Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Series #1: Magellan and Las Casas

These bags are the first in a series of "History in a Bag" projects that will be circulated throughout the KSU campus and Manhattan area. Tell us what you think!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It is interesting to see how Bartholome de las Casas’s reputation reverberated through history. Whereas we tend to view him as a humanitarian for revealing the abuses that native peoples suffered at the hands of conquistadors, at least one nineteenth-century abolitionist, David Walker, a free African American man in Boston, saw Las Casas as having helped to usher in the enslavement of Africans, presumably by protecting the Indians from that fate. In his “Appeal … to the Coloured People of the World,” Walker referred to Las Casas as that “notoriously avaricious Catholic priest or preacher, and adventurer with Columbus in his second voyage” who proposed “to his countrymen, the Spaniards in Hispaniola, to import the Africans from the Portuguese settlement in Africa, to dig up gold and silver, and work their plantations for them.”