While many Americans will find Columbus Day a nice respite during this intense election season, a look at headlines in the press may prove exhausting. The memorial has become a flashpoint for historical revisionism over the last thirty years. This likely means another cycle of stories claiming that Columbus was evil and the intrusion of Western civilization into the New World is to be regretted. Responding to this frenzy of historical revisionism over the last few years, multiple states and the District of Columbia have dropped Columbus Day in order to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
Such critics are not faithful to the historical record. They make the mistake of assuming that the goods of political and social life, developed over millennia in Western civilization, were present in the Americas in the days before Columbus arrived. Some critics tell a story wherein the Americas were pristine, pure, and good until Europeans showed up — a secular Garden of Eden. Others concede that the arrangements preceding Columbus’s arrival were not idyllic but still insist that the Americas would have been just fine without Columbus’s arrival and the evils he brought with him.
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