{"id":3464,"date":"2020-06-19T07:34:52","date_gmt":"2020-06-19T11:34:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/?p=3464"},"modified":"2020-06-19T07:36:21","modified_gmt":"2020-06-19T11:36:21","slug":"the-city-of-detroit-removed-its-christopher-columbus-statue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/?p=3464","title":{"rendered":"The City of Detroit Removes Its Christopher Columbus Statue…."},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"The<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This week, the City of Detroit removed a bust of Christopher Columbus from its pedestal near the entrance of the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel. It’s in storage for now as the mayor and city officials decide what to do with it. No doubt it has historical value \u2014 it’s 110 years-old. Like many Columbus-related honors, this one came as a gift from Italian-Americans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Columbus sailed under the flag of Spain, but he was born in Genoa in what is now Italy. Promoting the memory of Columbus was a way for Italian-Americans \u2014 who were heavily discriminated against as new immigrants in the early 1900s \u2014 to promote themselves as “real” Americans. So the statue was less about honoring Columbus the person and more about what Columbus represented. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a similar way, we know the statues and military bases in the South were not so much about honoring the supposed virtuous lives of Confederate Generals as it was about intimidating Blacks many years after the war to codify Jim Crow laws.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, history\u00a0can be a very sensitive thing.\u00a0We as a society need to be careful about how we handle it. The best take on this that I’ve seen is a\u00a0recent post by journalist Mike Peterson\u00a0on his Cartoon Strip of the Day blog, which can be found on dailycartoonist.com<\/a>. What should we do?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The answer is to stop teaching Great Man History and switch to Major Moment History.<\/p>

The coming of Europeans to the New World was a Major Moment, and it\u2019s more important to study what it meant to everyone \u2014 everyone \u2014 involved than to memorize the names of individuals in the big chairs.<\/p>

Important Point:<\/strong>\u00a0The cure for Great Man History is not adding the names of Great Women and Great Minorities to the list of meaningless crap kids have to memorize.<\/p>

It\u2019s teaching how Major Moments \u2014 inventions and immigrations and wars and pandemics and economic booms and busts \u2014 changed normal lives and, hence, the flavor and tone of the entire nation.<\/p>

It means fewer statues and more local museums.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

You can read the whole article here: http:\/\/www.dailycartoonist.com\/index.php\/2020\/06\/13\/csotd-monumental-questions\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week, the City of Detroit removed a bust of Christopher Columbus from its pedestal near the entrance of the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel. It’s in storage for now as the mayor and city officials decide what to do with it. No doubt it has historical value \u2014 it’s 110 years-old. Like many Columbus-related honors, this one came as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,10,13,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-andrewheller-com","category-editorial-cartoon","category-michiganpress-org","category-michiganradio-org"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3464"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3464\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3467,"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3464\/revisions\/3467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}