Customer Reviews

Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years

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Rethinking Columbus provides a variety of resources, includign articles, essays, poems, song lyrics. lesson plan ideas, maps, lists, book reviews, and itnerviews. All around the central theme of finding an accurate interpretation of the Native American experience in the Americas since Columbus landed here in 1492. It is especially useful as a place for alternative resources that might be used in the classroom in the form of copyable pages that could be read to or by students, depending on their reading level. The status quo in our system is to teach about Columbus as a hero who "discovered" America. This book gives us an alternative version, where Columbus's actions instigate mass genocide, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and issues of opression that Native American's still suffer today.

The book does not contain fully detailed lesson plans, but has several pages of ideas for lessons with appropriate resources. There is an elementary and a secondary section, the secondary section covers mroe modern issues Native Americans face, while the elementary section covers more of the history. The book has two articles that review children's literature surrounding Columbus. The article on traditional literature shows the massive dismissal in a majority of the books of Native People as human beings of worth, only the white people have names, they are heroes, it is told from only their point of view. The second article reviews books that attempt to be more culturally relevant, while all of these also have problems. I was frustrated reading this, because it did not review books that were completely apprppriate, and maybe there aren't many. They did list a few in the back of the book. But by having the reviews of where there could be problems with the literature, teachers can still use the resources and discuss with their students how the author might have gotten it wrong.

Since the book is comprised of a series of articles, it is not one you have to read front to back. You can pick it up and easily read a section, and it could be something you could come to with a specific topic and easily find a resource without dredging through long passages.

The book could go into further detail about connections outside social studies, such as the accomplishments of native peoples in the areas of science, math, and other areas.

I always thought that there was another story to every history event. They always just told us about the preditures doings and not what happened to the victims. I never knew the whole truth about the Columbus aventure. I also never heard of the way they treated Native Americans when they came into our country. I recommend this book to all school systems. All students and adults should know the truth about their hero. This book also made me look at other events in the past that the regular history books left out. I hope to learn more about the truth from other history events that happened. This is the best book that I read in a long time.

As a history teacher who feels it is my responsibility to teach histories that have been marginalized and to teach truth that has been denied, Rethinking Columbus (and other books put out by Rethinking Schools) is tremendously useful, not only for the practical ideas for lesson plans and activities (which are wonderful), but also for the general message of the importance of critical thinking among students and teachers. I wish curriculum of this sort had been shared with me in my teacher education program.

I attended a worshop on Native Americans. The leader used quite a bit of information from 'Rethinking Columbus'. I found it facinating so I ordered the book for my grown son who has always been very interested in Native Americans. He was so grateful to receive it.

This is a wonderful book about atrocity and genocide. It should be reqiured in every public school in the U.S.

I hope that being one of the most widely assigned among the books recently banned in AZ public schools will result in a surge of interest toward it.

This book is unfortunately an unfair and biased interpretation of American history. I recommend more centrist, unopinionated material.

Bigelow seeks to shamelessly use the schools as the propaganda arm for his obsolescent pseudo Marxist horse hockey - despite having absoltuely no democratically mandated authority to do so; thus, like a true apparatachik, he boldly goes where no sane person wants to go, onto slef-initiated committees where he and his ilk rhetorically bludgeon their way to exclusive membership and hope to use the mechanism of bureaucratic state coercion to cram their communist agenda deep into the...well, you get the picture. The odd thing about the Bigandlow type is they generally bring with them a trailing retinue of glassy- eyed women who nod stone faced as the Bigandlow Chairman pours forth venom against the perfidious pawns of the profiteers in meatings no sane person would attend more than once.

Photos of Bigelow bending down to help black students smiling at their desks and working earnestly at their studies are eerily similar to pictures of Hitler petting his dogs who have come to sniff his vegetarian meal.

The next 500 years in the title should give you a pretty good idea that this totalitarian millenialism all over again. Will Bigandlow take his case to the voters and run an HONEST campaign as a communist? Of course not. Like any good Stalinist - Leninist, he knows damn well that the capitalists will simply pervert the election and sway the gullible masses with fear. Thus Bigandlow doesn't mind lying about his intentions until he feels the people are ready for communnism. And he and his ilk have annointed themselves the cultural army that will transform consciousness.