Let us today, this Columbus Day –granted the official observation is Monday – ignore Howard Zinn and honor the guy who, for all intents and purposes, discovered America.

(snip)

America is a place that allowed tens of millions of Europeans and Asians to escape the feudalism that infected their homelands and her discovery only deserves to be celebrated. Even Africans should celebrate. Slavery existed in Africa — it wasn’t Europeans doing the slavecatching — before the trans-Atlantic slave trade and it was only after the founding of the United States did the push begin to end it. Pennsylvania was the first recognized government in the world, maybe in history, to ban slavery which happened in 1780 in the middle of the Revolutionary War.

Our hipster ironically wants a day named for Bishop Bartolomé de las Casas and there is a point to that as the Bishop is one of history’s good guys. On the other hand, he was the one who suggested that the labor lost due to the death of Indians be replaced by Africans and some credit him with the start of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

History is a bit more nuanced than Zinn and the hipster crowd make it out to be.

(excerpted from http://billlawrencedittos.com/ignore-how...brate-columbus/