42 Genocide may be too harsh a term. The Spanish, who profited from Indian
labor on Haiti, didn’t want to wipe out the Arawaks. Many Indians died from
diseases that the Spanish introduced unknowingly, like malaria, and from
famine resulting from Spanish disruption of Indian gardening practices.
Disease and forced famine have been factors in other genocides, however. In
“Deconstructing the Columbus Myth,” in John Yewell et al., eds., Confronting
Columbus (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1992), 149-58, Ward Churchill argues
that Europeans’ treatment of Indians can be compared with the Nazi Holocaust
against Jews and Gypsies. Working slaves to their deaths was typical at
Auschwitz and in the gold mines in Haiti.
43 Barbara Gamarekian, “Grants Rejected; Scholars Grumble,” New York
Times, April 10, 1991; Karen J. Winkler, “Humanities Agency Caught in
Controversy Over Columbus Grants,” Chronicle of Higher Education,
3/13/1991, A8.
44 Robert Reinhold, “Class Struggle,” New York Times Magazine, 9/29/1991,
26-29ff.
45 Robert Bernstein, conversation, 1973.
46 Black, The American Schoolbook, 39.
47 Harriet Tyson-Bernstein, “The Academy’s Contribution to the
Impoverishment of America’s Textbooks,” Phi Delta Kappan 70, no. 3
(11/1988): 197; Scriptor Pseudonymous, “The Ghost Behind the Classroom
Door,” Today’s Education , 4/1978, 41-45, an account by a person who has
never taught a class or earned a history degree, yet writes textbooks and
ancillary material in history and many other subjects; interview, McGraw-Hill
editor, 7/2006.
48 Brooks Mather Kelley, interview, 7/2006; cf. Diana Schemo, “Schoolbooks
Are Given F’s In Originality,” New York Times, 7/13/2006.
49 Allan M. Winkler, interview, 7/2006.
50 Judith Conaway, interview, 7/2006; textbook editor, interview, 7/2006;
Paul Boyer, brief interview, 7/2006; Schemo, “Schoolbooks Are Given F’s In
Originality”; James Goodman, “The Mystery of the Echoing Textbooks,” New
York Times, 7/7/2006. Ironically, Boyer’s comparison is inapt: textbooks are
the same as The Iliad or Beowulf in that no one knows for sure who wrote
them.