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19 Photos of the Columbus Day Parade in Little Italy

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19 Photos of the Columbus Day Parade in Little Italy

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scene is your source for the best coverage of news

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19 Photos of the Columbus Day Parade in Little Italy

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Columbus Day: Perfect day for a parade in Cleveland’s Little Italy

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Columbus Day: Perfect day for a parade in Cleveland’s Little Italy

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CLEVELAND - It is a day to celebrate all that is Italian as an estimated 35,000 people lined the streets of Cleveland's Little Italy for the annual Columbus Day parade.

The Italian Sons and Daughters of America and The Northeastern Ohio Italian American Foundation have kept the tradition going, now in its 63rd year.

"These are traditions that you don't want to lose. To keep this kind of thing strong, especially in Little Italy is very, very nice to see," Lorraine Dodaro of Gates Mills said.

Sandra Pianalto, the former President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, served as Grand Marshall. There was even a sighting of the man credited with discovering America - Christopher Columbus himself.

"Argue. Fight, doesn't matter. We could argue and fight and two minutes later we love each other. That's the great thing about being Italian. And, that's what's it's all about, you celebrate being Italian," Dennis Bellisario, dressed as Christopher Columbus said.

For many, the day would not be complete without some traditional Italian food. But above all, this day and this parade celebrates Italian-American pride and a rich heritage.

"Italian Americans are very, very loyal and dedicated to their families. And this is a day for families to get together and celebrate their heritage together," Parade Chairman Basil Russo said.

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Columbus Day: Perfect day for a parade in Cleveland's Little Italy

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CLEVELAND - It is a day to celebrate all that is Italian as an estimated 35,000 people lined the streets of Cleveland's Little Italy for the annual Columbus Day parade. The Italian Sons and Daughters of America and The Northeastern Ohio Italian American Foundation have kept the tradition going, now in its 63rd year.

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Seattle Swaps Columbus Day For 'Indigenous Peoples' Day'

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Seattle Swaps Columbus Day For 'Indigenous Peoples' Day'

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This year's Columbus Day holiday will have a slightly different, more Native flavor in the city of Seattle. Thanks to a unanimous vote this summer by the city council, the federal holiday will now be known by a different name: Indigenous Peoples' Day.

The name change comes after activists pushed for a day to honor indigenous people instead of Christopher Columbus, the most recognizable figure linked to European contact with the Americas.

"This is about taking a stand against racism and discrimination," Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant told the Seattle Times. "Learning about the history of Columbus and transforming this day into a celebration of indigenous people and a celebration of social justice ... allows us to make a connection between this painful history and the ongoing marginalization, discrimination and poverty that indigenous communities face to this day."

On Monday, the streets of Seattle will likely be filled with drums, singing and the faces of citizens from the city's surrounding Native Nations: the Lummi, Nooksack, Tulalip, Sauk-Suiattle, Swinomish, Puyallup, Colville and 22 other Washington tribes, as well as citizens from other Indian Nations that call Seattle home.

Seattle isn't the first place to give the holiday a makeover. Earlier this year, the Minneapolis City Council also renamed Columbus Day Indigenous Peoples' Day. South Dakota celebrates Native American Day in "remembrance of the great Native American leaders who contributed so much to the history of our state." Hawaii observes Discoverers' Day, in which Polynesian explorers are honored.

Of course, not everybody is happy about these changes. The AP reports that some Italian-Americans in Seattle have been upset by the change because it comes "at the expense of what essentially is Italian Heritage Day." But for those who have a negative view of Columbus' impact, the new name honors a legacy of struggle and resistance.

In the past, anti-Columbus Day protesters have clashed with the holiday's supporters, most notably in Denver, where members of the American Indian Movement have taken to the streets almost yearly since the late 1980s. Those protests have quieted down in recent years, although those annual demonstrations frequently ended in arrests.

But anti-Columbus sentiment is hardly limited to the U.S. In Chile, Mapuche activists launched anti-Columbus demonstrations that turned violent last year. In 2002, indigenous people in Guatemala protested the day by shutting down highways across the country. Today, many countries in Latin America --including Mexico, El Salvador and Argentina - recognize Dia de la Raza, while in Venezuela, the holiday has been renamed the Day of Indigenous Resistance.

In the U.S., the bigger issue now is whether the holiday can survive as a growing number of cities and states decide to do away with it. According to the Pew Research Center, it's already "one of the most inconsistently celebrated U.S. holidays." Apart from federal employees, workers in only 23 states are given a paid day off to observe the holiday.

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Seattle Swaps Columbus Day For 'Indigenous Peoples' Day'

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subscribe to Code Switch podcast This year's Columbus Day holiday will have a slightly different, more Native flavor in the city of Seattle. Thanks to a unanimous vote this summer by the city council, the federal holiday will now be known by a different name: Indigenous Peoples' Day.

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Instead of Columbus Day, some U.S. cities celebrate Indigenous People's Day

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Instead of Columbus Day, some U.S. cities celebrate Indigenous People's Day

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(CNN) -- Columbus Day often brings to mind the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. This Monday, some cities and states would rather you think of the Sioux, the Suquamish and the Chippewa.

For the first time this year, Seattle and Minneapolis will recognize the second Monday in October as "Indigenous People's Day." The cities join a growing list of jurisdictions choosing to shift the holiday's focus from Christopher Columbus to the people he encountered in the New World and their modern-day descendants.

The Seattle City Council voted last week to reinvent the holiday to celebrate "the thriving cultures and values of Indigenous Peoples in our region." The Minneapolis City Council approved a similar measure in April "to reflect upon the ongoing struggles of Indigenous people on this land, and to celebrate the thriving culture and value that Dakota, Ojibwa and other indigenous nations add to our city."

The Seattle School Board followed suit along with Portland Public Schools, where officials say Indigenous People's Day will not replace Columbus Day but supplement it. Schools across the country have been working for years to clarify Columbus' role in history.

"It's not about one or the other, it's about how do we get a complete picture to understand where we're at in history, and how we got there?" said Portland School Board member Greg Belisle, according to the Oregonian.
Opinion: What to tell your kid about Christopher Columbus
In many cities, Columbus Day is a celebration of Italian-American heritage, leading to opposition to the recasting of Columbus Day.

"Italian-Americans are deeply offended," Lisa Marchese, a lawyer affiliated with the Order Sons of Italy in America, told The Seattle Times."By this resolution, you say to all Italian-Americans that the city of Seattle no longer deems your heritage or your community worthy of recognition."

President Benjamin Harrison established a celebration of Columbus Day in 1892, the 400th anniversary of Columbus' landing in the Bahamas in 1492. The holiday started being celebrated on the second Monday in October in 1971. Today, 16 states, including Alaska, Hawaii and Oregon, don't recognize Columbus Day as a public holiday. South Dakota has celebrated Native American Day since 1990.
Redskins owner sits with Navajo Nation president
Berkeley, California, is thought to be the first city to adopt Indigenous People's Day in 1992, building on international efforts to end the celebration of Columbus' "discovery" of the New World. The International Day of the World's Indigenous People is celebrated on August 9 thanks to a 1994 United Nations General Assembly resolution.

The Italian explorer and his namesake holiday have long been controversial. Despite what American schoolchildren may have learned about when "Columbus sailed the ocean blue," supporters of Indigenous People's Day believe Columbus should not be celebrated for "discovering" America. Indigenous people had been living in the "New World" for centuries by the time he arrived, and his voyages established lasting connections between Europe and Americans that paved the way for its colonization, leading to the subjugation and decimation of the indigenous population.

"Learning about the history of Columbus and transforming this day into a celebration of indigenous people and a celebration of social justice ... allows us to make a connection between this painful history and the ongoing marginalization, discrimination and poverty that indigenous communities face to this day," Seattle Councilmember Kshama Sawant said.
Do you think we should still celebrate Columbus Day? Tell us in the comments.

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Instead of Columbus Day, some U.S. cities celebrate Indigenous People's Day

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(CNN) -- Columbus Day often brings to mind the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. This Monday, some cities and states would rather you think of the Sioux, the Suquamish and the Chippewa. For the first time this year, Seattle and Minneapolis will recognize the second Monday in October as "Indigenous People's Day."

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What is Indigenous Peoples' Day and why should it replace Columbus Day?

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What is Indigenous Peoples' Day and why should it replace Columbus Day?

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What is Indigenous Peoples' Day and why should it replace Columbus Day?

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For all they've endured, Native Americans should be celebrated.

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Why Do We Celebrate Columbus Day and Not Leif Erikson Day?

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Why Do We Celebrate Columbus Day and Not Leif Erikson Day?

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Explore National Geographic. A world leader in geography, cartography and exploration.

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New York Times Opinion Article

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Though Mr. Connell briefly flirted with a career in banking after graduating summa cum laude with distinction in history from Yale University, he made his life's work documenting facts, specifically those of the Renaissance. After earning a doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley, he taught history at Reed College in Portland, Ore., then at Rutgers.

In 1998 he became the first professor to hold the La Motta Chair in Italian studies at Seton Hall, where he is usually preoccupied with the Italian humanists and the political and economic strife of Italian city-states.

Mr. Connell, who was raised by parents of Irish, German, and Welsh descent in the Bronx and Westchester, has so enthusiastically embraced Italian culture that he reads fairy tales in Italian to his 16-month-old daughter, Zoe, at the Clinton home he shares with his wife, Nikki Shepardson, who teaches history at Rider University. His first book, La citta dei crucci (City of Sorrows), about a feud that destroyed the Tuscan city of Pistoia at the time of the Medici, was written in Italian and will be published next month in Florence.

And as a Renaissance man, Columbus fell within his area of expertise. Last year, Mr. Connell spoke on Columbus and the meaning of Columbus Day before both public school students in Elizabeth and the West Orange Rotary Club. This year, he will address the Columbus Day Dinner Dance in Hanover, sponsored by District 11 of UNICO, an Italian-American civic organization that spearheaded the campaign to endow the chair in Italian studies at Seton Hall.

''Certainly we don't want to downplay the tragedies that happened,'' said John Sebastiano, president of the Montville chapter of UNICO. ''But for a lot of individuals, the symbolism of Christopher Columbus was that of a voyage of freedom. It really was the start of the globalization of our world.''

As Mr. Connell noted, ''When history is made in this kind of fundamental way, there are also costs.''

The arrival of Dutch, Swedish and English to New Jersey in the 17th century, for example, led to smallpox and measles epidemics among the native Lenape communities, which had no resistance to Old World diseases. Although the Lenape, also known as the Delaware, were the first tribe to sign a treaty with the newly formed American government in 1778, most were pushed West and to this day live in Bartlesville, Okla.

Some Indians have urged that Columbus Day -- first celebrated in New York in 1792, the 300th anniversary of Columbus's arrival -- be rescinded as a holiday in their states. One hundred years later, Congress designated Columbus Day a national holiday to be celebrated each Oct. 12. And in 1971 Columbus Day became a federal holiday observed on the second Monday of October.

Throughout the years, Italian-American, Hispanic, and other groups have embraced the holiday as a occasion to celebrate their ethnic heritage, though some Indian groups prefer to refer to the day as ''Indigenous Peoples Day.''

Dee Ketchum, chief of the Delawares, said his tribe ''recognizes various holiday events in North America and allows paid time off to its tribal employees, but Columbus Day is not one of them.''

Other tribes are more vocal in their opposition. ''We believe that Columbus came and conquered,'' Mark (Quiet Hawk) Gould, tribal chairman of the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Indians, said in a telephone interview, ''We really think that it was like a genocide.''

Roy Crazy Horse, chairman of the New Jersey Commission on American Indian Affairs and chief of the Powhatan Renape Nation, based at the Rankokus Indian Reservation in Westhampton Township, put it this way: ''Why celebrate a man who started looking for India and landed in the Caribbean, who never put down his foot in the United States, who brought slavery to this continent?'' Neither American Indian leader, however, is involved in protesting the holiday. Instead, they say they concentrate on educational programs.

The controversy over Columbus Day doesn't bother Mr. Connell, who said: ''The whole discussion around Columbus Day has been useful to the extent that it has reminded us of many of the tragic consequences of the contact.''

And he doesn't believe the holiday should be replaced with a celebration of ethnic diversity, which ''sounds like a hodgepodge.''

''We have ethnic diversity anyway; we celebrate it every day,'' Mr. Connell said. ''It's one of the best things about this country.''

As for doing away with the holiday, he said, ''I don't think that it should go to the point of taking away from the tremendous achievement of Columbus.''

Though modern textbooks no longer state that Columbus discovered the New World, his arrival marks ''where we as a country and as a hemisphere began our identity,'' said Mr. Connell. ''It's a question of the contact that matters. There wasn't a significant or important tradition that survived from the voyages of the Vikings.''

On the other hand, he noted, Columbus's contact with the New World had a profound effect, largely because of the time -- an era when Europe was still reeling from the psychological effects of the Black Death of 1348, fierce competition among the various monarchs and the newly invented printing press, which enabled accounts of Columbus's findings to spread rapidly.

''Columbus strikes me as a person of his time,'' said Mr. Connell. ''He was eager to push the envelope to go farther, to take the skills and the learning of the Renaissance in order to do something glorious.''

As a man of the Renaissance, Columbus operated under a set of assumptions that ''sound terrible to modern ears,'' Mr. Connell allowed. ''He justified slavery in the Caribbean as being a way of bringing people into the Christian faith.''

But the European concept of slavery was rooted in the Aristotelian concept that ''if a person is captured in war, they're legitimately a slave,'' he explained. ''There was nothing racial about it.''

Moreover, widely spread accounts that Columbus's followers wiped out the Taino people of the Caribbean were inaccurate, says Jorge Estevez, himself of Taino lineage, who is a program coordinator at the National Museum of the American Indian in Manhattan. Mr. Estevez says that although many natives were murdered, fell victim to European diseases, or were taken captive, others intermingled with the Spanish settlers. And the settlers who were given Tainos as slaves were required to pay taxes on them, resulting in the undercounting of the Tainos as a form of tax evasion and leading to reports of their eradication.

''Columbus didn't start slavery,'' said Mr. Connell. ''He brought the entrepreneurial form of slavery to the New World. It was a phenomenon of the times. With all great figures of the past, we need more understanding, critical understanding that sees the person's flaws and the inaccuracies and myths that have arisen around him, but we shouldn't forget the tremendous changes that they created.''

The scholar went on: ''I think we have to be very careful about applying 20th-century understandings of morality to the morality of the 15th century.''

That said, Mr. Connell does not consider himself an apologist for Columbus. 'I'm just doing my job as a historian,'' he said. '' 'Celebrate' is a word we could use for Columbus's genius, his persistence against the odds in getting people who were much more powerful than he was to back him in a risky enterprise that had results way beyond anyone's imagination. We can celebrate his enterprise and ingenuity. A more appropriate word for what happened would be 'commemorate.' ''

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Though Mr. Connell briefly flirted with a career in banking after graduating summa cum laude with distinction in history from Yale University, he made his life's work documenting facts, specifically those of the Renaissance. After earning a doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley, he taught history at Reed College in Portland, Ore., then at Rutgers.

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Video used to teach about Christopher Columbus in schools

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Video used to teach about Christopher Columbus in schools

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Ms. Baker watched this video in 1st Grade to learn about Columbus Day.

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Vintage Columbus Day Video (public domain)

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Columbus Day: Christopher Columbus Sets Sail

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Columbus Day: Christopher Columbus Sets Sail

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History.com

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Columbus Day: Christopher Columbus Sets Sail | History

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Order Sons of Italy in America

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Happy Bartolomé Day.

Sources:

All of the information in this essay came from A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn, and Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James W. Loewen, both of which uses primary sources such as eyewitness accounts, journal entries, and letters from Christopher Columbus himself.

A very important note about Bartolomé de las Casas and the African slave trade

This issue keeps coming up and, despite my footnotes, I keep seeing commentary about it so I'm going to address it here.
Initially, Bartolomé de las Casas advocated the use of African slaves instead of native labor. In the first few years after he renounced his land and title, his initial cause was to end the suffering of the natives, rather than seeking an end to the institution of slavery itself, and so this became his deplorable rationale for the endorsement of African slavery. Bartolomé de las Casas eventually retracted those views, however, and came to see all forms of slavery as being equally wrong. In The History of the Indies published in 1527, he wrote the following:

I soon repented and judged myself guilty of ignorance. I came to realize that black slavery was as unjust as Indian slavery...
and I was not sure that my ignorance and good faith would secure me in the eyes of God.

I know that the discovery of the New World means a lot of different things to a lot of different cultures. I like the sound of Bartolomé Day. If you don't like that, call it Indigenous People's Day. Or perhaps Chris-Columbus-was-a-turd Day. I'd even settle for just calling it MONDAY.

But please, oh please

do not call it Columbus Day.

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Christopher Columbus was awful (but this other guy was not) - The Oatmeal

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Happy Bartolomé Day. Sources: All of the information in this essay came from A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn, and Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James W. Loewen, both of which uses primary sources such as eyewitness accounts, journal entries, and letters from Christopher Columbus himself.

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CBS News

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Working on Columbus Day? It depends on where you live

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Working on Columbus Day? It depends on where you live

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Fewer than half of U.S. states give their employees Columbus Day as a paid holiday.

Depending on where you live and whom you work for, Columbus Day may be a paid day off or no different from any regular Monday.

Columbus Day is one of the most inconsistently celebrated U.S. holidays. It's one of 10 official federal holidays, which means federal workers get the day off. And because federal offices will be closed, so will banks and the bond markets that trade in U.S. government debt (though the stock markets will remain open).

Beyond that, it's a grab bag. According to the Council of State Governments' comprehensive "Book of the States," only 23 states (plus the District of Columbia, American Samoa and Puerto Rico) give their workers Columbus Day as a paid holiday. Tennessee officially does so too, but curiously chooses to celebrate the occasion on a different day - the Friday after Thanksgiving.

Since 1990, South Dakota has marked the second Monday in October as Native Americans Day, an official state holiday. In Hawaii, the second Monday in October is known as Discoverers' Day, though it's not an official state holiday. The U.S. Virgin Islands "observes" Columbus Day but emphasizes Virgin Islands-Puerto Rico Friendship Day - which falls on the same day. The Northern Marianas substituted Commonwealth Cultural Day for Columbus Day in 2006. And in Nevada and Iowa, statutes "encourage" the governor to issue an annual Columbus Day proclamation but do not designate it a legal holiday.

Nearly 100 years ago, Colorado became the first state to designate Columbus Day as a state holiday, largely due to the efforts of Angelo Noce, a first-generation Italian immigrant in Denver. The day spread, in large part as a celebration of Italian-American heritage; it became a federal holiday in 1937. It was moved from Oct. 12 to the second Monday in October starting in 1971.

But in recent years, Native American groups and other critics, citing Columbus' own mistreatment of natives and the legacy of European settlement that his voyages initiated - have advocated changing the holiday to something else - perhaps "Exploration Day." Minneapolis and Seattle, among other localities, celebrate Indigenous People's Day instead.
Note: This is an update to a post originally published Oct. 14, 2013.
Category: Daily Number

Topics: State and Local Government

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Working on Columbus Day? It depends on where you live

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Fewer than half of U.S. states give their employees Columbus Day as a paid holiday. Depending on where you live and whom you work for, Columbus Day may be a paid day off or no different from any regular Monday. Columbus Day is one of the most inconsistently celebrated U.S.

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Reconsider Columbus Day Presented by Nu Heightz Cinema rethink columbus day reconsider christopher columbus anti columbus day

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For fun, not research...

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Spongebob Squarepants - Leif Erikson Day