Columbus's arrival is a story of conquest, not discovery

Zinn opens by systematically dismantling the celebratory narrative of Christopher Columbus's 1492 arrival in the Caribbean, drawing directly on Columbus's own journals and the eyewitness accounts of the Spanish priest Bartolomé de las Casas to document the enslavement, mutilation, and mass killing of the Arawak people that followed Spanish colonization of Hispaniola. Zinn cites las Casas's estimate that the Arawak population, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, was reduced to a small fraction within a few decades through violence, forced labor, and disease.

He uses Columbus deliberately as his opening case study to establish the book's method: taking a figure celebrated in conventional textbooks as a heroic discoverer and re-examining the same documentary record from the perspective of those his arrival actually affected, revealing a story of resource extraction and human devastation largely absent from the traditional telling.

Zinn's point isn't merely that Columbus was personally cruel by the standards of his time, but that the entire framework of "discovery" obscures whose land, labor, and lives were being taken to enable it.

Takeaway: whether an event counts as "discovery" or "conquest" depends entirely on whose perspective gets to write the history.