| Few historical figures have undergone a reappraisal as radical as that of Christopher Columbus, whose “discovery” of “the New World” will be marked tomorrow with a holiday in his name. Earlier this month, U.S. lawmakers reintroduced a bill that would replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day; many of the admiring myths about him have been thoroughly debunked. “The version of Columbus’s life that most of us grew up on was invented in the early nineteenth century,” Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in The New Yorker, in 2002. Columbus didn’t defy conventional wisdom by proving that the Earth was round; to the contrary, he was one of the few who entertained the possibility that it wasn’t. His nautical calculations would have been laughable, except that he falsified the numbers he shared with his crew. His gravest misjudgments, of course, concerned the treatment of Native peoples, whose “subjugation” he advocated within days of making landfall. Modern defenders insist that Columbus should be judged by the standards of his day, but Kolbert points out that at least one early settler was alert to the moral outrages under way. Bartolomé de las Casas, a former slaveholder, spent ten years on Hispaniola, she observes, before dramatically reorienting his views. “He devoted the next fifty years,” she writes, “to trying, in vain, to defend the New World’s indigenous peoples.” | 
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