The Pros And Cons Of Columbus

In the Zinn reading, we need to think a lot about empathy and moral judgements. Columbus did many things that would not deem acceptable today, and although it should not have been accepted in the past, it was more socially acceptable than it would be in today’s time. This made it easier for such a tragic event, the slavery and extinction of the Arawak people, to happen at that point time. I think that Columbus had historical agency; he had great ideas and extreme motivation to accomplish them. Even though he misidentified the Indies and lead the movement that lead to the death of all Arawaks, he did make a significant impact on history. We also have to think about progress and decline. Clearly slavery and extinction of a group of people is a negative outcome of this historical event, but there was some progress too. The idea Columbus had to sail around the tip of Africa, and then attempting to execute that plan is progress. The way they began using the land around them and searching for cold is progress as well. So, even though this seems to be an extremely negative

event, positive things also happened with it.
In Johnson’s reading, you can see major aspects of progress in regards to progress and decline.

America is advancing in how to use their land for farming, technology, and creating rodes for traveling. With such advancements, the U.S population also grew rapidly, which is even more progress. Joseph F. Glidden and Jacob Haish had historical agency in patenting the very inexpensive barbed wire, but as a whole I feel that the historical agency goes to the U.S population as a whole. It took everyone to make such huge advancements, with some individuals help, the full U.S population could work to make progress for the country. The invention of barbed wire also caused for some decline as people could not travel as freely as they could before, still, during this time period they moved the frontier and expanded across their land. In this reading, there is rapid progress done by individuals as well as

groups.
There are many social and cultural differences between these text, as they are about different historical events. The cultural differences are shown with the advancement in farming in our Johnson reading that drifted away from the gold mining of out Zinn reading. Socially, people seem to be working more cooperatively in the industrial time, in order to make such great advancements, in contrast to slavery and mass killings done in the Columbus reading. Population was increasing greatly in the industrial time, while a whole group of people were becoming extinct in the other time period. Also, the industrial time made many technological advances, especially with farming equipment, and technology advancements were not mentioned in the other reading. Overall, I feel that the Columbus reading was a time of great exploration that ended as a great learning experience, and the industrial reading was a time of great advancement, growing, and expanding that was building America up.