by Vincent Traina

Created on: October 01, 2008   Last Updated: August 07, 2011

On Monday, October 13th, historically conscious Americans will have celebrated the national holiday we know as "Columbus Day."    This day is named in honor of the courageous Genoan navigator Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) who, in spite of the naysayers, continued his perilously ambitious 4,000-mile journey across the Atlantic and rediscovered the Americas for the European peoples. The reason we say "rediscover" is that recent radiocarbon dating and archaeological evidence has confirmed that Vikings and Celtic peoples landed in North America several centuries before Columbus.

The milieu of Medieval dogma in the fifteenth century regarding the earth's geography was still a political, religious, and social force to be reckoned with at the time that "Cristoforo Colombo" pushed off from the docks of Palos de la Frontera in southwestern Spain to cross an untamed ocean over half a millennium ago. Even though most educated classes agreed with the ancient Greek scientific understanding of a spherical world, there still persisted a belief among citizenry (be it peasant, priest, or poet) that there were giant sea monsters who lurked in scalding-hot ocean waters. The Atlantic, earth's second largest ocean, hadn't been traversed across since Norseman Leif Erikson managed to touch down on Newfoundland 500 years earlier.

It seemed that there was no seaman around who had the ballast and determination to traverse the unknown. Christopher Columbus pioneered four trips to the New World and went the extra miles, four thousand of them to be exact. It is of notable interest to the author of this article that land was first sighted by a sailor named Rodrigo de Triana (not "Traina") at 2 a.m. on October 12, 1492.

His success resulted in a watershed moment in European and World History. Virtually overnight, the world doubled in size for the West. It propelled in motion the largest seaborne colonization, both in magnitude and in distance, the world had ever witnessed up to that point in time. From about 1500 to 1800, nations were built in the New World by Spain, Portugal, Holland, Great Britain and France.

*There wasn't any single community that inhabited all 16.3 million square miles of the Americas, which stretched from the tip of Tierra del Fuego, Argentina in the Antarctic Circle to the top of Nunavut, Canada in the Arctic Circle. The North and South American continents encompassed thousands of various tribes and clans, who in turn were spread out sporadically over hundreds of mountains, forests, deserts, beaches, plains, and grasslands. Some were peaceful such as the Lenni Lenape, while others were more warlike such as the Iroquois. Certain peoples such as the Aztecs and Mayans created outstanding architecture, artwork, and astronomical tools. Many tribes who were conquered by the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas willingly aided the Spanish in carving up their empires at the expense of the pre-Columbian non-European empires.

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