So, today was declared Columbus Day in 1892 by President Benjamin Harrison, as partial recompense for the mass lynching of Sicilians in New Orleans by a WASP mob that numbered in the thousands the year before (the U.S. also paid reparations to the families of the victims).
Read more about this little discussed atrocity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_14,_1891_New_Orleans_lynchings
Notwithstanding, Christopher Columbus’s arrival marked the beginning of centuries of invasion, occupation, genocide and exploitation of the First Peoples that had inhabited the Americas in the preceding millenia – all these atrocities being foundational to the status quo in all nations currently occupying North and South America.
And how and when did the First Peoples arrive and by what means? This is the subject of a book published earlier this year, Origins: A Genetic History of the Americas by Jennifer Ruff that proposes that archaeology, anthropology, genetics and the traditional accounts of the Peoples themselves suggest that these original settlers of the Americas had migrated down the Pacific coastline from an area scientists call Beringia, a landmass twice the size of Texas that was submerged as the last Ice Age ended. As human footprints have been found in New Mexico that are some 22,000 years ago, the migration would have started thousands of years before. Read the review:
