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Never Say “Never Again”

Jeffrey Magee

in The Uncrowned King of Swing: Fletcher Henderson and Big Band Jazz

Far from securing his position and income, Henderson's work for Benny Goodman initiated an unstable sequence of ups and downs that continued until his death in 1952. Goodman's success, and the ... More

Far from securing his position and income, Henderson's work for Benny Goodman initiated an unstable sequence of ups and downs that continued until his death in 1952. Goodman's success, and the unprecedented popularity of swing, spurred Henderson to form a new band, including trumpeter Roy Eldridge and saxophonist Chu Berry, which had mixed fortunes. The band enjoyed an extended residence at the Grand Terrace Café in Chicago, where Henderson had a hit with a piece titled “Christopher Columbus”. This chapter explores that tune's conflicting attributions and musical features. It continues with a survey of Henderson's posthumous legacy, noting how Henderson's style become the common tongue of big-band swing, how his music continues to appear on film and radio, and how the vicissitudes of Henderson's career speak to larger unresolved issues in American history and culture.Less

Concordia Mundi

Zvi Ben‐Dor Benite

in The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History

This chapter discusses the search for the ten tribes in the Americas. It shows how the possibility to find the tribes in the Americas was “there” even before the discovery of the Americas ” through ... More

This chapter discusses the search for the ten tribes in the Americas. It shows how the possibility to find the tribes in the Americas was “there” even before the discovery of the Americas ” through telling the story of Canary Island’s discovery several decades before. It also shows how the Ten Tribes were “removed” by European cartographers from their “original” locations in Ethiopia and Central Asia and placed in northeastern Siberia. From there they crossed the water barriers to the Americas. The chapter also discusses how the reformation affected Christian thinking about the ten tribes and heightened the debates about them among Christian thinkers, such as Sebastian Munster, John Calvin, and others. The chapter also discusses how the ten tribes became central in Spanish thinking after the conquest of America. Finally, the chapter shows how the story of the ten tribes became briefly fused with the myth of Atlantis and the history of the Scythians.Less

“I Lead the Way, Like Columbus”: Joseph Smith, Genocide, and Revelatory Ambiguity

Zachary McLeod Hutchins

in Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon

Readers of The Book of Mormon have long identified Christopher Columbus as the “man among the Gentiles” whose divinely prompted journey to the Americas is foretold therein; Columbus thus became a ... More

Readers of The Book of Mormon have long identified Christopher Columbus as the “man among the Gentiles” whose divinely prompted journey to the Americas is foretold therein; Columbus thus became a model for the prophetic leadership of Joseph Smith. But if Columbus was inspired to discover the New World, that inspiration was imprecise, as the admiral sailed for China, suggesting that revelation is necessarily an ambiguous, messy process whose conclusions are uncertain and provisional, subject to correction or revision. Because his arrival in the Americas precipitated the genocide of Native peoples, identifying Columbus as a prophetic figure has forced faithful readers of The Book of Mormon to grapple with the question of theodicy. Some, like the novelist Orson Scott Card, have suggested that the Amerindian genocide is compatible with the justice of a loving God, while others have argued that The Book of Mormon celebrates prophetic weakness and promotes hermeneutic humility.Less

Selling the Indies: Columbus and the Economy of the Marvelous

in New World Gold: Cultural Anxiety and Monetary Disorder in Early Modern Spain

This chapter focuses on the difficulties encountered by Christopher Columbus in providing the reliable sources of gold that he had promised to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, his royal sponsors. ... More

This chapter focuses on the difficulties encountered by Christopher Columbus in providing the reliable sources of gold that he had promised to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, his royal sponsors. Columbus describes only projected earnings and uses symbols to represent wealth and monetary value, viewing the Indies as a golden land given by God to the Spanish monarchs and using grace as a guarantee of value and a form of credit. The theme of the providential donation, which recurs in early New World historiography and was at the core of the imperial imagination, raises questions about how to represent the value of what is given and establishes a symbolic function in which the worth of gold is created through New World exotica. The practice of gift exchange, an essential relational mode used in both medieval and early modern Europe, is linked to Columbus's writings via generosity, grace, and obligation. Once they acquired a vast empire in America, Castilians began to regard themselves as a chosen people divinely favored with wealth and a global empire.Less

To Build the Falling Castle: Louis MacNeice and the Drama of Form

Ian Whittington

in Writing the Radio War: Literature, Politics and the BBC, 1939-1945

Collectively, Louis MacNeice’s output of radio dramas and features represents one of the greatest achievements of wartime radio broadcasting in Britain. For MacNeice, already interested in poetic ... More

Collectively, Louis MacNeice’s output of radio dramas and features represents one of the greatest achievements of wartime radio broadcasting in Britain. For MacNeice, already interested in poetic form, radio provided a new medium with its own technical limitations, generic possibilities, and productive constraints. From the early features in the Stones Cry Out series (1941), through his first verse epic, Alexander Nevsky (1941), to the spectacular triumph Christopher Columbus (1942), MacNeice built ever more complex soundscapes in which a listening audience might immerse themselves, if only to rediscover a sense of collective purpose. Within MacNeice’s radio dramas, human examples of effective auditory navigation—in the form of blind characters and other attentive listeners—populate sonic environments structured by distinctions of proximity and distance, the present and the past, and safety and danger. MacNeice’s broadcasts therefore achieve propagandistic goals via modernist means, creating critical listeners as a means of forging good citizens; in the process, the broadcasts demonstrate that Priestley’s demotic approach was not the only means of uniting the radio public around a common goal.Less

First Encounters, Inventing America, and the Columbian Exchange

Luis Martínez-Fernández

in Key to the New World: A History of Early Colonial Cuba

This chapter covers the subject of the discovery of America, including the voyages of Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci. It looks at the theological, scientific, and philosophical debates ... More

This chapter covers the subject of the discovery of America, including the voyages of Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci. It looks at the theological, scientific, and philosophical debates surrounding the early encounters between Europeans and the indigenous inhabitants, as well as the evolving cartography of the New World. The chapter also examines two useful perspectives: Edmundo O’Gorman’s “Invention of America,” and Alfred W. Crosby’s “Columbian Exchange.”Less

Discovering Cannibals: Europeans, Caribs, and Arawaks in the Caribbean

Kelly L. Watson

in Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World

This chapter discusses the connection between sexuality and conquest, particularly on the ideas envisioned in Samuel Eliot Morison's book, The Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher ... More

This chapter discusses the connection between sexuality and conquest, particularly on the ideas envisioned in Samuel Eliot Morison's book, The Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus. Morison describes the American continents as a virginal woman and Spanish exploration as sexual conquest. He states that the colonizers showed up in Americas without their permission and laid claim to lands and people who could not object because they were not even aware that a claim was being made. Thus, rape would be an appropriate metaphor if one would describe their first meeting in sexual terms. In relation to this claim, the chapter explores the discourse of Carib cannibalism as gendered in a variety of complex ways. European writings about the New World demonstrated preconceived notions about proper displays of gender and sexuality, and these assumptions led them to construct Indians as inferior Others.Less

Invasive Specie: Rabbits, Conquistadors, and Capital in the Historia de las Indias (1527–1561) by Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484–1566)

Nicole D. Legnani

in Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human

This chapter traces a narrative archipelago from Madeira to Hispaniola through the metonymy of wood and the trajectory of Christopher Columbus, as allegorized by an anecdote about the reproductive ... More

This chapter traces a narrative archipelago from Madeira to Hispaniola through the metonymy of wood and the trajectory of Christopher Columbus, as allegorized by an anecdote about the reproductive destruction of an invasive species on a deserted island off the coast of West Africa in the Historia de las Indias by Bartolomé de Las Casas. It reflects on the connections afforded by the polysemy of naturaleza in sixteenth-century Spanish and made by Las Casas in his anecdotes about colonial capitalism on Hispaniola and Madeira in both Historia de las Indias and his edition of Christopher Columbus’s Diario a Bordo.As islands have always served as schematic shorthand for categories and indigeneity, an anecdote about a plague of rabbits on the Madeira islands in the early fifteenth century blurs the limits between state and enterprise, animal and human, native and nature (naturaland naturaleza), and the natural and unnatural (naturaand contra natura). What seems like a digression into the Madeira rabbits from Las Casas’s larger narrative about the conquest of America serves instead as a self-reflexive allegory for the paradoxical project of narrating origins in historical processes, especially destructive ones that nonetheless reproduce on a global scale.Less

Following the Admiral: Reckonings with Great Men’s History

Dixa Ramírez

in Colonial Phantoms: Belonging and Refusal in the Dominican Americas, from the 19th Century to the Present

This chapter examines how European colonialism, U.S. empire, and Dominican patriarchal nationalism intersected over a century to create the Columbus Lighthouse Memorial in Santo Domingo. These ... More

This chapter examines how European colonialism, U.S. empire, and Dominican patriarchal nationalism intersected over a century to create the Columbus Lighthouse Memorial in Santo Domingo. These entities, however, cannot account for subaltern subjects’ relationships to monuments such as the Lighthouse and the history that they celebrate. To get at this “history from below,” the chapter analyzes Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the Dominican-American film La Soga, and the controversy surrounding the 1985 murder of pop merengue icon Tony Seval in police custody. Juxtaposing these narratives, I contend that working-class island and diasporic Dominican men, most of them nonwhite, resist the persistent nationalist and imperialist violence that the Lighthouse celebrates through the performance of a distinctly Dominican hyper-masculine performance known locally as tigueraje. While resistant to Eurocentric patriarchal history, these performances remain masculinist and prioritize the enactment of violence on non-compliant subjects, including women and queer subjects.Less

Columbus Days: 1492: Conquest of Paradise

Vincent LoBrutto

in Ridley Scott: A Biography

In 1992, on the five hundredth anniversary of the world-changing voyage of Christopher Columbus, Ridley Scott created a movie that showed the personal side of the explorer. Extensive research was ... More

In 1992, on the five hundredth anniversary of the world-changing voyage of Christopher Columbus, Ridley Scott created a movie that showed the personal side of the explorer. Extensive research was poured into the project as well as insights from Columbus’s diary, which was inherited by his son. The production was lavish and exotic. The culture of the people who lived where Columbus landed is portrayed with realism and authenticity. The performances, especially that of Gérard Depardieu, are engaging. Ridley Scott captures history with meticulous location shooting and intricate lighting and composition that define the period. The film did not get great reviews and box office was unimpressive. Controversy over who Christopher Columbus really was and what he actually accomplished continues to swirl, but 1492: Conquest of Paradise brings layers of insight into his life and larger-than-life personality.Less

Popular Histories and Serious Fictions: Manifest Destiny and the Spanish Atlantic World

Gretchen J. Woertendyke

in Hemispheric Regionalism: Romance and the Geography of Genre

It is the discourse of manifest destiny that conjoins the popular romance and the Spanish Atlantic world; and Cuba provides a key site for staging the conflict between the Old World and the New. This ... More

It is the discourse of manifest destiny that conjoins the popular romance and the Spanish Atlantic world; and Cuba provides a key site for staging the conflict between the Old World and the New. This chapter explores the rich source materials negotiating the disjunctive relations between regions and the expansive American hemisphere. Washington Irving’s biography of the legendary explorer Christopher Columbus and Alexandre Exquemelin’s Buccaneers helped to create the conditions out of which popular romance emerged. Popular romance, then, becomes a vehicle through which the Spanish Atlantic world, and Cuba especially, is translated for a broad reading public. In both texts, the danger and possibility of discovery are visible on the surface: the violence of slavery, domination, and pillaging are essential features of each narrative. But these ruptures produced by the violence and friction of hemispheric relations are sutured over by the rhetoric of manifest destiny, which provides the architecture for popular romance.Less

Columbus and La Isabela

Kathleen Deagan and José María Cruxent

in Archaeology at La Isabela: America's First European Town

This chapter describes the establishment of La Isabela by Christopher Columbus during his second voyage to America. La Isabela has captured the imagination of archaeologists and historians for ... More

This chapter describes the establishment of La Isabela by Christopher Columbus during his second voyage to America. La Isabela has captured the imagination of archaeologists and historians for centuries, as the first European attempt at colonization in the unknown Americas. This first European colony was outfitted and organized without any substantial information about the social or environmental circumstances of life in America other than the brief shipboard sojourn during Columbus's first voyage. La Isabela represents a medieval Iberian concept of colonization, and so provides us with an extremely important archaeological reference point from which to study the development of the diverse and distinctive cultural mosaic of the post-1500 Americas. The life conditions and social processes of fifteenth-century La Isabela were deeply influential in shaping subsequent Spanish colonial experiences in the Americas.Less

Providence, the Renaissance Atlantic, and Law

Alexander B. Haskell

in For God, King, and People: Forging Commonwealth Bonds in Renaissance Virginia

This chapter introduces the late Renaissance preoccupation with the interplay between God's will and earthly power by focusing on three issues. Envisioning the law as pathways of rightful conduct ... More

This chapter introduces the late Renaissance preoccupation with the interplay between God's will and earthly power by focusing on three issues. Envisioning the law as pathways of rightful conduct where Providence and human initiative intersected, colonizers viewed Christopher Columbus's discovery as as a divine sign that Christians were free to cross the ocean. Because distinguishing lawful pathways from erroneous ones was a matter of conscience, the literature that emerged to justify the Virginia venture took the familiar form of casuistry. Centered on the callings or divinely appointed offices by which humans contribute to bringing about the eschatological promise of the world's redemption, casuistry underlay, for instance, the magus and humanist John Dee's claim, in 1577, that Elizabeth I had a duty as a grace-filled empress to issue her first letters patent authorizing Sir Humphrey Gilbert's colonizing voyages. And colonization was inevitably defined as a project in forging commonwealths that brought everyone to his or her duties, for only in such a morally complete polity would Virginia satisfy God and contribute to coaxing sinners away from the primitive individualism left by the Fall.Less

Columbus and La Isabela

Kathleen Deagan and José María Cruxent

in Columbus's Outpost among the Tainos: Spain and America at La Isabela, 1493-1498

This chapter tells the story of Christopher Columbus's departure from Cadiz in 1493 on his second voyage to America. A jubilant affair, it stood in stark contrast to the sailing of his first ... More

This chapter tells the story of Christopher Columbus's departure from Cadiz in 1493 on his second voyage to America. A jubilant affair, it stood in stark contrast to the sailing of his first expedition a year earlier. Instead of the three small, meagerly outfitted vessels that left in 1492 under a cloud of public skepticism, in the second fleet he commanded 17 ships and more than 1200 eager men, infused with what Spanish historian Antonio Ballesteros Beretta has called the ilusion indiana, dreams of “the wild lands, the exuberant vegetation, the sweet climate, the fragrant flora, the landscape of marvels, the new animals...the tobacco and the thousand plants unknown to the Europeans...and the hopes they inspired of finding many more marvels.”Less

The Planet and the World

Eric Hayot

in On Literary Worlds

This chapter discusses two significant events which are most literally relevant to world-making. These are, first, the series of cosmological and geographical revolutions leading from Ptolemy through ... More

This chapter discusses two significant events which are most literally relevant to world-making. These are, first, the series of cosmological and geographical revolutions leading from Ptolemy through Copernicus (On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres, 1543) to Galileo and Newton; second, the circumnavigation of the planet and the European discovery of the Americas, hermetically figured by Magellan (who did not complete his voyage, which ended in 1522) and Christopher Columbus. In subsequent imaginaries, the two events are readily conjoined.Less