By resisting the conquest of Columbus, Taíno peoples made the story of conquest their story too. A novelist explains how he worked to recover both sides of the conflict, including the values and worldview of Native and European antagonists, through historical fiction.
Rather than debate Columbus's heroism or villainy, take a page from sports analytics: consider him a mediocre player and focus on the broader game being played.
Copies of a letter written by Christopher Columbus describing his first impressions of the Americas have become so rare and valuable, they're being stolen and replaced with forgeries at some of the world's most prestigious libraries.
This year the District of Columbia joins at least five states and dozens of cities and counties in replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day. It’s part of a decades-long reckoning with the sanitized version of the European colonization of the Americas.
The Math in Focus workbook said in a math problem that Columbus landed in America in 1492. The students at Valleyview Elementary School in Oneonta knew that wasn’t true — and they wanted the publisher to fix the error.
Leif Erikson Day is a celebration of the Viking explorer credited with reaching the continent around the year 1000, nearly 500 years before Columbus did.
While historians caution against lumping in Columbus with Confederates who came three centuries later, they say Columbus’ holiday and monuments remain ripe for reassessment — whether they stay, change or vanish entirely.
“There’s a bigger issue here, and that is what it means to tell the truth about history,” says Stephanie Fryberg, a professor of American Indian Studies and Psychology at the University of Washington.
For more than century a bronze statue of Christopher Columbus has adorned the Barcelona skyline, but now a group of anti-capitalist councilors are working to get the memorial torn down.
