Cancelling Columbus

I don’t know if anyone actually reads the “Today in History” page here in the paper, but I like to think it’s a popular feature because I’m a big history buff.

Well, if you look at page 7 today, you’ll see the very first entry is about Christopher Columbus and how 529 years ago today, ol’ Chris and his crew had a bit of a false alarm when one of the lookouts aboard one of his three ships thought he had spotted land.

That wouldn’t actually come until a few weeks later when an island in what is now known as the Bahamas was spotted by a crewman aboard the Pinta. I’d kind of like to think it was the same guy who screwed up the false sighting getting a little redemption, but I don’t know for sure.

In any event, we always say that Columbus “discovered” America, even though we all know it was already home to millions of indigenous people and most of us know now that the Vikings landed in northern North America around 1100 A.D., so “discovered” is stretching it a bit.

But either way, Columbus and his voyage definitely changed the world forever and human history would be vastly different without him.

Unfortunately, many of his accomplishments are nowaday overshadowed by some problematic things he also did, including the exploitation of the native people he encountered, and for that reason, Columbus had been one of the targets of “cancel culture,” and that’s a shame. Not because he didn’t do those bad things but because trying to erase Columbus is impossible. You can’t tell the story of America without him, at least not without telling it wrong. So, let’s remember Columbus, the good and the bad because that’s the whole story.