{"id":5865,"date":"2015-10-12T18:44:31","date_gmt":"2015-10-12T22:44:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/?p=5865"},"modified":"2019-05-15T13:48:36","modified_gmt":"2019-05-15T17:48:36","slug":"day-98-a-taste-of-columbus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/?p=5865","title":{"rendered":"Day 98: A taste of Columbus"},"content":{"rendered":"

Columbus is the quintessential Dead White Guy – castigated as one who was undeservedly glorified<\/a> by other elites.<\/p>\n

The guy had a tough trip across the Atlantic, for sure, and he launched the colonization of the Americas, so he is not insignificant.\u00a0But you don’t have to be a Howard Zinn<\/a> fan to know that\u00a0he didn’t actually “discover America” (the Vikings did, 500 years earlier), and the people who were here for 12,000+ years before Columbus\u00a0don’t actually think his landing is cause for celebration.<\/p>\n

Rather than attempt to\u00a0rehabilitate Columbus, I suggest we make today\u00a0the Spice Holiday. Spices are ethnicity-neutral and had more impact on history than Columbus.<\/p>\n

Columbus’ voyage was driven by Europe’s need to find a shortcut to the spice trade<\/a>. There’s been a spice trade for at least 5,000 years<\/a>; and it is valuable stuff, which made\u00a0the Arab traders rich for centuries. (Spice traders who tried to adulterate saffron were burned at the stake<\/a>, one source claims.)<\/p>\n

The European push to have their own routes to\u00a0the spices, some historians say, was the beginning of the modern era.<\/a>\u00a0When the Ottoman Empire took over Constantinople in 1453, the Western Europeans squirmed at the idea of their spices and other goods being taxed as they\u00a0passed through an ambitious, non-Christian gateway, and started looking for ways to sail to India around Africa.<\/p>\n

Hence, Columbus, the New World, revolution, and other major developments that were key to what we call modernity.<\/p>\n

That\u00a0cinnamon on your applesauce and\u00a0pepper on your steak are no small thing.<\/p>\n

\"Day<\/a><\/p>\n

Today’s penny is a 1992, the quincentennial\u00a0of Columbus landing in America.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Columbus is the quintessential Dead White Guy – castigated as one who was undeservedly glorified by other elites. The guy had a tough trip across the Atlantic, for sure, and he launched the colonization of the Americas, so he is not insignificant.\u00a0But you don’t have to be a Howard Zinn fan to know that\u00a0he didn’t … read more Day 98: A taste of Columbus<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5869,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[319],"tags":[170,197,349,353,352,350,354,351],"class_list":["post-5865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inheritance","tag-170","tag-america","tag-columbus","tag-discovery","tag-history","tag-holiday","tag-modernity","tag-spice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5865"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5865\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5871,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5865\/revisions\/5871"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}