Sunday, December 11, 2011

Why I Chose this Topic

While reading 1421: The Year China Discovered America, I often was faced with the challenge of knowing who did what.  The book constantly mentions names such as Zhu Di, Zheng He, Yang Qing, and Hong Bao.  I was having troubles even knowing that Zhu Di was the emperor at the time!  All of the names sounded the same to me.  So I chose this topic to try to figure out the travels of each individual mentioned greatly in my book.  Upon doing that, I discovered that one of them (Zheng He) died while he was out at sea.  As you can probably tell, I learned a lot in doing this research.  Some of the most interesting things I learned had to do with the artifacts that were found that showed proof that the Chinese were there before Columbus.  One of those includes a large stone pillar-type formation from Rhode Island that was mentioned in the records of Yang Qing when he sailed there and that tower is still standing there.  Another interesting fact is that the whole idea that the Chinese discovered America 70 years before Christopher Columbus and circumnavigated the globe almost a century before Magellan is merely an idea to most.  I however, after reading this book and learning about all of the artifacts found and the maps and charts charted by the Chinese, believe it as being true.  This book has changed the way i now think.  After reading it, it makes me want to go to all of the history and American history teachers and tell them that they have been teaching the wrong things all along, but, I probably will unfortunately never do that.

-Trevor Seymour

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