (2016b), Boardman, Cavender and Kahane (2018), Browne and Keeley (2018), Groarke and Tindale (2012), and Moore and Parker (2020). In their wake, colleges and universities in North America transformed their introductory logic course into a general education service course with a title like ‘critical thinking’ or ‘reasoning’. In 1980, the trustees of California’s state university and colleges approved as a general education requirement a course in critical thinking, described as follows:

Instruction in critical thinking is to be designed to achieve an understanding of the relationship of language to logic, which should lead to the ability to analyze, criticize, and advocate ideas, to reason inductively and deductively, and to reach factual or judgmental conclusions based on sound inferences drawn from unambiguous statements of knowledge or belief. The minimal competence to be expected at the successful conclusion of instruction in critical thinking should be the ability to distinguish fact from judgment, belief from knowledge, and skills in elementary inductive and deductive processes, including an understanding of the formal and informal fallacies of language and thought. (Dumke 1980)

Since December 1983, the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking has sponsored sessions at the three annual divisional meetings of the American Philosophical Association. In December 1987, the Committee on Pre-College Philosophy of the American Philosophical Association invited Peter Facione to make a systematic inquiry into the current state of critical thinking and critical thinking assessment. Facione assembled a group of 46 other academic philosophers and psychologists to participate in a multi-round Delphi process, whose product was entitled Critical Thinking: A Statement of Expert Consensus for Purposes of Educational Assessment and Instruction (Facione 1990a). The statement listed abilities and dispositions that should be the goals of a lower-level undergraduate course in critical thinking. Researchers in nine European countries determined which of these skills and dispositions employers expect of university graduates (Dominguez 2018 a), compared those expectations to critical thinking educational practices in post-secondary educational institutions (Dominguez 2018b), developed a course on critical thinking education for university teachers (Dominguez 2018c) and proposed in response to identified gaps between expectations and practices an “educational protocol” that post-secondary educational institutions in Europe could use to develop critical thinking (Elen et al. 2019).

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