Christopher columbus day history12/2/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() “ Hail Columbia” served as our nation’s unofficial anthem until “ The Star-Spangled Banner” became official in 1931. King’s College in New York changed its name to Columbia College in 1784-for the purpose of showing “the glorification of America”-and South Carolina made its capital city “Columbia” just a few years later. As the first Lady Liberty, Columbia was dressed in classical robes and a liberty cap, often decorated with the stars and stripes of America. ![]() In the years following the American Revolution, Columbia, the feminine counterpart to Christopher Columbus, emerged as yet another icon for the young republic. A new national story was needed, yet the Revolutionary leaders, obvious choices for mythical transformation, were loath to be raised to their pedestals.” As scholars note, “Having effected a violent separation from England and its cultural and political icons, America was left without history-or heroes. In Columbus, they found a hero who had challenged the unknown sea, leaving the Old World for a new beginning on a virgin continent-much as they were attempting to do. On the early morning of October 12, the lookout on the Pinta, spotting white cliffs in the moonlight, called out “ Tierra! Tierra!”-“Land! Land!” The ships landed on a small island in the Bahamas, and Columbus, believing that he had finally reached Asia, called the natives he encountered “Indians.” The truth, as we now know, is that he had serendipitously discovered a continent entirely unknown to Europe.īeginning in the early 18th century, the European colonies in the New World came to be known as “Columbia.” The association between Columbus and America continued to prosper as the revolutionary colonists sought to distance themselves from England. On August 3, 1492, Columbus set sail from the port of Palos, Spain with three ships: the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. After several years of searching for adequate financing for his proposed voyage, in April 1492 Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain signed an agreement with Columbus that officially sponsored his enterprise. Sometime in the early 1480s, after returning from a trip to a Portuguese trading fortress on the West African coast, Columbus began to seek support for his idea that Asia could be reached faster and easier by sailing straight across the Atlantic Ocean, instead of having to sail around the southern coast of Africa and across the Indian Ocean. In his early twenties, he worked as a mariner on merchant ships in the Mediterranean. As Ronald Reagan remarked in a 1988 speech, Columbus Day has become a day “ to celebrate not only an intrepid searcher but the dreams and opportunities that brought so many here after him.”Ĭhristopher Columbus (originally Cristoforo Colombo, 1451–1506) was born into a working-class family in Genoa, Italy. Immigrants in the 19th and 20th centuries rallied around the immigrant Columbus. In the late 18th century, Americans began to see Columbus as somewhat of a mythic founding figure by the 1830s, he was seen as an archetype of the American ideal: bold, adventurous, innovative. And yet, in the 500 years since Columbus’s sighting, the day has become distinctly American. Columbus Day-the day we celebrate Christopher Columbus’s historic discovery of the Americas in 1492-is a most unusual American holiday, as it commemorates an event that occurred well before the United States was a nation. ![]()
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