Let’s put Christopher Columbus in his place

The grander myths of Christopher Columbus were long ago exposed as false. As we’ve outlined on this page before, he didn’t set out to prove the world was round, didn’t discover America and might not even have been Italian. He was never the hero his legend grew to portray him, but instead a complicated man whose journeys commercially linked the Eastern and Western hemispheres, and led the way toward European conquest of North America, as well as the enslavement and domination of its Indigenous peoples.