Narratives of Conquest: American Textbooks on Columbus

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 13
  In Roundtable Session: Applications of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy

Abstract

The present study is a content analysis conducted on six public-school History textbooks currently used in the state of California. The goal is to analyze how the image of Columbus and of the conquest of the “New World” is reflected in these texts. Is there any real contestation of dominant, traditional narratives? The main findings suggest that the initial phase of the colonization in the Americas is frequently described by using the language of globalization. Furthermore, Eurocentrism predominates in most of the presentations. Nevertheless, examples of authentic contestation exist and should be acknowledged. While still primarily traditional, the image of Columbus is gaining in nuance, which points out to an increasingly disputed educational landscape on the horizon.

Author

• Ion Vlad, University of San Francisco