‘THE ONES WHO HOLD UP THE WORLD’: NATIVE AMERICAN HISTORY SINCE THE COLUMBIAN QUINCENTENNIAL An unsettled conquest: the British campaign against the peoples of Acadia. By Geoffrey Plank. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. Pp. 239. ISBN 0-8122-3571-1. £21.00. Blue Jacket: warrior of the Shawnees. By John Sugden. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Pp. xvi+250. ISBN 0-8032-4288-3. £19.95. The Cambridge history of the native peoples of the Americas, II: Mesoamerica. Edited by Richard E. W. Adams and Murdo J. MacLeod. Two parts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp.xv+571, xv+455. ISBN 0-521-652905-7. £90.00 (complete set).

Abstract

The quincentennial of Christopher Columbus's first voyage in 1992 generated an enormous outpouring of both emotion and scholarship. At times, it seemed that the emotional issues prevailed. Unlike earlier generations of scholars who had celebrated Columbus's achievements, the cohort of 1992 mostly attacked the Admiral of the Ocean Sea. As the historian Kenneth Maxwell put it, ‘Columbus was mugged on the way to his own party.’ By the time many commentators got through with him, Columbus had become responsible for precipitating centuries of slavery, environmental degradation, and ethnic cleansing in the Americas. He became the antichrist of a secular United States.