Who Discovered America?

When I was a kid, there was no ambiguity. The textbook clearly stated that Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas in 1492 (after “sailing the ocean blue”).

Of course, my teacher knew full well that there were people onshore to greet Columbus, the moment that he set foot on land, but still, the word “discovered” was never questioned.

By that point, the United States had fully embraced the Columbus as “discoverer” narrative, and it was a point of pride for the millions of Americans of Italian heritage, which is more than a little odd since Columbus wasn’t really all that Italian.

In fact, no one is quite sure what he was, especially since all of his written documents and correspondence were in Latin or else a melange of Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan. And sometimes, he also wrote in a kind of code using the Greek alphabet.

Either way, there were hundreds of statues and monuments to Columbus across the United States, and it wasn’t easy to change the narrative.

Today, of course, he’s pretty much universally loathed, which is definitely warranted as he was the epitome of a psychotic, warmongering asshole. Not only did he torture, rape, murder, and enslave all the kindly natives that he met during his voyages, he was utterly incompetent at sailing his own ship.