My esteemed Keloland colleague, Mr. Todd Epp, has this on one famous son of Genoa:
The fact that South Dakota changed the name of the holiday from the butcher's/imperialist's name to celebrate our state's indigenous peoples is significant.
I agree with Todd that changing the name of today's holiday in South Dakotan is significant, and I agree that it was a good thing. Columbus' achievement was extraordinary. Few individuals have left so deep a mark on history as he, or done so much on the strength of a simple idea. But I am not sure his personal bit of genius is worth a national holiday, and I suppose that whatever is worth celebrating about the American world in general, or the United States in particular, it isn't the way in which Europeans colonized the Western Hemisphere. The existence and culture of Native American Tribes is something Americans can take pride in, and so South Dakota wins marks for recognizing them.
I took a quick look at Wikipedia's article on Columbus, and found this note at the beginning.
Editing of this article by unregistered or newly registered users is currently disabled.
I suppose an article like this on a day like this gives rise to editorial wars at Wikipedia. Reading on, I came to this paragraph.
Knowledge of the Earth's spherical nature was not limited to scientists: for instance, Dante's Divine Comedy is based on a spherical Earth. Columbus put forth arguments based on the circumference of the sphere. Most scholars accepted Ptolemy's claim the terrestrial landmass (for Europeans of the time, comprising Eurasia and Africa) occupied 180 degrees of the terrestrial sphere, leaving 180 degrees of water.
Columbus, however, believed the calculations of Marinus of Tyre, putting the landmass at 225 degrees, leaving only 135 degrees of water. Moreover, Columbus believed one degree represented a shorter distance on the earth's surface than was commonly held. Finally, he read maps as if the distances were calculated in Italian miles (1,238 meters). Accepting the length of a degree to be 56⅔ miles, from the writings of Alfraganus, he therefore calculated the circumference of the Earth as 25,255 kilometers at most, and the distance from the Canary Islands to Japan as 3,000 Italian miles (3,700 km, or 2,300 statute miles) Columbus did not realize Al-Farghani used the much longer Arabic mile (about 1,830 meters).
Assuming all this is accurate, and any Wikipedia article is suspect until verified, it tells a very interesting story. Columbus "discovered America" for all practical purposes by letting the secret of its existence out of the bag. He did so because of a simple, earth-bending idea: that one could get to the east by sailing west. This is something of which no one in the Americas at the time could have conceived, at least in such a way as to act on it. But neither could he have done what he did if he hadn't dramatically underestimated the size of the earth. No one who knew the true circumference of the planet would have tried to sail west from Europe to Asia. If the Western Hemisphere hadn't been in the way, Columbus and his crew would have died of thirst. Columbus in fact discovered Cuba, looking for India, on the basis of a brilliant idea and a lot of bad calculations. That is a story.
Columbus may have been both a "butcher and an imperialist," as Todd said, but he was hardly out of place in America for that. The Aztecs and the Incas were just as "imperialist" and easily as prone to butchery as any empire Columbus was familiar with. Can any reasonable person doubt that the empires of pre-Columbian America would not have invaded and colonized Europe, if the opportunity had presented itself? Jerad Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel has the best explanation as to why history moved west rather than east at this point in time. The explanation turns not on genius, of which the Aztecs, Incas, and countless other civilizations had more than their share. It turns on the geographical fact that Eurasia has an east-west axis, whereas the Americas have a north-south axis. If you want to know what that means, read the book.
I also note that, were it not for Columbus or someone like him sailing the ocean blue, most of the peoples south of El Paso (and a lot of folks north of the fence) would never have been born. That doesn't excuse anything, it just reminds us of everything. All of us owe our lives to countless accidents, and countless deliberate deeds, both heroic and noble, generous and despicable. Whether we call it Native American Day or Columbus Day, it is good time to reflect on this.
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