The Arrival Of The Conquistadors Analysis

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Nowadays, different news stations have been focusing on one side of the story. For instance, the incident in Anaheim in which a teenage boy was arrested due to a confrontation with an off-duty police officer. In the Hispanic news, the teenage boy was viewed as the victim and in the English news, he was portrayed as the aggressor. Both parties, emphasized on the facts they had, and they were both ideological. Like the famous phrase, ‘there are two sides to a story,’ and it was Zinn’s purpose to write about the other side of the US history. He chose to view history from the standpoint of the Native people. As the prompt stated, the education system in the United States has only taught the story of “discovery”, the story of the “hero.” Zinn wanted to educate people how the Native thought and felt after the arrival of the Spanish. However, his intentions are not to accuse the arrival of the Spanish, but to release his facts “into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports some kind of interest…” just like the historians, who emphasized the heroism of Columbus and his successors. The arrival of the Conquistadors is a topic …show more content…

As stated by Zinn, “One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts…” (Zinn). The US and European education systems teach students about this controversial topic by stating the positive facts because what happened in the past “should affect very little what we do in the world” (Zinn). History, in general, should not be viewed as unimportant, especially when it involves a genocide. One should reflect on this historical experience by understanding their point of view. Nobody would like to have their own home be invaded by strangers. We would be angry and terrified and that is how the native people felt when the Spaniards invaded their