Christopher Columbus: At the Center of the Culture War

The American Conservative:

The bold figure of Christopher Columbus standing atop a 70-foot granite column in the center of New York City’s Columbus Circle dominates one of the great crossroads of the world. Erected in 1905, it marks a time when Italian Americans sought to declare their stake in the American dream. Columbus anchored them symbolically as residents of the New World.

Columbus was part of the American mythos well before then. Washington Irving’s biography A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828) was a romantic confection that—among other things—promoted the silly idea that Europeans before Columbus believed the world to be flat, a misconception persistent in the popular imagination.

Cont....