Christopher Columbus Legacy!

Sometimes thought of erroneously as the discoverer of the New World, Columbus was preceded by the various cultures and civilizations of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, as well as the Western world's Vikings. He is regarded more accurately as the person who brought the Americas into the forefront of Western attention. "Columbus' claim to fame isn't that he got there first," explains historian Martin Dugard, "it's that he stayed." Equally false is the notion that he was first to envision a rounded earth. This was known in ancient times, though largely forgotten in the Middle Ages. By Columbus's day, educated men were in agreement as to its spherical shape, even if many or most people believed otherwise. More contentious was the size of the earth, and whether it was possible in practical terms to cross such a vast body of water: the longest any ship had gone without making landfall did not much exceed 30 days when Columbus embarked on his first audacious voyage.


Bronze statue at Central Park, New York City by Jerónimo Suñol, 1894.
Bronze statue at Wooster Square in New Haven, Connecticut
Replicas of the Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria sailed from Spain to the Chicago Columbian Exposition. Amerigo Vespucci's travel journals, published 1502-4, convinced Martin Waldseemüller that the discovered place was not India, as Columbus always believed, but a new continent, and in 1507, a year after Columbus's death, Waldseemüller published a world map calling the new continent America from Vespucci's Latinized name "Americus".

Historically, the British had downplayed Columbus and emphasized the role of John Cabot as a pioneering explorer. But for the emerging United States, Cabot made a poor national hero. Veneration of Columbus in America dates back to colonial times. America itself was sometimes referred to as Columbia. The use of Columbus as a founding figure of New World nations and the use of the word Columbia spread rapidly after the American Revolution. During the last two decades of the 18th century the name "Columbia" was given to the federal capital District of Columbia, South Carolina's new capital city, Columbia, South Carolina, the Columbia River, and numerous other places. Attempts to rename the United States "Columbia" failed, but Columbia became a female national personification of America, similar to the male Uncle Sam. Outside the United States the name was used in 1819 for the Republic of Colombia, a precursor of the modern nation of Colombia.

A candidate for sainthood in the Catholic Church in 1866, Celebration of Columbus's legacy perhaps reached a zenith in 1892 when the 400th anniversary of his first arrival in the Americas occurred. Monuments to Columbus like the Columbian Exposition in Chicago were erected throughout the United States and Latin America extolling him. Numerous cities, towns, counties, and streets have been named after him, including the capital cities of two U.S. states.

In 1909, descendants of Columbus undertook to dismantle the Columbus family chapel in Spain and move it to a site near State College, Pennsylvania, where it may now be visited by the public. At the museum associated with the chapel, there are a number of Columbus relics worthy of note, including the armchair which the "Admiral of the Ocean Sea" used at his chart table.

Culpability is sometimes placed on contemporary governments and their citizens for the hardship suffered by Native Americans during the time of Christopher Columbus. Columbus myths and celebrations are generally a positive affair, making less room for this concept in history books. Christopher Columbus was strongly criticized in a song by Jamaican artiste Burning Spear titled 'A Damn Blasted Liar.' The controversial song opened a strong opinionated debate across much of the Caribbean region on the effects that Christopher Columbus and his leadership had on the region's native peoples.

The Spanish colonization of the Americas, and the subsequent effects on the native peoples, were dramatized in the 1992 feature film 1492: Conquest of Paradise to commemorate the 500th anniversary of his landing in the Americas. In 2003, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez urged Native American Latin Americans to not celebrate the Columbus Day holiday. Chavez blamed Columbus for leading the way in the mass genocide of the Native Americans by the Spanish.