What's Dennis Teaching?
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for a much more exhaustive look at what goes on in Mr. Y's Room.

Who's Howard Zinn?
You've got Google.
Go find out!

Columbus
There's something about Columbus you really ought to know...

First off, Christopher Columbus wasn't his real name. His name was Cristobol Colon. He didn't have to prove the earth was round, everyone knew it. He made four trips to the New World, only one of which could be called a Voyage of Discovery.

He could be a very mean person.

It's a great myth, though.

Quoting Howard Zinn:
He described the people who greeted him when landed in the Bahamas--they were Arawak Indians, sometimes called Tainos--and told how they waded out into the sea to greet him and his men, who must have looked and sounded like people from another world, and brought them gifts of various kinds. He described them as peaceable, gentle, and said: “They do not bear arms, and do not know for I showed them a sword--they took it by the edge and cut themselves.”

Throughout his journal, over the next months, Columbus spoke of the native Americans with what seemed like admiring awe: “They are the best people in the world and above all the gentlest--without knowledge of what is evil--nor do they murder or steal...they love their neighbors as themselves and they have the sweetest talk in the world...always laughing.”

And in a letter he wrote to one of his Spanish patrons, Columbus said: “They are very simple and honest and exceedingly liberal with all they have, none of them, in the midst of all this, in his journal, Columbus writes: “They would make fine servants. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

Columbus' second voyage consisted of a flotilla of ships laden with attack dogs, soldiers, cannon, and leg irons. His third and forth voyages were expeditions of conquest. Hit the link up there in the left column for the rest of the history...

The FPL fight in Wellington, Florida

Many of our internet visitors want to keep up with what's going on in the battle to preserve the urban forest that makes up most of the Florida Power and Light easement that runs parallel to Wellington's northern border. Here's the latest in WhatDoYaKnow.com's foray into saving the planet. Click on the text to jump to the FPL Update.

It's been a couple of years since the big celebration of Jamestown's 400th birthday! This past summer we took a fieldtrip to Jamestown and spent considerable time with the archeologists involved in the dig at the site of the original fort. The things we learned! We'll be sharing those findings and a whole lot more in the eBook Jamestown that is currently in production and will be out sometime in 2010.