S4 E34 - They Taught You Columbus Was Evil. They Lied.

A generation believes Christopher Columbus was a villain. But that story didn’t emerge organically — it was written by one man, and it spread like gospel through classrooms across America.

In this full-length episode, we dismantle the Howard Zinn narrative, expose the myths (like the infamous “smallpox blankets”), and tell the real story of what happened when Europe and America collided — a clash of civilizations that shaped the modern world.

We’ll cover:
 • 📚 How Howard Zinn’s A People’s History rewrote Columbus’s legacy
• 🧠 Mary Grabar’s takedown of Zinn’s distortions
• 🧭 What Columbus actually accomplished — and why it mattered
• 🦠 Disease myths, including the smallpox blanket story and the two-way spread of illness
• ⚔️ Why the clash between Europe and the Americas was inevitable — and what would’ve happened if someone else (like the Arabs or Chinese) had arrived first
• ✝️ The role of Christianity in shaping the civilization that emerged

Columbus didn’t just carry ships across the Atlantic. He carried a civilization — with all its virtues and flaws. And the values that came with him — law above power, human worth, forgiveness, the dignity of the individual — are still the ones people want to live under today.

This is the story Howard Zinn didn’t tell. And it’s one worth reclaiming.

🎧 Subscribe to The Tenth Man Podcast for more deep dives that challenge the narratives and break the echo chamber.

Commentary on trending issues brought to you with a moderate perspective.

Transcript

0:11

The modern story of Christopher Columbus involves a villain, but the villain is not who you think it is. How one man turned Christopher Columbus into the face of evil, today on The Tenth Man One man, one book, one ideology. That's all it took to turn Christopher Columbus from one of history's greatest navigators into the ultimate villain of Western civilization. Not centuries of scholarship, not a wave of newly unearthed evidence. Just one activist historian in 1980, a catchy narrative and a captive audience of millions of students. From that moment on, Columbus was no longer the daring explorer who connected two hemispheres. He was the arch villain in the morality play of Western Imperialism. But here's the thing, if you were taught that story, that story isn't history. It's propaganda. And if we're going to talk honestly about Columbus, we need to talk first about the man who rewrote him, Howard Zinn. And then about what actually happened when Europe and America collided. Because they did collide, Europe won, and thank goodness it did. Had that not happened, the map of the world might look very different and not in the romantic way some imagine today. Howard Zinn published a People's History of the United States in 1980. The book quickly became a sensation in academia, then in high schools. By the 1990s, it was practically required reading in AP US history courses. For many students, this was their first and only exposure to Christopher Columbus. Zinn wasn't a neutral historian, which is the only kind of historian we're supposed to study, and he admitted as much in his introduction. His goal, he wrote, was to tell history from the perspective of the oppressed, not to be objective. Of course, he decided who the oppressed were, and that's not my editorializing. That's Zinn's own framing. To construct his Columbus chapter, Zinn leaned heavily on one source, Bartolome de Las Casas a Spanish priest writing decades after Columbus's voyages. Las Casas wrote vividly about atrocities committed by the Spanish, some of which he witnessed. Others he heard secondhand. His writings are valuable, but hardly neutral. Moreover, Zinn cherry picked the most inflammatory passages, ripping them from context, and presented them as if they were pages from Columbus personal diary. Professional historians across the spectrum shredded Zinn's methods. Samuel Elliot Morrison, a Pulitzer Prize winner and naval officer, wrote the definitive Columbus biography. Zinn selectively quoted him to make Columbus look worse, ignoring entire sections that praise Columbus navigational genius, or clarified the historical context. And even many left-leaning scholars called Zinn's book,"unsophisticated" called it"ideological", and"a piece of activism pretending to be history". Zinn's impact on historical memory, however, was enormous, on par with cultural figures who reshaped public perception in other fields. Think of Rachel Carson whose Silent Spring ignited the modern environmental movement by exposing real dangers in pesticide use. We may disagree with some of her conclusions, but her work was meticulously researched and genuinely transformative. Then think of the man who gave us global warming. James Hansen, the NASA scientist whose 1988 congressional testimony essentially invented the modern climate change narrative. Hansen had data, yes, but also a flare for drama that turned a technical debate into a moral crusade overnight. Howard Zinn did something similar for American history. He didn't just reinterpret the past. He rewrote the moral script, casting Columbus as the villain in a grand morality play. The difference is Carson tried to inform Hansen, tried to persuade Zinn, tried to indoctrinate. Over time, the narrative hardened. Statues came down. Columbus Day became controversial. Generations grew up knowing the myth of Zinn's Columbus, not the man himself. Zinn's version didn't go unchallenged. Historian Mary Grabar in her book, Debunking Howard Zinn meticulously dismantled his distortions, showing how he cherry picked sources, misquoted key historians, and turned moral arguments into history. Her work exposed the ideological sleight of hand that transformed Columbus from explorer into arch villain. To understand Columbus, we have to go back to the late 15th century a time when the edges of the map were filled with dragons and sea monsters. Reaching Asia by sailing West was revolutionary. Nobody in Europe had done it. Nobody knew if it could even be done. Columbus was not a conquistador with an army at his back. He was a sailor- and a good one- with a bold theory trying to reach Asia by a shorter route. He convinced Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain to fund his voyage in 1492, he crossed the Atlantic in wooden ships barely larger than modern fishing boats. He completed four transatlantic voyages opening the Americas to Europe and launching what historians call the Colombian Exchange, the massive transfer of people, plants, animals, technologies, and ideas between hemispheres. This exchange reshaped human history. Potatoes and corn maize transformed European diets. Horses revolutionized life in the Americas. Diseases crossed oceans too, with devastating consequences. But that was not planned, biological warfare. The popular myth of smallpox blankets Europeans deliberately infecting Native Americans is just that a myth. There's no credible evidence Columbus or his contemporaries ever engaged in such a scheme. The story was popularized by Howard Zinn and repeated so often that it hardened into fact in classrooms and activist rhetoric. But just as COVID didn't need a conspiracy to spread across the world, smallpox didn't need blankets. Two isolated populations met, disease did the rest. And here's the part you almost never hear. Disease traveled both ways. While smallpox and measles spread, west syphilis and other pathogens spread east, killing far more Europeans than the reverse over the following centuries. The Colombian exchange was a two-way biological highway, not a one directional tale of European villainy. Columbus himself was a man of his time, ambitious, pious, occasionally harsh, occasionally compassionate. He had authority but not absolute power. He dealt with mutinous crews, rival factions, and native groups who were hardly passive victims. Many indigenous societies practiced their own forms of conquest and slavery long before Europeans arrived. Was Columbus perfect? No. Did he participate in practices we condemn today like slavery? Yes, so what? So did every other society on Earth at the time. The transatlantic slave trade existed because slavery itself was already widespread, not because Columbus invented it. What Columbus did do was connect two halves of the world, setting the stage for global civilization as we know it. When Europe and America finally met, it was a clash of civilizations. Europe won and that's a good thing. Let's be honest. pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas were not idyllic gardens of peace. In some of the most advanced cultures, human sacrifice was institutional. The Aztecs performed ritual killings on a staggering scale, cutting out hearts to feed their gods. The Maya practiced bloodletting and sacrifice. Slavery existed in many tribes. Wars were frequent. These were civilizations, yes, but they were not morally superior to Europe. They were simply different operating under pagan religious systems where human life was expendable. European civilization for all its flaws brought with it Christianity, literacy, the rule of law. And a moral framework that would over centuries lead to the abolition of practices like slavery. Was European conquest brutal? Of course, but conquest was the global norm. What's unique is that Europe eventually turned its moral scrutiny on itself, abolishing the slave trade, elevating human rights, and spreading literacy and scientific progress on a global scale. The collision between Europe and America was inevitable. The question wasn't if, it was when and under whose values. People sometimes say, what if Columbus had never sailed? As if the two hemispheres could have remained isolated forever. That's a fantasy. If Columbus hadn't crossed from the East, someone would've crossed from the west. The Chinese were already exploring the Indian Ocean with massive treasure fleets. Japan was a rising power. Russia was pushing across Siberia. Someone was coming, and history is complex. Think back to 732 AD the Battle of Tours. Charles Martel and his outnumbered Frankish forces stopped the Arab invasion of Europe in its tracks. If Martel had lost, Europe could easily have fallen under Islamic rule. How different would the world have been if it had been the Arabs who discovered. the Americas centuries later? If the Arabs had come, the slave trade may have gone in the opposite direction. Not Europeans, enslaving Africans, but Arabs, transporting Europeans or Native Americans eastward, with a very different set of cultural values, different economic systems, and a completely different moral trajectory that would've shaped the hemisphere. Would today's activists prefer that? If the Ming Dynasty, the Shogunate, or the Caliphate had first contact, the values that define the new World would not have been European, Christian, or Western. They would've been something else entirely. Modern critics love to selectively apply 21st century moral standards backward to 15th century people. They treat Columbus as if he were a modern politician standing trial on cable news. But history doesn't work that way. Conquest was universal. Slavery was universal. Cruelty was universal. What made the European project distinct was that over time it generated the tools to question itself. Theology, philosophy, law, and eventually democratic institutions. Zinn's narrative, flattens all this complexity into a simple fable. Columbus evil. Native's good. Europe, bad. It is easy to teach. It fits neatly into activist talking points, but it's not honest history. Columbus isn't just a figure to be understood. He's a figure to be remembered and celebrated. Not because he was perfect, no one is, but because what he accomplished changed the course of history. One daring sailor opened the Atlantic and set in motion the creation of a new world. He brought not just ships and sailors, but a civilization with all its virtues and flaws, and he carried Christianity across the ocean. For all his faults. Columbus brought the faith that built hospitals, schools, cathedrals, and ultimately nations. He planted a flag. But he also planted a cross. People love to mock Christianity, but everyone wants to live where Christian values prevail, where human life has worth forgiveness is a virtue, law stands above power and the individual matters. Those were the values Europe carried across the ocean. They're the values that shaped the civilization we live in today. Howard Zinn's myth reduced all this to a morality play. History tells a richer story, and Columbus stands at its center.